‘A LANDMARK IN THE RECEPTION OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN BRITAIN’
KRYLOV, [Ivan Andreevich]; William Ralston SHEDDEN-RALSTON, translator.
Krilof and his Fables …
London, Strahan and Co., 1869.
8vo, pp. xlii, [2], 180, 32 (Strahan catalogue); with a half-title; engraved illustrations by Arthur Boyd Houghton and J. B. Zwecker throughout; a fine copy in the original publisher’s green cloth, covers blocked in blind and gilt; front hinge cracked; authorial presentation inscription to title verso; armorial bookplate of Robin de Beaumont (1926–2023), with his lengthy pencil annotations to front free endpaper.
First edition in English in book form of any of Krylov’s Fables, a presentation copy ‘To Sir John Shaw Lefevre H.C.B. from the Translator’.
‘Among the top achievements of Russian literature’ (Terras), the fables were translated by William Ralston Shedden-Ralston (1828–1889), who had worked in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum since 1853 and knew Tennyson, Carlyle, and George Eliot. Ralston taught himself Russian by memorizing a dictionary, visited Russia twice (in 1868 and 1870), where he met the folklorist Afanasev, and by 1875 was pre-eminent as a translator and critic, with a hundred publications to his name, this one of the earliest. ‘His study Krilof and his Fables (1869) was a landmark in the reception of Russian literature in Britain’ (ODNB). His Russian correspondents included Tolstoy and Turgenev, with whom established a close friendship. His translation of Turgenev’s Dvorianskoe gnezdo (as Liza, 1869) was deemed by the author the best translation of any of his works.
Here Ralston translates ninety-three of Krylov’s most characteristic fables, with notes based on a critique of 1868 by Kenevich, to which he prefaces a lengthy biographical ‘Memoir’ of the author. He later expanded the work for a third edition of 1871.
The lawyer and politician John Shaw Lefevre (1797–1879), recipient of this copy, was, like Ralston, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He helped found the University of London, and his extensive library of Russian books (he had begun learning the language in the 1860s) was presented to the library by his widow in 1880. Lefevre had himself met Turgenev in 1857.
Line, p. 23.
