Our Notes & References

Lovely editions of these famous fairy tales by the Russian diaspora in China. Scarce, especially all three volumes together.

Established in 1923 in Kharbin (or Harbin), the publishing house of Mikhail Zaitsev (1901 – after 1946) was among the most prolific ones in the diaspora: it published around 150 titles of Russian-language books of various contents by local authors and by Russian authors abroad, primarily from France. Zaitsev also owned the bookstore “Rus” and collaborated with Parisian publishing houses, mostly printing children’s books for them.

The three volumes follow the same structure and contain five full-page colour illustrations each. We could trace another issue of The Frog Princess, printed with black and white illustrations, possibly designed for colouring, and with some variants, such as the use of some post-revolutionary letters, a slightly different layout and without ‘skazka’ and ‘Kharbin’ on the title. This latter issue was perhaps produced for the readership in China, while our issue may have been intended for children in Europe, France in particular.

Despite the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, Zaitsev’s publishing house continued its work until around 1942. In his last years he worked as the head of the publishing house of the newspaper Russkoe Slovo [Russian Word] and the magazine Russkaia Rech [Russian Speech]. In 1946, after the end of the Soviet-Japanese War and the establishment of the pro-Soviet government in Northern Manchuria, he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag; his later fate is unknown.