Our Notes & References
An early edition of the letters of Enlightenment writer Gellert, from the library of Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, with an unusual, detailed handwritten description of its sale abroad during the dispersal of Imperial collections under the First Five-Year Plan.
A poet and novelist from Saxony, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–1769) was ‘a prominent representative of the German Enlightenment whose works were, for a time, second in popularity only to the Bible’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica). His Briefe, first published in 1751 and frequently reprinted, served as models for Enlightenment letter-writers and are accompanied by an essay on tasteful style.
Provenance
From the library of Maria Feodorovna of Russia (1759–1828), second wife of Paul I, with her arms to covers and the bookplate of Pavlovsk Palace to upper pastedown. Maria Feodorovna married the future Paul I in 1776 and the couple received Pavlovsk Palace from Paul’s mother, Catherine the Great, the following year; like her mother-in-law, Maria Feodorovna was born and educated in Enlightenment German courts, and by the time of her death had formed a library of over twenty thousand volumes at Pavlovsk.
A loosely inserted note, signed Friedrich C. Steinert and dated Vienna, 23 January 1937, gives a five-page account of the volume’s later provenance. The volume remained in Imperial and state collections until their dispersal by the state-owned art-agent Antikvariat, under the supervision of the bibliophile Sergei Alexandrovich Mukhin (1896–1933), and was sold to the Viennese bookseller Gilhofer & Ranschburg in 1931. Antikvariat was dismantled in 1934 and its directors purged, although (as the note tells us) Mukhin had starved to death the previous year after his ration card was cancelled as a suspected bourgeois. Steinert wrote the note in 1937 when presenting the book to his godson Wolfgang Loschke, in the hope that it would ‘convey a sense of the interesting historical and cultural perspectives that arise from dealing with antique books’ (trans.), concluding ‘habent sua fata libelli’.
Physical Description
Octavo. [16] and 240 pp.; large copperengraved vignette to title, woodcut initials, head-, and tailpieces; [4] ff. of notes loosely inserted.
Binding
Contemporary mottled calf, spine gilt in compartments with gilt-lettered red morocco label, gilt arms to coversover an unidentified blind-blocked monogram, edges stained red, marbled endpapers, green ribbon placemarker.
Condition
Binding a little rubbed, slight sunning to upper board, very small wormholes at foot of spine; very light foxing in places.
