Our Notes & References

A fantastic, spotless example of this anthology of Russian poetry for the youth, luxuriously designed and produced in Paris.

The historian of literature, writer and educator Petr Nikolaevich Polevoi (1839-1902) invited the artist Ivan Stepanovich Panov (1844-83) to illustrate this collection of some of the greatest Russian poets’ works for youth. This laborious project involving numerous woodengraved figurative illustrations, plant and allegorical headpieces, tailpieces and initials, proved to be Panov’s “best artwork” (Novitskii). Polevoi saluted Panov’s art in the preface: “Studying each poem with great love, as a separate whole, in all its details, the artist began his work, and step by step becoming more and more fascinated, pushing wider the narrow framework of the original plan, he created the whole host of drawings in the course of the last year”.

The famous Belgian – French engraver François Pannemaker notably acknowledged the merit of Panov’s drawings and offered Polevoi to engrave them himself: “the first drawings made for my new collection impressed not only me, but also the kind Pannemaker, this patriarch of Parisian engravers, so much that he paid special attention to them […] At the same time, Pannemaker advised me to print my collection in Paris, fearing that the most important aspect of it — artistic — could lose a lot from careless printing” (Polevoi). The edition was thus authorised and collated in St Petersburg by the publisher Anton Kotomin, but printed in Paris at the Motteroz printing house on paper specially commissioned from the Imprimerie du Marais; the binding was designed and executed (in various colours) by two other Parisian workshops — all those involved in this production are listed at the end of the book.

The collection includes poems by some of the greatest Russian poets, such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Vasilii Zhukovskii, Fedor Tiutchev, Afanasii Fet, Evgenii Baratynskii, Nikolai Nekrasov and, oddly, an abridged translation by Mikhail Mikhailov of Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mountain Daisy”. This is the first edition; the anthology was published again with some changes in 1880 by Mavrikii Volf, and in 1881 Polevoi issued another collection, Familiar Echoes. Malorussian [Little Russian] Life and Nature, reflecting the everyday life, past and present of Ukraine.

Bibliography

Seslavinskii, Girlianda iz knig i kartinok, II, № 83; Aleksei Novitskii, “Ivan Stepanovich Panov”, Russkii biograficheskii slovar A. A. Polovtseva, T. 13, 1902, pp. 263-264.