First edition of Pushkin’s collected papers, edited by P.I. Bartenev, the first (and at that time only) person allowed access to them.

The work contains ‘the papers of Pushkin preserved by his son Aleksandr Aleksandrovich and now given by him to the Moscow Rumiantsovskii Museum. Added to those are the letters of Pushkin to Goncharova and the marginalia in a new edition of his works, belonging to G.S. Chirikov. Almost all of these have previously appeared in Russkii Arkhiv in 1880 and 1881’ (‘Foreword’). Although Pushkin’s manuscripts had come to the Rumiantsovskii Museum after the Pushkin celebrations in 1880, Bartenev, editor of the periodical Russkii Arkhiv, was then the only person allowed access to them.

The material selected by Bartenev, all appearing here for the first time in book form, includes a ‘New chapter from “The Captain’s Daughter”’ (pp. 3-12); thirty-one letters by Pushkin, including nine to his wife Natalia Goncharova (some in French with translations); a number of letters addressed to Pushkin; and transcriptions from his notebooks, including much poetry. The lithographic facsimiles at the end comprise letters, a page of rough notes for Poltava (the leaf having been torn out of Pushkin’s working notebooks by Annenkov for this purpose), and a number of drawings. Despite the title-page no further volumes followed, as public access to the material was granted shortly after.

OCLC shows copies at Oxford, Colorado, Harvard and Columbia.

Not in Smirnov-Sokol’skii.

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