Carroll, Lewis (Luis Karol), Stanislav Vinaver (translator), and Evgenija Gaganidze Samonova (illustrator).

[FIRST SERBIAN TRANSLATION OF ALICE IN WONDERLAND] Alisa u čarobnoj zemlji [Alice in Wonderland].

Belgrade: Vreme, 1923. Octavo (18.6 × 15.8 cm). Original reddish brown paper-covered boards, printed in black and with mounted color illustration; [4], 172 pp. With twenty-one mostly full-page black-and-white illustrations and [3] leaves of color plates on thicker stock. A few small, unobtrusive repairs to spine at front hinge; else very good. Item #55579

Rare first translation into Serbian of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, printed in Cyrillic and published the same year Vladimir Nabokov's famed translation appeared in Berlin. The work is discussed in Tijana Tropin, "Serbian Translations of Alisa: Beginning in 1923" in Alice: In a World of Wonderlands (ed. Jon Lindseth, vol. I, 2015). The translator, Stanislav Vinaver (1891–1955) was a Serbian avant-garde poet, writer, and translator who spent time in Paris, the United Kingdom, and Russia, where he witnessed the October Revolution while on a diplomatic assignment. He briefly worked for the Ministry of Education of the newly established Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Tropin notes that Vinaver was “a colorful figure and a prolific translator from several languages… His trademark affinity for puns and parodies was congenial to Lewis Carroll’s, but in introducing his wordplays, he often neglected some aspects of the original and used considerable poetic license; he himself called the translation a ‘retelling’. He is also the only Serbian translator who tried to replace Carroll’s parodies with adequate parodies of Serbian poems for children” (Tropin, p. 531).

Even more unusual was the life of the illustrator, Evgeniia Gaganidze Samonova (1903–after 1943?). The daughter of a Russian officer and sculptor, Samonova found herself in Belgrade following the October Revolution, where she began her artistic career, exhibiting alongside other Russians in exile and becoming part of the artistic circle "Krug" (1930–1931). It is during this time that she illustrated Alice in Wonderland as well as works by Oscar Wilde. By the early 1940s, she was apparently working for the German Nazi propaganda organization "Vineta" active in Berlin. There she met and married Miletii Zykov, a Soviet-Ukrainian Jew who had become the main propagandist of the anti-Stalin Vlasov movement that collaborated with Hitler's Wehrmacht. Zykov was most likely abducted and killed by the Gestapo in 1944; his wife's fate remains unclear.

Taylor, Lewis Carroll at Texas (Weaver Collection) 226.

As of January 2026, KVK, OCLC show three copies outside former Yugoslavia, all in North America.

Price: €1,500.00

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