Romanof (Panteleimon) Three Pairs of Silk Stockings:

A Novel of the Life of the Educated Class Under the Soviet. Trans. from the Russian by Leonid Zarine. Edited and with an introduction by Stephen Graham
London, Ernest Benn, 1931.

First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.

Three Pairs of Silk Stockings is the first English edition of Panteleimon Romanof’s Soviet novel Tovarishch Kislyakov (Comrade Kislyakov), retitled for Western readers and translated by Leonid Zarine, with an introduction by Stephen Graham. It follows two arcs: Kislyakov, an educated bureaucrat who breaks with tradition to join the Bolsheviks, and Tamara, a stage-struck young woman, ‘a butterfly broken on an elaborate wheel’ of Bolshevism, whose mysterious and grisly death closes the book and is vividly echoed in the dust-jacket artwork. The jacket flap calls Romanof one of the best of the younger generation of Russian authors, whose English reputation rested on the short stories collected as Without Cherry Blossom. The satirical eye of those stories is evident here, above all in his treatment of sex and the post-1917 sexual revolution, summed up in a foreigner’s remark that ‘the Russian woman has lost all moral standards’: ‘give her three pairs of silk stockings and she is yours’. From the library of Adrian H. Goldstone (1897–1977), collector and bibliographer of Arthur Machen and John Steinbeck, with his bookplate.