[FROM THE CHIMEN ABRAMSKY COLLECTION] Byloe i dumy [My Past and Thoughts], vol. 1: 1812–1838. From the Chimen Abramsky collection.
London: Vol'naia Russkaia Tipografiia, 1861. Octavo (19 × 12.5 cm). Contemporary half-leather binding with gilt-tooled red leather spine label; original wrappers not preserved; XII, 413, III pp. A very good copy, with wide uncut margins in an attractive contemporary binding and with an important provenance. Item #P4381
First part of the first edition of Alexander Herzen's most important work, the memoirs published during his exile in England. A key member of the Moscow Hegelian group of "Westernizers" around the critics and philosophers Vissarion Belinsky, Mikhail Bakunin, and Timofei Granovskii, Herzen left Russia in 1846 and lived in Berlin, Brussels, Paris (where he experienced the Revolution of 1848), Geneva and London. To help the political goals of the Russian emigration, Herzen founded the "Free Russian Press" ("Vol'naia Russkaia Tipografiia") in London in 1853, which published books and journals without preliminary censorship, and issued two famous periodicals, "The Polar Star" (Poliarnaia zvezda) and "Kolokol" ("Die Glocke"). He died in Geneva in 1870.
This copy from the famous collection of Socialistica of the Marxist bibliophile and scholar Chimen Abramsky (1916–2010), who fled to London from the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and became a leading specialist in both Judaica and socialist thought. His collection, parts of which were auctioned after his death, has recently been commemorated in his son’s biography, The House of Twenty Thousand Books (2014).
Price: €750.00