(Film career of) William S. Hart, by Il. Trauberg. Cinematography RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic). Leningrad, 1926.

20 pages octavo, 11x14.5 cm (4.5x5.75 inches).

It's rather likely "Il. Trauberg" is Leonid Trauberg (1902-1990), the Ukranian-born son of a Jewish journalist. Leonid Trauberg taught at the Leningrad Institute of Performing Arts from 1926-1932 and headed the film department of the Leningrad Theatre Institute in 1926-1927. He also staged experimental "eccentric" plays and directed 17 films between 1924 and 1961, winning the Stalin Prize in 1941. But the heady times were not to last. After the war, he was blacklisted by Soviet authorities during their "anti-cosmopolitan" (anti-Semitic) period from 1948-1953. Later, in the 1960s, he taught at the USSR State Committee for Cinematography.

If you can translate the text, please let us know. It seems to start off with a scathing rebuke of "big, noisy" 20th-century American cities with their buildings that scrape the sky, "straight, level and boring;" elevators full of "squirrels running to dozens of floors;" and "no romance aside from the false sentimentality of the Statue of Liberty and the White House."

"The last of the Mohicans died," Trauberg writes.

What can stop the wheel of "progress?" Why, the cinema, of course. American "farmers with a Ford, a radio transmitter and an unlimited bank account" wax nostalgic for "those who first tilled their fertile soil." You know. Like the people portrayed on the screen by William S. Hart.

If we're correct about the author being Leonid Trauberg, he was still wet behind the ears when he wrote this. The Bolshevik revolution was less than a decade past. It would be another 20 years before his comrades in Moscow turned on him.