RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES – IN YIDDISH
STEPNIAK, Sergey.
דאָס אינטערערדישע רוסלאַנד … איבערזעצט פון א. פרומקין
[Dos untererdishe Rusland … ubersetzt vun A. Frumkin].
New York, Maks N. Maisel, 1921.
8vo, pp. [1 (blank)], 253, [3 (blank)]; a very good copy in the original publisher’s printed red cloth, without dustjacket; a little rubbed with a few small marks.
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דאָס אינטערערדישע רוסלאַנד … איבערזעצט פון א. פרומקין
[Dos untererdishe Rusland … ubersetzt vun A. Frumkin].
Scarce first American edition in Yiddish of Stepniak’s first and most influential book. Written in Italian during exile in Switzerland following his assassination of Nikolai Mezentsov, chief of Alexander II’s secret police, Underground Russia was published in 1882 and translated into English the following year. Comprising introductory essays on nihilism, propaganda, and terrorism, followed by biographies of early Russian revolutionaries and accounts of revolutionary incidents, the work was widely translated and influential in anti-Tsarist circles in Europe and America.
Published in the wake of the Revolution, this translation is by Abraham Frumkin, one of the leading translators of mainly political literature into Yiddish and contributor to the daily New York paper Yiddishe Welt. This is the second Yiddish translation we have been able to trace, preceded only by an even rarer edition published by Shapiro in London in 1897 (issued in ’17 Hefte’, according to the New York Public Library). The text is here prefaced by a short biography of Stepniak.
