Pseud Iskander (6 results)

Dostoevsky's successful debut in Nekrasov's famous anthology - the Fekula copy --- "We have never had almanacs like the Petersburg Miscellany. [In it] is printed the novel Poor Folk by Mr. Dostoevskii a name new and completely unknown, but one destined, it seems, to play a significant role in our literature." (Belinskii, our description here and below) This is the second of two influential almanacs published by poet, critic, and editor Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-78), appearing one year after The Physiology of Saint Petersburg. These collections showcased the new realistic current that would come to dominate 19th-century Russian literature. The most significant of the contributions to Nekrasov's weighty 560-page Peterburg Miscellany is the short novel Poor Folk by the young Fedor Dostoevski (1821-81)i. This is the first original work of Dostoevskii to appear in print; he had only published previously a translation of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet in 1844. The Miscellany also includes a programmatic essay by the leading critic Vissarion Belinskii, an early article by the radical critic Aleksandr Herzen (writing as "Iskander" shortly before his final departure from Russia), two of Turgenev's earliest stories, and the first mature verses of Nekrasov himself. Other contributors include Ivan Panaev, Vladimir Odoevskii, Vladimir Sollogub, Andrei Kroneberg, Aleksandr Nikitenko, and Apollon Maikov. Turgenev's verse tale "The Landowner" is illustrated with wood engravings by Bernadskii after Aleksandr Agin ("the best Russian illustrator of the time" (Kuzminskii)). There are also illustrations by various hands to Panaev's "Parisian Amusements." The appearance of Poor Folk represents one of the most celebrated cases of overnight success in literary history. Dostoevskii recalled decades later in his Writer's Diary how Nekrasov and the writer Dmitrii Grigorovich were enraptured by his manuscript and rushed to show it to Belinskii. The nation's most influential critic declared to Dostoevskii: "To you as an artist the truth has been revealed and proclaimed, bequeathed as a gift. So cherish your gift, remain faithful, and you will be a great writer!" At the same time, the reception of Poor Folk and of the Miscellany as a whole was not uniform. The critic Faddei Bulgarin led the conservative assault, deprecating Nekrasov as a member of some new, "natural literary school" (cited in Tikhomirov) who had abandoned his high artistic calling in favour of an obsession with vulgar reality. Belinskii responded by embracing the label "Natural School," which would come to designate the initial stage of the great era of literary realism in Russia. The critic had originally set on Gogol, with his story "The Overcoat," as the standard-bearer for this new school; but Dostoevskii's short novel about a lonely Petersburg copy-clerk proved to be ideologically more congenial even if its literary significance goes far beyond its status as Russia's first "social novel," as Belinskii put it. Dostoevskii not only builds on the type of the "little man" introduced by Gogol; he blazes a path for the psychological realism of his own later works, as well as the depth of characterisation that is a hallmark of the 19th-century Russian tradition as a whole. A very good copy, with provenance and in pleasant contemporary binding, of this scarce volume: we couldn't trace any other example at auction outside Russiain the past 40 years. Provenance: Paul M. Fekula (1905-82; Fekula was the son of a Russian Orthodox archpriest who immigrated to Edmonton, Alberta from the former Austrian province of Galicia (now in Ukraine). He spent most of his career in New York working in corporate finance; but his life's achievement was the creation of the largest private collection of Slavic books and old manuscripts in North America. A particular interest was material from the Russian ancien régime holdings of estates, monasteries and imperial institutions that were confiscated by the Soviets and s.

8vo, pp. [xii], 203; some light browning to last few leaves, but a very good copy in slightly later cloth, manuscript lettering to spine.Second, corrected edition of this collection of four short stories, which had initially been published in Russian periodicals, and were first collected and published as one volume in London in 1854. The collection contains the stories 'Dolg prezhde vsego', 'Povrezhdennyi', 'Mimoezdom', and the well-known 'Doktor Krupov', which 'presents the idea of madness as purely relative and suggests the presence of epidemic madness in society itself and the whole course of human history. The Voltairean sarcasm of this story was only too apparent to the contemporary reader' (Cambrdge History of Russian Literature).OCLC records two copies only, at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin and University of Leipzig, and two copies of the first edition, at Harvard and Columbia. Language: Russian.

(2), IV SS., 1 w. Bl., 96 SS. Neueres marmoriertes Halbleder mit goldgepr. Rückentitel und Kopfgoldschnitt; der bedr. blaue Originalumschlag mitgebunden. 8vo. Einzige Ausgabe der "Enden und Anfänge". Der russische Philosoph, Schriftsteller und Publizist Alexander Iwanowitsch Herzen (1812-70) ist vor allem bekannt für seine russische Exilzeitschrift "Kolokol" ("Die Glocke"), die in den Jahren 1865-68 in Genf erschien und zum zentralen zensurfreien Organ der revolutionären Demokratie wurde. - Von tadelloser Erhaltung. - Nicht bei Stammhammer. OCLC 29435641.

Norrkoeping, Eric Biornström, (below, on printed cover: En Commission - Londres, Trübner & Co), 1863. (2), iv, (2, blank), 96 pp. 8vo. Modern boards, original covers preserved. Anderson 302; Kilgour 436; Zaleski 197. First separate edition: Herzen's letters to Turgenev, which first appeared in My Past and Thoughts, published here with a new introduction. 'Herzen's renewed interest in Russia's past and future was closely linked to his bitter disappointment in the "old world". He was a discerning critic of bourgeois society, even if his strictures were not always fair. The modern reader is struck especially by certain far-sighted observations, that seem to anticipate criticism of a complex phenomenon we have come to refer to as "mass culture". Herzen's most interesting comments in this respect are to be found in a series of articles entitled Ends and Beginnings, in which he conducted a polemic with Ivan Turgenev, who had become the moral authority for liberal Westernizers in Russia' (Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 170). Alexander Herzen (1812-70) was a prominent nineteenth-century Russian social thinker and is known as the 'father of Russian socialism.' Early in his intellectual development, Herzen was influenced by German idealist thinkers such as Schiller and Schelling. He believed in the autonomy and dignity of the individual and opposed forces, such as family and state, that oppressed the individual. Later, under the influence of French socialist thinkers such as Charles Fourier, Herzen's thought became more radical. Herzen projected his earlier concern for the oppressed individual onto society at large and he became a supporter of socialism. The socialism he envisioned was a loose federation of self-governing communes. Only in such a system could the ideal society be achieved- according to Herzen that society would be a free association of individuals which provided for the full flowering of each personality. Herzen initially placed his hopes for this future order in the European socialist movement. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions to achieve socialist principles, however, Herzen became disillusioned about European prospects and turned his attention to Russia. Herzen argued that socialist transformation would actually come first to Russia because communal institutions such as the peasant commune survived and bourgeois attitudes hadn't yet emerged. This sense of the advantages of Russian 'backwardness' was influential among the Populists in the 1870s. Herzen has been called a 'gentry revolutionary.' The illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner, Herzen viewed the gentry as a progressive class. The revolution he envisioned was for the people but not necessarily by them. Also, his socialism was a national destiny rather than a class one, and because he promoted the value of individualism in collectivist form--in other words, the full flowering of the individual could best be realized in a socialist order. Among Herzen's works are From the Other Shore (1848-50) and The Russian People and Socialism and his autobiography, My Past and Thoughts.He founded a periodical, the famous Kolokol, in whose pages the free word first appeared in the Russian language, unhampered by censor or police, exposing the government's secrets, criticizing bureaucratic abuses, approving the good intentions of the czar, the 'liberator', and trying to dictate to him a reform program.

London: Vol'naia Russkaia Tipografiia, 1861. Octavo (19 × 12.5 cm). Contemporary half-leather binding with gilt-tooled red leather spine label; original wrappers not preserved; XII, 413, III pp. A very good copy, with wide uncut margins in an attractive contemporary binding and with an important provenance. First part of the first edition of Alexander Herzen's most important work, the memoirs published during his exile in England. A key member of the Moscow Hegelian group of "Westernizers" around the critics and philosophers Vissarion Belinsky, Mikhail Bakunin, and Timofei Granovskii, Herzen left Russia in 1846 and lived in Berlin, Brussels, Paris (where he experienced the Revolution of 1848), Geneva and London. To help the political goals of the Russian emigration, Herzen founded the "Free Russian Press" ("Vol'naia Russkaia Tipografiia") in London in 1853, which published books and journals without preliminary censorship, and issued two famous periodicals, "The Polar Star" (Poliarnaia zvezda) and "Kolokol" ("Die Glocke"). He died in Geneva in 1870. This copy from the famous collection of Socialistica of the Marxist bibliophile and scholar Chimen Abramsky (1916-2010), who fled to London from the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and became a leading specialist in both Judaica and socialist thought. His collection, parts of which were auctioned after his death, has recently been commemorated in his son's biography, The House of Twenty Thousand Books (2014).

Norrkoeping, Eric Biornström, (below, on printed cover: En Commission - Londres, Trübner & Co), 1863. (2), iv, (2, blank), 96 pp. 8vo. Sewn in the original yellow printed covers. Anderson 302; Kilgour 436; Zaleski 197. First separate edition: Herzen's letters to Turgenev, which first appeared in My Past and Thoughts, published here with a new introduction. 'Herzen's renewed interest in Russia's past and future was closely linked to his bitter disappointment in the "old world". He was a discerning critic of bourgeois society, even if his strictures were not always fair. The modern reader is struck especially by certain far-sighted observations, that seem to anticipate criticism of a complex phenomenon we have come to refer to as "mass culture". Herzen's most interesting comments in this respect are to be found in a series of articles entitled Ends and Beginnings, in which he conducted a polemic with Ivan Turgenev, who had become the moral authority for liberal Westernizers in Russia' (Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 170). Alexander Herzen (1812-70) was a prominent nineteenth-century Russian social thinker and is known as the 'father of Russian socialism.' Early in his intellectual development, Herzen was influenced by German idealist thinkers such as Schiller and Schelling. He believed in the autonomy and dignity of the individual and opposed forces, such as family and state, that oppressed the individual. Later, under the influence of French socialist thinkers such as Charles Fourier, Herzen's thought became more radical. Herzen projected his earlier concern for the oppressed individual onto society at large and he became a supporter of socialism. The socialism he envisioned was a loose federation of self-governing communes. Only in such a system could the ideal society be achieved- according to Herzen that society would be a free association of individuals which provided for the full flowering of each personality. Herzen initially placed his hopes for this future order in the European socialist movement. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions to achieve socialist principles, however, Herzen became disillusioned about European prospects and turned his attention to Russia. Herzen argued that socialist transformation would actually come first to Russia because communal institutions such as the peasant commune survived and bourgeois attitudes hadn't yet emerged. This sense of the advantages of Russian 'backwardness' was influential among the Populists in the 1870s. Herzen has been called a 'gentry revolutionary.' The illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner, Herzen viewed the gentry as a progressive class. The revolution he envisioned was for the people but not necessarily by them. Also, his socialism was a national destiny rather than a class one, and because he promoted the value of individualism in collectivist form--in other words, the full flowering of the individual could best be realized in a socialist order. Among Herzen's works are From the Other Shore (1848-50) and The Russian People and Socialism and his autobiography, My Past and Thoughts.He founded a periodical, the famous Kolokol, in whose pages the free word first appeared in the Russian language, unhampered by censor or police, exposing the government's secrets, criticizing bureaucratic abuses, approving the good intentions of the czar, the 'liberator', and trying to dictate to him a reform program.