A WINDOW ON RUSSIA For The Use Of Foreign Readers

small, red full cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. near fine cond. binding square & tight. pea size spot on front, otherwise covers clean. edges clean. contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. minor edge nicks, not torn or price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing so stated. 280p. world history. russian history. soviet union. russian literature. philosophy. biography. literary criticism. pushkin. tyutchev. gogol. chekhov. turgenev. sukhovo~kobylin. tolstoy. nabokov. svetlana and her sisters. solzhenitsyn. ~ Edmund Wilson's new book takes its title from Peter the Great, in Pushkin's Bronze Horseman: "Here it has been ordained for us by nature that we shall break a window through to Europe." A Window on Russia is a collection of Wilson's papers on Russian writers and the Russian language, written between 1943 and 1971 and now appearing together in book form. In the first section of the book there are essays on Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Sukhovo~Kobylin, the nineteenth~century dramatist, and two pieces on the Russian language. The second section contains chapters on Svetlana Alliluyeva, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and "The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov," first published in 1965 when the piece set off a controversy between Wilson and Nabokov. In his foreword Wilson writes: "This collection is intended, as I indicate in the subtitle, mainly for foreign readers, and I am well aware that its statements will be greeted with protest and even indignation by many literary Russians.".…