[Sammelband].- [Various. Early 20th Century Russian Sammelband]

various places, , 1903-7.

8vo. Green cloth with leather spine label lettered and bordered in gilt.

A collection of five scarce Russian language pieces, spanning some of the most volatile years of the early twentieth century Russian history, consisting of fiction (the influential German pacifist novel Lay Down Your Arms! featured on title stamp), worker poetry and important political articles. The works address and represent many of the causes and consequences of the 1905 Russian Revolution (The First Russian Revolution), as for instance raised by Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, including the harsh conditions for workers caused by industrialisation, the poverty experienced by the peasant population, the spread of revolutionary and liberal ideas, and the disastrous Russo-Japanese War.

1. Lay Down Your Arms! by Bertha von Suttner, published by Altshuler, St Petersburg, 1905. Third Russian edition. Von Suttner’s classic anti-war novel first published in Germany in 1889 as Die Waffen nieder! Von Suttner was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 also, being the second female Nobel Laureate (after Marie Curie).

2. On the All-Russian Workers’ Congress, published by Provincial Colleague, Moscow in 1907, and containing a collection of articles from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; authored by: Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, Lazar Solomonovich Yezhov, Akhmed Tsalikov.

3. Songs of Working Life by Fedor Postupaev, published by Donskaya Rech, Rostov-on-Don, 1904 (approved by the censor, May 7 1904). A collection of proletarian poetry, describing both agricultural and industrial life. The publisher’s offices were frequently raided by the authorities and their books confiscated or burned as they were seen as inciting worker unrest in Tsarist Russia. Postupaev was a self-taught poet who held radical views, including the immediate confiscation of land from exploiters and its fair and equal redistribution.

4. Songs of Labour, published by Donskaya Rech, Rostov-on-Don, 1903 (approved by the censor, December 4, 1903). An anthology containing poems and songs such as ‘It is Dawning’, and ‘Comrade’ by Innokenty Omulevsy, Dubinushka by Leonid Trefolev, Ivan Bunin’s ‘Worker’s Songs’, Konstantin Blamont’s ‘The Blacksmith’, and ‘Song of the Ploughman’ by Aleksey Koltsov, as well as translations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Hood, and Ferdinand Freiligrath.

5. A Short History of the French People by Paul Lacombe, published by Donskaya Rech, Rostov-on-Don, 1904 (approved by the censor, October 4, 1903). A Russian translation of Lacombe’s 1878 French work, significant because Russian revolutionaries regarded the French Revolution as a model for their own movement.