Our Notes & References

This pamphlet, featuring the satirical subtitle “not approved and not recommended by the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of Public Education,” was authored by a “former teacher from a Russian gymnasium”, now émigré to the USA – before the new, post-revolutionary wave.

Lavrovskii starts by criticising State-approved geography textbooks and what he perceives as biased patriotic information. However, the main focus of his essay is on Russian ideology and the problems of autocracy, specifically regarding the Jewish question in Russia and the pogroms and other attacks on Jews.

The pamphlet includes a few adds at the end, in particular for Lavrovskii’s NY-based magazine ‘Smekh’ [Laughter].

Rare: not in Savine and we could not trace any example in Russian libraries either. OCLC locates three copies (Princeton, NYPL and Columbia).

Provenance

George Sabo (most probably the bookdealer, 1896-1983, who hailed from the Carpatho-Rusyn region of the Kingdom of Hungary and settled in New York after 1920; ink stamp to title); Avenir Nizoff (a pianist who lived in Edmonton, Canada, in the second half of the 20th century, and gathered a large, wide-ranging library of Russian works, especially covering art, history and literature, with a strong representation of émigré works).