Our Notes & References

Very rare pocket-size collection of humorous works by Russian and foreign writers for literary salons, poetry evenings, and home readings in New York – we could locate only one copy worldwide (RNB, St Petersburg), no copy in the USA.

Various collections of poetry titled “Chtets-deklamator” [“Reader-Reciter”] had been published in the Russian empire since the late 19th-century; the most successful series of this almanac was issued by the publisher I. Samonenko in Kyiv, having 12 editions from 1902 to 1917.

Published by Russian-speaking emigrés in New York while Russia was still torn by civil war, the present collection unites satirical works by several generations of authors from the Russian empire: fables of Kozma Prutkov, Ivan Krylov and Dmitrii Minaev, poetry by Aleksei Tolstoy, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Anna Barykova and Aleksei Pleshcheev, fragments of plays by Viktor Krylov, and poetic translations of humorous works by Goethe, La Fontaine and Heine among others. The volume ends with a chapter of fragments from tales of the Ukrainian poet Stepan Rudanskyi in the “Little Russian dialect”.

Provenance

Avenir Alexandrovich 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, émigré, literature and history).