AN ALMANACK FOR ALL
[ALMANACK.]
Альманахъ для всѣхъ. Книга вторая [Al’manakh dlia vsekh. Kniga vtoraia; ‘Almanack for all. Second book’].
St Petersburg, “Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh”, 1911.
8vo, pp. 157, [3]; some light spotting; pages opened roughly causing occasional loss to blank margins; a good copy in the original grey-green printed paper wrappers, head and tail of spine repaired.
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Альманахъ для всѣхъ. Книга вторая [Al’manakh dlia vsekh. Kniga vtoraia; ‘Almanack for all. Second book’].
First edition, extremely rare, of the second literary annual published by the Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh (New Journal for Everyone) with poems by Blok, Gorodetsky, and Kuzmin, and short fiction by Chulkov, Gusev, Count Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and Ivan Poroshin.
Aleksei Tolstoy had published his first substantial book, Povesti i rasskazy, in the previous year. Here, ‘Katen’ka’ is an early adventure story subtitled ‘from the notebook of an officer’; set in the eighteenth century, it looks forward to his famous Peter the First (1929), the most popular historical novel of the Soviet era. The Zhurnal dlia vsekh (Journal for Everyone) was a monthly literary magazine published in St Petersburg between 1895 and 1906, when it was shut down by the Russian authorities and was seemingly revived as the Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh (New Journal for Everyone), which would remain active until 1917. ‘With Symbolism's disintegration, the forces it had generated flowed into different channels, and names once associated chiefly with elite modernist journals appeared increasingly in publications of the more popular type. New Journal for Everyone (Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh) showed a contributors' list reminiscent of anthologies of early twentieth-century literature: Andreev, Bunin, Blok, Balmont, Briusov, Gorky, Gorodetsky, Zaitsev, Kuprin, Remizov, A. N. Tolstoi. If one obvious reason for the descent from Parnassus of some of these writers was their search for new places to publish, a related one may have been the presence of a wider, relatively more cultivated audience which resulted in part from their earlier efforts in narrower spheres’ (Grossman, p. 192). This is the second of two literary almanacks published by the Novyi zhurnal, the first printed in 1910.
Not found in OCLC.
See Grossman, ‘Rise and Decline of the "literary" Journal 1880–1917’, in Martinsen ed., Literary Journals in Imperial Russia (2010), pp. 171–196.
