[POLISH SOVIET IMPRINT] Ulica bez słońca. Japońska powieść robotnicza [i.e. A Street without the sunlight. Japanese working class novel]

Kijów - Charków: 2-ga Międzynarodowa drukarnia UPT for Ukrderżnacmenwydaw, 1934. 183 pp. 19 x 12.5 cm. One of 1500 copies. In Polish. With publisher's cardboard cover illustrated in black and red. Title and imprint also in Ukrainian on the back cover. Overall in good condition. Minor wear to the cardboard cover, dents. Numbers in ink on front & back cover, Polish library stamps on title, p. 17, p. 182, library was active in 1934 but dissolved during the next few years.

The publisher responsible for printing this book was Ukrderzhnatsmenvidav or State publishing house of the national minorities of Ukrainian SSR. Ukrderzhnatsmenvidav was an important piece of puzzle in early Soviet pan-republican indigenization program of 1920s and early 1930s. Active from 1926, Ukrderzhnatsmenvidav issued mostly books and periodicals in Yiddish, but also German, Greek, Polish, Czech, Estonian. Ukrderzhnatsmenvidav, though very active and acclaimed by the ethnical minorities, was shaken during the great terror years and its activities
basically came to an end in 1939.

But the book is not only in Polish: the book comes from a unique place, tightly-knit with Ukrainian Polish minority history. It bears stamps of the only state-supported Ukrainian Polish library - Centralna Polska Bibljoteka Panstwowa na Ukranie. The library was a short-lived Kyiv organization active in Soviet Ukraine from 1925 to 1937. Initially, the library was another piece of the puzzle of the Bolshevik effort to support ethnical & cultural minorities. As the ethnocentric policies of country organization began to disappoint the Soviet leaders, regional reorganization came in 1931. With fabricated anti-Polish crime cases opened in 1934, repressions rose and purges came. Some CPBPU employees were prosecuted, and the library was soon closed. Some books were transitioned to another libraries, some were lost. Throughout its activity years, CPBPU gathered available Polish books, carried out bibliographical studies on Polish literature published in Soviet state, provided mobile reading houses, lectures and education in native language for Poles in Kyiv (counting 13 000 people) and beyond. During its peak years, the library employed seven people, housed close to 50 000 books and served 1912 readers together with 500 collective subscribers, i.e. almost every fifth Kyiv Pole was a user of the library (see: Zhukovs'kyi, O. I. Rol' Tsentral'noi pol's'koi derzhavnoi biblioteky u rozvytku pol's'koi natsional'noi kul'tury na pravoberezhnii Ukraini u 20-ti roky XX st. In: Ukrains'ka polonistyka, 2004). Over half of the readers were students of four Kyiv Polish schools and colleges, all situated in the same building with the library. Young readers loved M. Gorky and J. London translations. So it's no surprise to see a translated Japanese proletarian novel coming from within CPBPU storage.
Sunao (Naoshi) Tokunaga (1899 - 1958) was a Japanese publisher's house press worker from as early as 12 years old. He was also an avid union
member and the first noticeable proletarian writer in Japan.
A Street without the sunlight is Tokunaga's most known novel, first published in 1929. The book was a fiction based on 1926 Kyodo Printing strike, told from the worker's union perspective. Although the original strike turned unfavorable for the union and Tokunaga lost his job, those radical events provided a lot of inspiration to the author. The book was a hit, sold 40 000 copies and boosted Tokunaga into relative wealth. As a writer coming
from a straightforwardly proletarian background, he was favored by the Soviet government, which resulted in numerous translations of his works into languages of the USSR ethnicities and even an official visit of fame to Moscow. According to a comparable preface text, this translation was made from 1932 Russian 1st edition of Tokunaga's novel.

Very rare. Not in WorldCat. Not in KVK.