Just a few trifles

There's this amazing bookstore in Boston that has a great Russian collection. Here are a few things I wouldn't mind as graduation gifts, or as thesis inspiration... Too bad a hopeful professional academic will probably never be able to afford them.

MANDELSHTAM, Osip., Vtoraya kniga (The second book). Moscow-Petersburg: Krug, 1923

Octavo, 85pp. First edition thus, of Mandelstam's magnificent second book, previously published under the title Tristia. The present edition contains an additional 18 poems and is entirely reset, corrected and re-ordered. One of 3,000 copies printed. Very good In a contemporary private binding of gols paper-covered boards, preserving the front wrapper. Scarce.

$US1500


MANDELSHTAM, Osip (1891-1938), Almanach ‘Dom Iskusstv Num. I’ (House of Arts). St. Petersburg: House of Arts, 1921

Octavo, 85pp. First number of the Almanac published by the famous House of Arts -- the organization that supported many Russian writers and artists in the difficult period after the Revolution. Contributors include Mandelshtam, N.Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, A. Blok, A. Remizov, E. Zamyatin and others. The cover is illustrated by M. Dobujzhinsky and the volume includes other illustrations by him, S. Chekhonin, B. Kustodiev and others. Among the texts published here for the first time is Zamyatin’s famous and important article, I am Afraid. The present is a particularly important copy, bearing a one-and-a-half page poetic manuscript by Osip Mandelshtam, of the poem, When Psyche, Who is Life, later published in Tristia (1922), and later as number 209 of his collected verse. Mandelshtam submitted three poems for publication here, all dedicated to Olga Arbenian, the muse of the Acmeists. As it eventuated that only two of the poems were actually published, Mandelshtam wrote out the text of the third for a friend on this copy of the almanach. It is well known that Mandelshtam had an aversion to writing down his poems. His wife Nadezhda, whose heroic memory is responsible for the preservation of many of his works, discusses this peculiarity in her extraordinary volumes of autobiography, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. In toto, there are no more than about two dozen extant poems in the hand of Mandelshtam. This is the only known manuscript of the present poem, written in pencil over the last two pages of the almanach, signed by Mandelshtam at the close. Rear wrapper detached, else a very good copy of of this rare and fragile title.

$US35000



MANDELSHTAM, Osip., Autograph Manuscript of the Poem, Petersburg Stanzas. 1913

Single lined folio sheet removed from a sewn notebook, folded once, written on two rectos. The only known manuscript version of this important early poem by one of the great figures of 20th century verse, first published in the literary miscellany Giberborei (Number 5, Feb, 1913) and later included in the poet's first book, Kamen' (Stone) and then in the Collected Poems in 1928. The present text, which is cited in the standard edition, differs from the printed texts in two locations (first stanza, line one and third stanza, line 3). The manuscript bears the date January 1913 at the close. In her memoirs, Lily Brik specifically mentions this poem as one of the works Mayakovsky knew by heart and often spoke. Some soiling and crinkling, as is meet for such an object. Mandelshtam manuscript is among the rarest in the modern era, only about twenty poems being known to survive in holograph. It is a well-known fact that had it not been for the memory of Mandelshtam's wife Nadezhda, who had memorized them, many of his poems would have been lost.

$US65000