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Dublintsy (Dubliners) : Rasskazy [i.e. Dubliners : Stories]

Joyce, J.

Leningrad: Mysl’, 1927. Item #1615

168 pp. 17,5x13,5 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Spine and edges of covers restored, pale water stains on outer edge of pages and front cover, otherwise very good and clean.

First Russian edition of the work and early publication of James Joyce in the USSR. One of 5000 copies produced. Very rare in this condition.
The book includes eleven of fifteen stories of Joyce’s collection. These selected stories from ‘Dublins’ became an early Soviet publication of the author, skipping ahead only a fragment of “Ulysses” in 1925. Translation of ‘Dublins’ and writing of the foreword were undertaken by E. Fedotova. The full content of this work came out in the Soviet Union in 1937. Other writings by James Joyce began to be published in the late 1960s.
The cover design was designed by Georgy Fitingof (1905-1975). He was born to an old Baltic noble family that lived in St. Petersburg and stayed there after the Revolution. Fitingof graduated from the All-Russian Academy of Arts in 1926. He studied at the workshop of Alfred Eberling. Fitingof is one of the founders of the Leningrad school of painting, and is best known as a graphic artist, watercolor painter, postcard designer, illustrator of children’s adventure books, including works by J. Verne, M. Twain, G. Wells, and others. In 1934, because of his family, he was arrested and imprisoned. Although he was released in 1935, the artist came back to Leningrad a little later. He survived the whole siege of Leningrad and took part in an exhibition in 1942. This cover design is his early work he embarked on soon after the graduation from the Academy.
In the Soviet Union, Joyce had supporters and their opponents. Writer V. Vishnevsky had met Joyce in Paris in the 1930s and told him about Soviet publications. Joyce was pleasantly surprised. Vishnevsky also entered into polemics about Joyce and his significance with literary critic V. Kirshon. “You are behaving rudely. Try to read Joyce (of three periods: 1912, 1922, 1932-1933), give an analysis and make a public assessment of the object that you find so disturbing and irritating... You’re talking fervently about classical inheritance... Obviously, the inheritance suddenly ends (in Chekhov?) and then... there is a general forbidden zone! There is a world, humanity, classes, there is a struggle. There is art (Chaplin, Griffith, Joyce, Proust, Barbusse, Giraudoux, Remarque, Rolland, Wells, Tagore, Kipling, etc). It is complex, there are continuous collisions and changes in it”.

The only copy is located in Ohio University.

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Status: On Hold