First edition in English of Dostoyevsky's first book, in beautifully sinister pictorial cloth designed by Aubrey Beardsley.
Very good plus.
Price: $1,000.00
"When shall I ever meet you again? I shall die; Varinka, do not break my heart!"
Dostoyevski's first published work, an epistolary novel appearing here in its first English translation nearly fifty years after its initial publication in Russian, but before the critical work of Virginia Woolf and others spurred the English literary world's love affair with the great Russian novelists. Beardsley's characteristically Beardsleyan cover design reveals nothing of the contents, but its spare lines and the pitiless gaze of a young woman suggest a certain unmerciful bleakness that well suits the story of Mákar, a middle-aged clerk tormented by poverty and living in hopeless love with his second cousin.
London / Boston: Elkin Mathews and John Lane / Roberts Brothers, 1894. Octavo. 7.5'' x 4.75''. Original decadent yellow and black pictorial cloth. Gilt-lettered spine. Cover design and title page illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. Part of the 'Keynotes' series issued by John Lane with designs by Aubrey Beardsley, including an ornate key-shaped monogram stamped on the spine, back cover, and leaf following the title page. Translated from the Russian by Lena Milman. With a critical introduction by George Moore. Publisher's ads at rear. 191, [1], 14, [2] pages. Bookplate of eminent art dealer and collector Martin Birnbaum mounted to front paste-down. Moderate bumping to extremities and light soil to boards.
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