Very rare first edition in Russian of Casanova’s famous Histoire de ma vie, published as part of Vladimir Chuiko’s series ‘European Writers and Thinkers’. The anonymous translation, made presumably from the German version published in the 1820s, or the French back-translation which followed it, is naturally selective, 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 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 and National Library of Poland only.

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