Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
18th November 2015
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the novelist Barbara Hofland’s response to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Iwanowna; or, The Maid of Moscow. I recently came across another piece of English literature inspired by the events in Russia, this time a poem by a Yorkshireman called William Margetson Heald (1767–1837), published the same year as Hofland’s […]
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27th January 2015
As regular readers of this blog will know, I have a particular interest in cultural relations between the English-speaking world and Europe, especially Germany and Russia. I’ve written before about the popularity of Jack London in Russia, ‘until the 1950’s … by far the most popular American author’ there, and illustrated a few of the many translations […]
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18th June 2013
Next week, I shall be attending the annual RBMS Preconference, this year in Minneapolis where the theme is “Performance in Special Collections”. I thought this little book may be timely. It’s the catalogue of the celebrated Zimin Opera Museum in Moscow, published in 1916, just a year before the Bolshevik Revolution led to the Museum’s […]
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7th June 2012
This is the first edition of the full score of Tchaikovsky’s cantata Moskva (‘Moscow’), with its shimmering chromolithograph title, written for the coronation of Tsar Alexander III. Although passed by the censor for printing in May 1883 when the coronation took place, it was not published until five years later. Writing to his publisher Pyotr Jurgenson in […]
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