Sichath Chulin [“Small Talk or The Legend of Prague”]

(LISSITZKY, ELIEZER).

Chaver Verlag

Moscow

1917

One of 90 copies. Lithograph on paper. Title page, dedication and 15 text pages all surrounded by El Lissitzky’s modernist design. Yiddish text written in “Assyrian script” (Lissitzky’s term for Hebrew square letters) in a traditional calligraphic style. This copy is with the lithographic title page and dedication to Rabbi Jacob Kahan-Shabshai

ELIEZER LISSITZKY’S FIRST COMPLETED JEWISH WORK. The folk story of Jewish Messianic hope and miracles in Old Prague, parallels the exhilaration felt among avant-garde Russian-Jewish artists towards the apocalyptic events of the Russian Revolution. Sichath Chulin, Lissitzky’s first consciously Jewish work, created a new aesthetic experience, integrating religious and cultural origins and transforming them into a regenerated secular perspective. See Busch-Reisinger Museum Catalogue, El Lissitzky (1987) no. 1917/1; Israel Museum Catalogue, Tradition and Revolution, pp. 104-5 and 176-7 and no. 74 i-xv; and see, A. Rudenstine, The George Costakis Collection - Russian Avant-Garde Art (1981) p. 243