CASANOVA IN RUSSIA
CASANOVA, Giacomo.
Казанова. Мемуары [Kazanova. Memuary ‘Casanova. Memoirs’] … St Petersburg, V.I. Gubinsky, 1887.
[Memuary ‘Casanova. Memoirs’] … St Petersburg, V.I. Gubinsky, 1887.
8vo, pp. [ii], 373, [1]; some light browning, but a good copy in contemporary half cloth with marbled sides.
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Казанова. Мемуары [Kazanova. Memuary ‘Casanova. Memoirs’] … St Petersburg, V.I. Gubinsky, 1887.
Very rare first substantial Russian translation of Casanova’s famous Histoire de ma vie, preceded only by short extracts published in periodicals.
The present edition was published as part of Vladimir Chuiko’s series ‘European Writers and Thinkers’. Small excerpts of Casanova’s memoirs had appeared in Russian in 1823 – in the magazine Сын отечества (Son of the Fatherland) – and 1861, in Dostoevsky’s magazine, Вре́мя (Time).
This anonymous translation, made presumably from the German version published in the 1820s, or the French back-translation which followed it, is naturally selective due to censorship, but it does include the account of Casanova’s visit to Russia in 1781 and his meeting with Catherine the Great in St Petersburg. It was these unreliable versions of the text which also served as the basis for the first English translation, by Arthur Machen, in 1894. The complete original French text was not published until 1960–2.
OCLC records copies at Illinois, National Library of Poland, and the Polish Academy in Kraków only.
