Home Life in Russia: By a Russian Nobel. Revised by the Editor of "Revelations of Siberia." In Two Volumes.

London: Hurst and Blackett, 1854. Rare First English Edition of "Dead Souls"

[GOGOL, Nikolai]. Home Life in Russia. By a Russian Nobel. Revised by the Editor of

"Revelations of Siberia." In Two Volumes. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1854.

First edition in English. A "translation" of Dead Souls by Gogol. Two octavo volumes (7 11/16 x 4 13/16 inches; 195 x 122 mm). [2], iv, 308; [2], 314, [2, ads] pp. With two pages of publisher's advertisements.

Publisher's original green cloth. Boards and spines decoratively stamped in blind. Spines lettered in gilt. Yellow coated endpapers. Top edges brown. Some very light soiling to cloth and some fraying to the tops of spines. Some very minor professional and almost invisible gluing to a small portion of the back outer hinge, with no loss of cloth. Spines lightly sunned. Previous owner's old ink signatures on front paste down (dated 1860) and on title pages (dated 1857) of each volume, not affecting text. Volumes slightly skewed. Overall a very good, clean set in original cloth. Housed in a custom slipcase.

The first work of Russian prose fiction published in the United States was published in Philadelphia in 1832. The title was Ivan Vejeeghen (translation of Ivan Vyzbigin, 1829) and its subtitle was Life in Russia. "[The publication of this book] began a tendency to present Russian fiction as a source of information about Russian life rather than as art...This trend continued after the outbreak of the Crimean War, which brought with it an increased English interest in Russian life and culture. A spate of prose translations appeared in the 1850s, which were drastically doctored and presented as factual accounts by unnamed 'Russian noblemen'. Their titles are indicative of the treatment the novels received: Sketches of Russian Life in the Caucasus, 1853 (Lermontov's A Hero of our Time); Home Life in Russia, 1854 (Gogol's Dead Souls); and Russian Life in the Interior, 1855 (Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches). In spite of the pretense to factuality suggested by the titles, the so-called translators took great liberties with the texts, expunging whole portions, exaggerating caricatures, and adding imaginative flourishes to the author's prose." (Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, Classe, 1206).

Sadleir 985.

HBS 64929.

$10,000.