First edition, from the ‘Academia’ series ‘Masters of Contemporary Literature’, including an autobiographical sketch by Babel, and three biographical or critical essays by Nikolai Stepanov, P. I. Novitsky and G. A. Gukovsky, plus a list of Babel’s works. Other writers in the series included Zoshchenko, Pil’niak and Shklovsky.

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ZAMIATIN, Evgenii Ivanovich.

Nechestivye rasskazy [Impious Tales].

First edition of a collection of eight short stories by the increasingly dissident Zamyatin, including ‘Iks’ [‘X’] and ‘Rasskaz o samom glavnom’ (‘Tale of the most essential thing’), ‘the single most important work of Zamjatin’s transitional period’ (Shane). ‘Iks’ tells the story of a deacon who joins the Bolsheviks – in love with a pretty girl called Martha, he is torn between Marxism and ‘Marthism’; the extraordinary ‘Rasskaz o samom glavnom’ depicts three worlds: that of a yellow-pink caterpillar Rhopolocera, that of peasants fighting on opposite sides of the Revolution, and that of a distant dying star.

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'DON-AMINADO' [pseudonym for Aminad Petrovich SHPOLIANSKII].

Neskuchnyi sad [Bare garden].

First edition, no. 38 of 150 copies, of a poetical collection by the émigré poet, satirist and feuilletonist Aminad Shpolyansky. A journalist during the First World War, Shpolyansky emigrated to Paris shortly afterwards. ‘With his poetry and prose … he continued the classical tradition of Russian humour with its compassion for the “small man” … Published in Paris in 1935, Don-Aminado’s book Bare garden assembled alongside poetical works, a cycle of aphorisms under the general title “The new Koz’ma Prutkov” [a fictional author invented by Aleksei Tolstoy] … brilliantly witty and wicked. He casts doubts on all moral values – brotherly love, friendship, kindness, justice’, in a manner reminiscent of both Koz’ma Prutkov and Oscar Wilde' (Literaturnaia entsiklopediia russkogo zarubezh’ia 1918-1940).

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