Tag Archive: 0Symbolism

A bookseller’s year is marked by the book fairs.  Summer is a quiet time, but in autumn everything starts up again.  There was York, then the ILAB Congress in Budapest, and now there’s Grasmere (a first for the ABA), Seattle, Frankfurt, INK in London (another new fair), Boston, and Chelsea.  Obviously, I can’t attend all these, so […]

As I wrote a couple of years ago, Oscar Wilde had a particular following in early twentieth-century Russia.  Here is another example: the first separate edition in Russian of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), printed in Moscow in a limited edition of just 500 numbered copies in 1906. It is the first appearance of this translation.  Others […]

I had quite a lot of interest in my recent blog about the early reception of Oscar Wilde in Russia, so I thought I would post some more. Here’s the first edition of Konstantin Balmont’s translation of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, published in Moscow in 1904.  The cover is by the decadent artist Modest […]

This is a copy of the first separate edition in any language of Oscar Wilde’s unfinished play, A Florentine Tragedy, translated into Russian from a copy of Wilde’s manuscript and published in Moscow by Skorpion in 1907. Correspondence between the young translator, Mikhail Likiardopulo, secretary of the Russian Symbolist journal Vesy (The Scales), and C. S. Millard (aka […]