NESMELOV A. (1889-1945) Krovavyy otblesk: stikhi [Blood-Red Reflection: Poems]. Harbin: [s.n.], 1928.

32 pp.; 18 x 13 cm. In the publisher’s typographic wrapper. In very good condition. Minor rubbing and soiling to the wrapper, creasing to the edges. Arseny Nesmelov (pseudonym of Arseny Ivanovich Mitropolsky; 1889-1945) was a Russian poet and an officer in the Imperial and later Kolchak’s army. In 1924 he fled the USSR across the Chinese border and settled in Harbin, Manchuria, where for more than two decades he was rightly regarded as ‘the best Russian poet in China’. He corresponded with Marina Tsvetaeva, who wished to edit his poem ‘Across the Ocean’. In August 1945, when Soviet troops entered Harbin, he was arrested and taken to the USSR, where he died almost immediately of a cerebral haemorrhage in the transit prison at Grodekovo station. He left vivid memoirs of the literary life of Vladivostok in the early 1920s, still not fully published, and was the author of more than a dozen books of poetry published in Moscow, Vladivostok, Harbin and Shanghai. Of Nesmelov’s early collection ‘Ledges’ (1924), Boris Pasternak wrote briefly in a letter to his wife: ‘Good poems’.