[ROMA IN THE SOVIET UNION] Bibliografiia o tsyganakh: ukazatel' knig i statei s 1780 po 1930 [Bibliography on gypsies: an index of books and articles from 1780 to 1930].
Moscow: Tsentrizdat, 1930. Octavo (19.5 × 13.4 cm). Original printed wrappers; 140, [1] pp. Light wear and discoloration to wrappers; chipped to spine extremities; pre-war library stamp of a pedogogical library to title verso; else about very good. Item #55764
First edition (a re-print was issued in 1977) of this bibliography of books and articles on Roma people in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union from 1780–1930, compiled by the writer, literary scholar, and Romani activist Aleksandr German (1893–1955). The volume is organised chronologically and lists close to 700 publications, articles, and monographs on all aspects of Roma language, customs, and culture, including publications on this subject in Belorussian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Romani, English, German, and French in addition to Russian. The compiler of the bibliography, Aleksandr German, was born to a Czech father and a Moravian Romani mother, who had relocated to Russia in the late nineteenth century. He began publishing essays and literary works in 1915, in Russian. During the Civil War, he served in the Red Army as a cultural activist and propagandist, later settling in Moscow, where he began to devote his life and work to Romani culture in the service of the new state. On behalf of Narkompros, the People's Commissariat for Education, he was involved in the creation of the new Romani alphabet as part of the Soviet literacy campaign of the 1920s. He began to live among the Roma, learning their various dialects, wrote literary works in Romani, and co-founded the first professional Romani theatre company (Romen) in 1930. In 1931 he would publish the first history of the Romani people in the territory of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, which presents a case for adaptation to urban settlements and cultural growth in the Soviet sense.
The introduction to the volume, which calls for looking at the “Roma population in a new light” was written by Maxim Sergievskii (1892–1946), a romance languages professor at the Moscow State University who was in charge of creating a new Roma alphabet. Sergievskii, along with his doctoral linguistics student Tatiana Venttsel’ (1903–1990), and native speakers and activists from the All-Soviet Union of Gypsies, Nina Dudarova (1903–1992) and Nikolai Pankov (1895–1959), met regularly for study sessions which resulted in the introduction of the new written language in May 1927. Despite the initial skepticism expressed by Pankov at working with a Russian scholar to codify the Romani language, in his memoirs Pankov later expressed approval for Sergievskii’s scholarly dedication: “Despite his duties at the university, Narkompros, and other institutions,” Pankov favourably recalled of Sergievskii, “he found time to be everywhere personally – in the Gypsy school, the Gypsy artel, the club, theatre, and in the nomadic camp in order to see Gypsy life in all of its diversity” (See: Brigid O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union, 2020). Sergievsky would author the first “Gypsy Grammar” (1931) and the “Gypsy-Russian Dictionary” (1938), edited by Nikolai Pankov. (See Marushiakova and Popov, “Politics of Multilingualism in Roma Education in Early Soviet Union and its Current Projections”, in Social Inclusion, Vol. 5, pp. 48-59). The stamp to the inside wrapper of this volume indicates that it was part of the collection of the
central pedagogical library and purged likely along with orher Roma-related materials in mid-1930s. One of only 1000 copies.
As of June 2026, KVK, OCLC show six copies of the first edition in North America.
Price: €750.00