Item #4744 [O. HENRY IN RUSSIAN] O starom negre, bol’shikh karmannykh chasakh i voprose, kotoryy ostalsya otkrytym: [Rasskazy] [i.e. Thimble, Thimble: [Short Stories]]. O. Henry.

Henry, O.

[O. HENRY IN RUSSIAN] O starom negre, bol’shikh karmannykh chasakh i voprose, kotoryy ostalsya otkrytym: [Rasskazy] [i.e. Thimble, Thimble: [Short Stories]]

Leningrad: Ateney, 1924.

Item #4744

244, [1] pp. 12.8x17.6 cm. In owner’s contemporary binding with the original front wrapper mounted on the front board. Light staining and foxing of the front board, Soviet bookshop stamp on the recto of the rear board, previous owner’s ink inscription on the title-page. Otherwise in a very good condition.
Scarce. First edition. 1 of 6,000 copies. Design by the famous Russian graphic artist Sergey Chekhonin (1878-1936). Translated from English by the Russian writer and journalist V. Azov (Vladimir Ashkinazi) (1873-1941). At different times, Ashkinazi attended lectures at the universities of Paris, Zurich, and Bern. In 1906, Vladimir moved to St. Petersburg and undertook the issuance of the journal Blagoy mat [i.e. Good Swearing], which was banned after the first issue for the publication of a letter from the Socialist-Revolutionary E. Sazonov. After the October Revolution, Ashkinazi worked in the publishing house Vsemirnaya literatura [i.e. World Literature] and printed under his editorship over 40 volumes of works by foreign writers. In 1919, he was arrested as one of the leaders of the House of Writers. Seven years later, Vladimir emigrated to France where he became a member of the Parisian Masonic Lodge ‘Jupiter’.
A collection of O. Henry’s short stories printed in Russian in the first years of the Soviet Union.
The collection titled after O. Henry’s short story Thimble, Thimble (1909) houses 18 works written by the author in the period from 1903 to 1912: Roads of Destiny (1903), A Sacrifice Hit (1904), The Friendly Call (1904), The Making of a New Yorker (1905), Sociology In Serge And Straw (1906), Nemesis and the Candy Man (1908), Third Ingredient (1909), The Guardian of the Accolade (1909), A Poor Rule (1909), The Discounters of Money (1909), A Chaparral Christmas Gift (1909), The Enchanted Profile (1909), The Head-Hunter (1909), Thimble, Thimble (1909), Buried Treasure (1909), Supply and Demand (1909), A Technical Error (1910), and A Dinner at ----* (1912). Most of the short stories appeared in Russian for the first time.
O. Henry’s books first appeared in Russia in 1923: Koroli i kapusta [i.e. Cabbages and Kings], Rasskazy [i.e. Short Stories], Amerikanskiye rasskazy [i.e. American Short Stories], etc. In the next four years over 750,000 copies of his works were published in the Soviet Union. During the period of the New Economic Policy, only two other Americans - Jack London and Upton Sinclair exceeded the author in popularity. The anticapitalist by nature, O. Henry conquered both the Soviet print and cinematography: among numerous Soviet movies that were based on Henry’s oeuvre, Lev Kuleshov’s Velikiy uteshitel’ [i.e. The Great Consoler] (1933) is up to date considered a masterpiece of Soviet film industry.
Design by the noted Soviet graphic artist, ceramicist, and illustrator Sergey Chekhonin (1878-1936). In 1896 he moved to Petrograd, where he studied at the Drawing School of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts until 1897 and at the Tenishev school until 1900, being for some time a pupil of Ilya Repin. Chekhonin belongs to the second generation of the World of Art, the so-called artists who entered the union in the 1910s. Widely known as a graphic artist and creator of propaganda porcelain, he illustrated numerous Soviet publications and even managed to invent a completely original way of multi-color printing on fabric.

No copies found in Worldcat.

Price: $1,250.00

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