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Foreign Literature

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This department specialises in rare and important works of French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and South American literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Here you can find first editions and signed or presentation copies of authors as diverse as Akhmatova, Balzac, Borges, Camus, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Goldoni, Hugo, Kafka, Leopardi, Lorca, Manzoni, Pirandello, Pushkin, Schiller, Tolstoy, Zola, and many others. Among the important works which have passed through our hands are the original working manuscript of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, now in the Pushkin House in St Petersburg, the only known copy of the first edition of Brecht's first play, Baal (1920) with his working notes, and an extraordinary collection of Pushkin first editions.

 
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  1. KAFKA, Franz.

    Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Prose Writings.

    London, Secker and Warburg, 1954.

    First edition in English. Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, with notes by Max Brod. ‘Although Kafka’s almost unceasing guilt and anxieties seem to mark him as a man of pestilential morbidity and gloom, it is not the important effect he has on us. He has a kind of cunning. His plain and...

    £200

  2. KAFKA, Franz.

    Frants Kafka: roman, novelly, pritchi [Franz Kafka: a novel [The Trial], novellas, parables].

    Moscow, “Progress”, 1965.

    First edition in Russian of Der Prozess, part of the ‘recent unprecendented publication’ (Struc) of Kafka in Russian. Also published here are a number of short stories, some of which had previously appeared in Ukrainian and Russian in Soviet periodicals. The translators include R. Rait-Kovaleva,...

    £1350

  3. KAMENSKII, Vasilii Vasilievich, and Nikolai Pavlovich DMITREVSKY (illustrator).

    Emel’ian Pugachev, poema. Graviury...

    [Leningrad], ‘Molodaia Gvardiia’, 1931.

    First edition of Kamensky’s long narrative poem, preceded by a play on the same subject in 1925.

    £1200

  4. KAPITSA, Olga and Yuri VASNETSOV.

    Зайка [Little Hare] .

    Leningrad, Detizdat Ts K VLKSM, 1936.

    First edition of this collection of eleven traditional folk tales and songs about the hare and his encounters with huntsmen, foxes and other animals, charmingly written by Olga Kapitsa and illustrated by Yuri Vasnetsov, one of Russia’s leading artists of children’s books.
    Worldcat finds two...

    £350

  5. KARAMZIN, Nikolai Mikhailovich.

    Aglaja. Romantische und historische Erzählungen. Nach dem Russischen des Karamzin herausgegeben...

    Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1819.

    First appearance of a collection of eight prose pieces by Karamzin (1766–1826) in German translation. Although the work takes the title of the first Russian literary almanac, Aglaia, published by Karamzin in two volumes, 1794–5, it is actually a selection of pieces by Karamzin taken both from Aglaia...

    £750

  6. KHARMS, Daniil Ivanovich, translator. BUSCH, Wilhelm.

    Plikh i Pliukh [Plisch und Plum].

    Moscow, Detizdat, 1937.

    First edition in book form, very rare, of Daniil Kharms’s Russian free verse translation of the children’s story by Wilhelm Busch about two mischievous dogs, second only in fame to his Max und Moritz. The translation had been first published in the children’s magazine Chizh in 1936 (nos. 8-12),...

    £3000

  7. KLIUEV, Nikolai Alekseevich.

    Izbianyia pesni [Izba Songs].

    Berlin, “Skify”, [1920].

    First edition. Nikolai Klyuev (1887–1937) was the leader of the so-called peasant poets, and Esenin’s erstwhile friend and mentor. This collection suitably takes its name from the izba, the traditional Russian peasant’s hut.

    £250

  8. KLIUEV, Nikolai Alekseevich.

    Chetvertyi Rim [The Fourth Rome].

    St Petersburg, “Epokha”, 1922.

    First edition of Klyuev’s attack on Esenin.

    £280

  9. KOLLÁR, Jan. 

    Díla básnická … we dwau djljch [‘A Collection of Poems … in two parts’]. 

    Buda, no publisher, but ‘with the types Gyuriána a Bagó’, 1845. 

    First collected edition of Jan Kollár’s works, inscribed to fellow poet and ‘brother Slav’ Ognjeslav Utješenowić-Ostrožinski, with an additional autograph sonnet written in his honour. 

    £1750

  10. KOROLENKO, Vladimir Galaktionovich.

    Dom No. 13-yi. Epizod iz Kishinevskago Pogroma [House No. 13. An episode from the Kishinev...

    Berlin, Johannes Räde, 1904.

    First edition printed in Berlin (first, London 1903) of Korolenko’s description of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, in which he denounces anti-Semitism and religious persecution. The work was prohibited by the Russian censor and had to be published abroad.

    £200

  11. KOROLEVICH, Vladimir.

    Sady Dofina [The Gardens of the Dauphin].

    Moscow, [“Sinema”,] 1918.

    First (and only?) edition. The poems are divided into two sections: ‘The Gardens of the Dauphin’ and ‘Sacred Spring’.

    £150

  12. KRASNOV, Petr Nikolaevich.

    Mantyk, okhotnik na l’vov. Povest’ [Mantyk, lion-hunter. A story].

    Paris, V. Siial’skii, 1928.

    First edition, an African safari adventure for younger readers, by the exiled ataman of the Don Cossacks.

    £1200

  13. KRASNOV, Petr Nikolaevich.

    S Ermakom na Sibir! Povest’ [With Ermak to Siberia! A story].

    Paris, V. Siial’skii, [1929].

    First edition, an illustrated children’s story about the sixteenth-century Cossack leader Ermak Timofeevich, whose exploration of Siberia in the 1580s marked the beginning of Russia’s expansion into the interior.

    £1000

  14. KRASNOV, Petr Nikolaevich.

    Domoi! (na l’gote). Roman [Homewards! (On leave). A novel].

    Paris, V. Siial’skii, [1936].

    First edition, one of 1000 copies on normal paper from an edition of 1002; a novel of soldiers on leave.

    £600

  15. KRASNOV, Petr Nikolaevich.

    Nenavist’. Roman [Hatred. A Novel].

    Paris, E. Siial’skaia, [1934].

    First edition, one of 1000 copies on normal paper from an edition of 1007. It was also translated into German and Italian.

    £600

  16. KRASNOV, Petr Nikolaevich.

    Mantyk, okhotnik na l’vov. Povest’ [Mantyk, lion-hunter. A story].

    Paris, V. Siial’skii, 1928.

    First edition, an African safari adventure for younger readers, by the exiled ataman of the Don Cossacks.

    £1200

  17. KRASNOV, Petr Nikolaevich.

    Lozh’. Roman [The Lie. A Novel].

    Paris, V. Siial’skii, [1939].

    First edition, written in Berlin in 1938-9.

    £600

  18. [KRASNOYARSK.]

    [Title in Russian:] Krasnoiarsk.

    [Vienna, 1968.]

    Facsimile of a pamphlet printed by Siberian prisoners of war in 1919 in the camp at Krasnoyarsk. Although the title is in Cyrillic, the text is in German.

    £275

  19. KRUCHENYKH, Aleksei Eliseevich.

    Zaumnyi iazyk u: Seifullinoi, Vs. Ivanova, Leonova, Babelia, I. Sel’vinskogo, A. Veselogo, i...

    Moscow, Publishing house of the All-Russian Union of Poets, 1925.

    First edition, a critical study of six poets by ‘the most effective theoretician of cubo-futurism and its most loyal and consistent advocate of transrational language … or the destruction of meaning in poetry … For Kruchonykh, transrational language also reflected the confusion and chaos...

    £650

  20. [KRÜDENER, Barbara Juliane de Vietinghoff, Baronne de.]

    Valérie, ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G… Tome...

    Paris, Henrichs, 1804.

    Rare first edition of Valérie, the most famous novel by the Russian mystic and novelist Madame de Krüdener (1766–1824), who for a time exerted an influence over Tsar Alexander I.

    £800