Russia Biography

Hardcover. NY, St. Martins Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 350 pages. The spellbinding story of both the man and the theory,this book chronicles one of the most notorious radicals in Mikhail Bakunin, the founder of anarchism, here revealed as a practical moral philosophy rooted in a critique of wealth and power. Mark Leier corrects many of the popular misconceptions about Bakunin and his ideas, offering a fresh interpretation of his life and thoughts. Bakunin is an insightful read for all those who wish to better understand the fundamental basis of modern radical movements. Ex-lib but clean, only residue to acetate wrapper.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st US, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 188 pages, b&w illustrations, endpapers map. Rear of dj with 2"X1" piece missing from bottom edge. Otherwise very good.

Hardcover. NY, Stein and Day, 1st US, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 320 pages, b&w illustrations. Translated from the Russian, compiled and edited by Nina Froud and James Hanley. This is the first complete publication in the West of the great operatic basso's life. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1st US, 1941, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 352 pages. Translated from Russian by Malcolm Burr. Cloth covers, blue stamped titles, 3 b&w illustrated maps, blue top edge stain. Rubbing and light soiling to covers, spine lightly cocked, previous owner's bookplate and signature to front endpapers, light foxing and discoloration to endpapers, discoloration to page block ends; otherwise, a neat, tight copy of a scare book.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 835 pages. Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, MInerva Press, reprint, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 489 pages. Bright, clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 521 pages. The fourth volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. Covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 401 pages. The first volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 395 pages. The third volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. This volume begins with the writer's return to Saint Petersburg after a ten-year Siberian exile and traces how his engagement in the cultural and social ferment of Russia in the early 1860s led to his discovery of the themes that would underlie his mature masterpieces. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 320 pages. The second volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 374 pages. Russia has a fascinating history and author Robert Coughlan has provided us with an informative and compelling peek into a particularly notable segment of it, essentially the 1700s. The book covers the period from Tsar [Czar] Alexis (briefly) up to the reign of Tsar Alexander I, probably the most beloved of all the Romanovs. The focus of the work is on Catherine the Great. Her mentor, Elizabeth, was important through her shrewd handling of the many bumps and potholes which eventually allowed Catherine to take the throne against many rivals and usurpers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages illustrated throughout with 156 plates including 74 in full color. Remainder mark on bottom edge. Large folio. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Follows the artist from his birth in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1892, through the 1980's. Beautiful color plates include costume design, magazine covers (Harper's Bazar), sculpture, vases, mirrors, medallions, jewelry, labels, bottles, playing cards, watches.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 600 pages, in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. In this substantial work, Berberova, a renowned writer who left her homeland along with many compatriots in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, chronicles the travails she encounters in poverty-stricken Russia, poverty-stricken Berlin, and poverty-stricken Paris, where she lived from 1925-1950.

Softcover. NY, Guggenheim Museum, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 267 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. In 1915, Kazimir Malevich changed the future of modern art when his experiments in painting led the Russian avant-garde into pure abstraction. He called his innovation Suprematism--an art of pure geometric form meant to be universally comprehensible regardless of cultural or ethnic origin. His Suprematist masterpiece, White Square on White (1920-27), continues to inspire artists throughout the world. Focused exclusively on this defining moment in Malevich's career, Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism features nearly 120 paintings, drawings and objects, among them several recently discovered masterworks. In addition, the book includes previously unpublished letters, essays and diaries, along with essays by international scholars, who shed new light on this popular figure and his devotion to the spiritual in art.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 400 pages, b&w illustrations. A touching, brilliant and ground-breaking biography of one of literary history's most famous couple, at once a dual biography, a history, and the portrait of a long and stormy marriage. In a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Remainder line on bottom edge.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 400 pages. In 1897 Tolstoy wrote his daughter Tonya, explaining his opposition to her desired marriage: "As far as love is concerned, it's an ignoble and unhealthy sentiment-I would not have opened my door to it." Perhaps this passage reflects the turbulent marriage of Leo and Sonya-first the promise of love and then disillusionment. Certainly, there was a love of sorts-their marriage lasted 48 years and brought forth 13 children-but the later half of the marriage was soured by acrimony, secrecy, and great emotional wounding. The greatest division came with the battle over the rights to Tolstoy's works. Sonya finally got sole possession, outliving Leo by nine years and plagued by the thought that she had been wrong for her genius husband. In intimate and scrupulous detail often drawn directly from Leo and Sonya's diaries, Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) has profiled the disintegration of a marriage. Clean copy.

Philadelpia, Vertex Book/Auerbach Publishers, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, lightly soiled dust jacket, 243 pages. Map endpapers One man's story of being arrested on trumped up charges as an enemy of the Soviet State and being sent to Siberia for eight years. Inscription on dedication page (by book jacket designer).

Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with minor wear. Selected and translated by Olga Davydoff Dax. Color illustrations by the author throughout. Mariamna Davydoff, the Russian lady who wrote and illustrated this memoir of her life before the Revolution, was born in 1871 into a large, aristocratic family whose ancestors can he traced back to the eleventh century. After fleeing Russia in 1919, she eventually settled in Brittany with a sister and there reproduced, from memory, albums of detailed text and watcrcolors that had been abandoned in Russia and were later destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The result is a unique, first-hand account of a way of life that we have previously known almost exclusively through the works of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, and a few other writers of the late nineteenth century.

Softcover. Los Angeles, privately printed, 1st, circa 1980, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 47 pages. Softcover with light blue paper wrappers. Black and white pictures in rear. Faded wrappers, and abrasion on first few pages. Previous owner's name in upper right corner of title page. Boris Novikoff was a ballet dancer and the brother of the ballet master, Ivan Novikoff.

Hardcover. Ann Arbor, MI, Ardis, 1st English, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 565 pages. B/w illustrations throughout. Gilt title on spine. Decorated endpapers. Dust Jacket shows some wear due to age: yellowing, fraying and chipping to edges of front, spine and back, but still in tact. Cover boards clean, covered in teal fabric and in good shape. Pages clean, edges slightly yellowed. From the front flap: "...a landmark work in Russian theater scholarship, this study reveals Meyerhold in the context of his time, as seen by friends and enemies, actors and critics, and analyzes the development of his remarkable career as Russia's most celebrated and influential experimental director."

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 530 pages. Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Clean, bright copy, as new.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages, b&w photos, in a bright dust jacket. The true, little-known story of a family torn apart by revolution and war. Olga Chekhova, a stunning Russian beauty, was the niece of playwright Anton Chekhov and a famous Nazi-era film actress who was closely associated with Hitler.

Softcover. London, Tate, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 208 pages. Softcover. Color and black and white pictures throughout. Light edgewear to wrappers.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, The Winchell Co., 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 297 pages, b&w illustrations, in a bright dust jacket. Clean. Helene Iswolsky, daughter of a Russian diplomat, grew up in Japan, Denmark, Russia, and France. In 1911, her father became Russian ambassador to France. She returned to Russia for her debut in 1914, to be presented to the Tsarina Alexandra. While there she attended the wedding of Prince Felix Yusupov, who was to murder Rasputin three years later. After the Tsar was overthrown, her father retired to Biarritz and died there in 1919, leaving unpaid debts. The author took up translating and writing. She had a religious awakening and became a Catholic. A sojourn in a Benedictine monastery left her changed, but she decided not to make the cloister her life. The author knew many notable people in the Paris area, especially writers, poets, critics, philosophers of the "new wave," Christian humanists, and Russian emigres. She attended the Sunday afternoon gatherings of Jacques Maritain and Nicholas Berdiaev, and worked on Emmanuel Mounier's journal "Esprit." When the Nazis occupied France, she escaped to America with her mother. Here she founded an ecumenical movement called "The Third Hour" and taught Russian at Fordham University and other schools. She was a close friend of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. Scarce.