Our Notes & References

First edition, very rare: OCLC locates the Harvard copy only. 

Nikolai Protasov (1865–1903), an active member of the Eastern Siberian section of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, was the first to go about a proper collection of the folk-songs of Siberia. In 1901 he recorded, on a phonograph, almost 150 songs, writing some of them out in notation. It is twenty of these songs which are published here as indicated in the long title: “From [the songs] collected in 1900 in the province of Irkutsk and the Transbaikal region by Nikolai Protasov.  Arranged by Aleksei Petrov.  Published … by the Song Commission of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society”.

Protasov’s complete collection did not appear in his lifetime, and it has even been suggested that he burned his manuscripts in despair at not being able to see his work in print.

According to the preface, it was thanks to Rimsky-Korsakov that these songs appeared at all. He gave them to the Commission set up by the Tsar in 1897 to collect Russian folk-songs, which published them as a follow-up to another folk-song collection, by Balakirev, Lyadov and Lyapunov.

Provenance

From the estate of Geoffrey Elliott (1939-2021), banker of Russian descent, author of books on 20^th-c. history.

Geoffrey and his wife Fay were noted collectors, especially of Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and other literary figures. Russia was also an important theme: Geoffrey’s grandparents were interned in a Siberian tsarist prison camp before the October Revolution, and he focused most of his published works on the Cold War.

The Elliotts donated a significant part of their collection to the library of Leeds University in 2002, but kept the Russia-related items, which we consequently acquired.