SSYL’NYM I ZAKLIUCHENNYM.

Rare first edition of this anthology of stories, novellas and poems by Russian authors; a publication intended to raise funds in support of the exiled and imprisoned (as the title translates), the victims of the Tsarist reaction after the 1905 revolution. Among the mainly socially oriented and neo-realistic authors represented in this rare volume are Leonid Andreev, Mikhail Petrovich Artsybashev, Veresaev (Vikenty Vikentievich Smidovich), the Marxist writer and journalist Garin (Nikolai Georgievich Mikhailovsky), who belonged to the Znanie group of writers, which was headed by Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin, another prominent figure in the Znanie group, and Vera Nikolayevna Figner, who is more known for her political radicalism, such as the successful planning of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1880. After long imprisonment and exile, which ended in 1906, she went abroad and devoted herself to campaigning for Russian political prisoners. It is most likely that she was a central figure in putting together this publication, which appeared without any editorial note of preface.

TARSIS, Valerii Iakovlevich.

Skazanie o sinei mukhe. Krasnoe i chernoe [The legend of the bluebottle. Red and black].

First edition in Russian of Tarsis’ first work to be published abroad, a political allegory of a philosopher who kills a fly and then asks himself why he cannot likewise kill people who get in his way.