Our Notes & References

Great two-volume émigré collection of poetry and analysis, in an attractive example in the original wrappers.

The first volume is a roll call of major émigré names, from Remizov, through Kuprin, to Teffi; it also contains one of the earliest, if not the earliest appearance of Nabokov’s work in the West, published just a few months after he went into exile. His poem Panikhida [Requiem], written whilst Nabokov was at Cambridge, is a lament for his lost homeland. Interestingly, in all modern editions the poem is recorded as being written in 1920, but here is dated to the previous year.

The second volume contains work by such masters as Balmont, Bunin, Chukovskii, and Voloshin – with an essay by Roerich to the memory of Leonid Andreev. It also contains what appears to be the first publication of Blok’s Dvenadsat’ outside of Russia.

Publihsed in New York, these two volumes were among the very first post-revolutionary collections of contemporary Russian poetry published anywhere, and together can be characterised as a literary attempt to come to terms with the country’s sudden change in direction brought about by the Revolution.