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[HOMO NOVUS] Russkie dramaturgi. Ocherk teatral’nogo kritika [i.e. Russian Playwrights: Essays by a Theatre Critic]. / Edited and annotated by V.F. Botsyanovsky

Kugel A.R. (Homo Novus)

Item #2577

Moscow: Mir, 1934. 180 p., 22x14 cm. Portrait of the author on the separate leaf. Original printed wrappers. Spine is chipped and missing fragments.
Otherwise good.

First edition of one of the main works by , Aleksandr
Rafailovich Kugel'(1864-1928), one of the most
prominent theatrical critics of pre-Revolutionary
Russia, the founder of the Crooked Mirror theatre. Of
Jewish origin, he managed to move to St-Peterburg
after enrolling in the local Juridical University. He
published theatre reviews and feuilletons in the
Petersburg newspaper, the newspapers Rus, Den
and others; he used the pseudonyms Homo Novus,
N. Negorev and Kvidam. He collected some of his
published articles into books, which were published
separately: Without a Title (1890), Under the
Shadow of the Constitution (1907), and Theatrical
Portraits (1923, one of the first Soviet publications
about Nadezhda Plevitskaya).
From 1897 to 1918 he was the editor-in-chief of
the magazine “Theater and Art”. This book is a
compilation of Kugel articles from the magazine,
including the unpublished material.
Kugel was a traditionalist in his reviews, so
appearance of his selected works in mid-1930s is
a bit unusual for Soviet publishing, however he
was one of the favorite authors of A.Lunacharskiy, who has written a second preface for the volume,
in which he tells about the close relationship with
Homo Novus and about the meetings they had - this
might explain the appearance of the publication.
The authors covered in the volume are Pushkin,
Gogol, Griboedov, Ostrovskiy, Tolstoy, Leonid
Andreev, Sumbatov, Chekhov, Naidenov and others.

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