Our Notes & References

Extremely rare early edition of “Lermontov’s most popular poem, on which he worked most of his life” (Terras) – the first comparing two manuscript versions. Forbidden in Russia.

A superb example in bright original printed wrappers.

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) worked on his Demon from 1829 to 1839, leaving a total of eight revisions of varying degrees of completion. Because of censorship bans, the work was heavily edited but never published during the poet’s lifetime. The poem however gained prominence in the Russian literary community long before its publication thanks to its circulation in manuscript copies, which included both early and late versions.

A story of love of a fallen angel for a mortal, “this is Lermontov’s most objective narrative poem, colored with dazzling imagery of the Caucasus, contrasting cosmic panorama with realistic detail of life in Georgia, and voluptuous in its imagery of the seduction scenes” (Terras).

Among the most enthusiastic readers of Demon was the famous literary critic Vissarion Belinskii who wrote in a letter to his friend in 1842: “Demon has become a fact of my life, I repeat it to others, I repeat it to myself, it contains realms of truths, feelings, beauty in it. I have read it so many times and my listeners were so satisfied…” Previously, in his article “Lermontov’s Poems”, Belinskii compared Demon with Lermontov’ another poem Mtsyri: “What a pity that [Demon], which also takes place in the Caucasus, was not published and is now circulating in manuscript copies, just like [Griboedov’s] Woe from Wit used to. […] The luxury of [Demon’s] imagery, the wealth of poetic inspiration, the excellent verses, the highness of thought put it incomparably higher than Mtsyri” (our translation).

The musicality of the verse and dramatic plot of Demon attracted attention of several Russian composers. The Czech conductor based in St Petersburg Eduard Napravnik carried over his impression of the poem into his Third Symphony in 1874; the composer and piano player Anton Rubinstein staged his opera Demon at the Mariinskii Theatre in 1875, and the composer Boris Fitinghof-Schel produced the opera Tamara in 1886 also at the Mariinskii Theatre.

A year after Lermontov’s death, in 1842, the magazine Otechestvennye zapiski [Notes of the Fatherland] published excerpts from the poem, after a failed attempt in 1841. The text was published in full in 1856 by Gasper in Karlsruhe, Germany, through the efforts of Lermontov’s relative, General Aleksei Filosofov, and around the same time in Berlin by F. Schneider & Co. In 1857, Schneider published for the first time a different version in the present second, corrected and augmented edition; Gasper also republished his own edition in 1857.

All these editions are very rare: we could trace only one copy of our second edition sold at auction in 2010, and none of the other editions (either by Gasper or Schneider), Russian included. We could trace only one holding of our edition on Worldcat (Harvard, in green cloth boards apparently without wrappers), two copies of Schneider’s first edition, two copies of Gasper’s 1857 edition, and none of Gasper’s first edition. All four editions are present in the two main libraries in Russia, where the full publication did not take place until 1860.

Most great Russian collections don’t show any of these editions. Smirnov Sokolskii managed to find only the first Schneider edition (1856) and Rozanov is the only we found having had our edition (in wrappers, but bound) – he had also the two other Schneider editions (1856 and 1858), but none of the Gasper’s.

Bibliography

Rozanov 878; Svod. Kat. russk. nelegalnoi i zapr. pechati 958 (“12 x 6 cm” !!; 6 copies); cf. Smirnov-Sok. 826 (for Schneider 1856); Victor Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991, p. 250; Viktoriia Gendlina, “Mikhail Lermontov. Demon, 1839”, Polka academy, 2020.