Russia’s first parliament

Posted on 11 June 2013 by simonbeattie

The First State Duma, Russia’s first ever elected parliament, was the direct result of the 1905 Revolution, and sat between April and July 1906 at St Petersburg’s Tauride Palace (built by Catherine the Great for Potemkin in the 1780s).  It was always going to be difficult, even though the Bolsheviks and others had boycotted the elections, and after only ten weeks of debate among the 478 deputies tensions between the Duma and the Tsar, who had been reluctant to share power from the start, became too much and the army was sent in to dissolve the parliament.  Any frustrations, however, evidently did not prevent publishers such as Karl Fisher, a photographer who specialised in souvenir albums marking particular events, from cashing in.  This portfolio, published in 1906, contains 60 photogravure plates with portraits of all the Duma members.  (A facsimile was produced in 2006 to mark the Duma’s 100th anniversary.)

Another popular publication to appear at the time was Lev Velikhov’s great Comparative Table of Russian Political Parties (815 × 1094 mm), which sought to explain to the interested reader over 20 of the political parties then active in Russia, from the ultranationalist Black Hundreds, through Slavophiles, Tsarists, socialist revolutionaries, and Tolstoyans, to anarchists.  Among the information given are the parties’ essence, their history, tactics, printed publications if any, their attitude towards the new State Duma, and their views on peasants, workers, economics, religion, war etc.

It is clear that demand for information on the various parties was high.  Velikhov’s table went through at least three editions, with thousands of copies printed, but due to its ephemeral nature few examples survive, certainly in Western libraries.

 

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Iconic

Posted on 5 June 2013 by simonbeattie

Published in Nuremberg in 1724, this is the first edition of apparently the first monograph on a Russian work of art, namely the icon of the 4th-century warrior saint Theodore Stratelates in the Rieterkirche St Marien und Christophorus in Kalbensteinberg, Bavaria, a church on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela.  So rich were the collections in the church that it was known as the ‘Franconian treasure-chest’.

The author is the Baroque polymath Johann Alexander Döderlein (1675–1745), Rector of the Lateinschule in Weißenburg.  The same year he also wrote a 12-page account of the icon in Latin, Inscriptiones slavo-russicae tabulae, published at Tyrnau (present-day Trnava, Slovakia), but that was unillustrated.

According to one source, the large folding frontispiece is the first depiction of a Russian icon in Western art.  Interestingly, the note to the binder on the final leaf gives three options with regard to the frontispiece: fold it and bind before the title (as here); cut up the engraving, and bind the individual pictures at the relevant places in the book; or loosely insert the plate, so that the reader can look at it whilst reading the book.

 

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Handel goes big

Posted on 29 May 2013 by simonbeattie

This wonderful engraving comes from Charles Burney’s great Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3d, and 5th, 1784.  In Commemoration of Handel (1785).  The Handel Commemoration Concerts of 1784, marking the centenary of the composer’s birth, have been described as ‘in some ways the most important single event in the history of English music’ (Mackerness, A Social History of English Music, p. 127).  Certainly the scale of the concerts was unknown at the time, and prepared the way for the large-scale performances of Handel, begun in the nineteenth century, which we all know today.

Burney’s account of the events, which had raised £6000 for the Royal Society of Musicians and £1000 for Westminster Hospital, was published under the supervision of George III himself; it was his suggestions for additional material which led to the large numbers of cancels and, thus, the book’s chaotic pagination.  (It runs pp. vii, [1], xvi, 8, *8, 9–20, *19–*24, 21–56, 21, [6], 26–41, [6], 46–90, [5], 94–139, [3], plus the plates.)

 

 

 

 

 

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Blood and laughter

Posted on 21 May 2013 by simonbeattie

Ovod (The Gadfly): 6 issues were published, between January and the first half of March 1906; the editor was sentenced to 6 months in prison, and the publication was banned

The boom years of 1890s Russia came to an abrupt halt at the turn of the century when an economic slump left many of the new urban working class jobless and led to unrest in the countryside.  The Tsar’s popularity took another knock when hopes of a quick military victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904) were quashed by a series of disasters and humiliations on land and at sea.  Strikes at home ensued.

On 9 January 1905, 150,000 striking Petersburgers and their families converged outside the Winter Palace to hand a petition to the Tsar, demanding basic civil rights and labour laws.  But the peaceful demonstration, led by Father Gapon, was broken up by live rounds from the Imperial Guards; as many as 1000 people were killed, and several thousand others injured.  The 1905 Revolution—in Lenin’s words, ‘the dress rehearsal for the October Revolution’—had begun.

Nagaechka (The Little Whip): 5 issues were published, the first two nos. November–December 1905, the others in January 1906; no. 4 was seized at the newspaper-sellers, no. 5 was confiscated and destroyed at the press; the editor was arrested and the press shut down

‘Bloody Sunday [as 9 January came to be known] killed superstition, the old faith in a just Tsar, and unleashed a tumultuous rage among the masses …  A huge wave of strikes swept the country, paralysing more than 100 towns and drawing in a million men and women.  Throughout the summer peasants rioted while terrorists struck at figures of authority.

‘Alongside the struggle in the street and factory was the struggle for the free press.  Ministers and clerics suffered assassination more by the pen than the bullet as the revolution strove for the expression of powerful emotions long suppressed.  A flood of satirical journals poured from the presses, honouring the dead and vilifying the mighty.  Drawings of frenzied immediacy and extraordinary technical virtuosity were combined with prose and verse written in a popular underground language …

 

Strely (Arrows): 9 issues were published, nos. 1–7 30 October to 22 December 1905, nos. 8–9 1–7 April 1906; nos. 2 and 5 were confiscated, no. 9 was destroyed by the authorities

‘For a few brief months the journals spoke with the great and unprecedented rage that neither arrest not exile could silence.  At first their approach was oblique, their allusions veiled, and they fell victim to the censor’s pencil.  But people had suffered censorship for too long.  Satirists constantly expanded their targets of attack, demolishing one obstacle after another as they went, thriving on censorship.  The workers’ movement grew in boldness, culminating in the birth of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, the people’s government.  For fifty days the Tsar and his ministers were confronted by another power, another law.  Journalists and printers seized the right to publish without submitting to the censor.  The satirical journals then reached their apotheosis, until the revolution died as it had risen, bathed in blood.  More clearly than any party resolution or government proclamation, the caricatures of 1905 tell the story of that heroic failure …’ (Cathy Porter, Introduction to Blood and Laughter: Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution, London, Jonathan Cape, 1983, pp. 18–9).

Sekira (The Pole-Axe): 14 issues were published, 17 December 1905 to 6 January 1906

 

Plamia (The Flame): 4 issues were published, the first three 1–23 December 1905, no. 4 on 4 January 1906

 

Fonar' (The Lantern): 5 issues were published, 1–3 between 8 and 29 December 1905, and then 1–2 in January 1906

 

Puli (Bullets): 9 issues were published, nos. 1–2 in December 1905, and then nos. 1–7 in 1906; nos. 1 and 2 from 1906 were confiscated

 

Vampir (The Vampire): 8 issues were published, between January and April 1906

 

Zabiiaka (The Trouble-maker): 4 issues were published, No. 1 on 30 December 1905, then 1–3 in January 1906; no. 1 from 1906 was confiscated, the editor sentenced to two months imprisonment, and the publication shut down

 

Gvozd' (The Nail): 3 issues were published, between 8 January and 9 February 1906; nos. 1 (the content of which is repeated in nos. 2 and 3) and 3 were confiscated and destroyed at the press

 

Pulemet (The Machine-gun): 5 issues, plus one "nomer-ekspress", were published, November 1905 to early January 1906; publication continued in 1917. ‘The most striking journal of the 1905 Revolution. No. 1 was quickly confiscated and is rare … The editor was arrested twice’ (Smirnov-Sokolsky)

 

Zanoza (The Splinter): 14 issues were published, between January and December 1906; nos. 6 and 11 were confiscated at the press

 

Zarnitsy (Summer lightning): 8 issues, numbered 1–6, 8–9, were actually published (no. 7 was seized at the press and never appeared), between January and March 1906; no. 6 was confiscated

 

Ezh (The Hedgehog): 8 issues were published, the first in 1906, the rest in 1907

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Frederick the Great writ small

Posted on 14 May 2013 by simonbeattie

A nineteenth-century drawing of Frederick the Great.  But look closer: every line of the picture is actually made up of words.

 

 

Here’s one with a ruler, to give you an idea of the scale:

This is an example of what’s called micrography, ‘the art of writing in microscopic characters’.

My next challenge was to try and work out what the text was.  After poring over the picture for a while I began to be able to make out some words and finally deciphered it as being the entry for Frederick the Great from Brockhaus’s famous Conversations-Lexikon.  Checking against the various published editions reveals it to be the entry used by Brockhaus between 1824 and 1834 (i.e. for the sixth, seventh, and eighth editions of the Allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyclopädie für gebildete Stände. (Conversations-Lexikon.)), after which the entry was rewritten.

 

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The Ring comes to London

Posted on 7 May 2013 by simonbeattie

The original playbill for the performances.

This week, in 1882, saw the first London cycle of Wagner’s Ring, the complete work’s first performance outside the German-speaking world.

The illustrated promotional flyer for the cycle, written in English but printed in Germany.

The Austrian impresario Angelo Neumann secured the performing rights for the Ring (and the Bayreuth stage equipment) from Wagner himself, intending to give 36 cycles in nine months.  He planned to open his campaign in London, and visited in October 1881 to inspect the stage at Her Majesty’s Theatre, and again in April 1882 with his entire technical staff, just a month before the first performance was to take place.  Although the Theatre was in theory ready, it reneged on its contract and it fell to Neumann to arrange everything, from the orchestra and chorus to the advertising (presumably why the flyer here was printed in Leipzig), even the carpets in the foyer.  Wagner’s health prevented his attending either rehearsals or performance, but Neumann was nevertheless ‘very successful with his first production of the Ring in London.  Thanks to an introduction from the German Crown Prince he managed to get the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward VII) to attend no fewer than eleven of the performances.  [He was particularly taken with the swimming Rhine Maidens.]  Neumann’s company was an excellent one, including as it did Hedwig Reicher-Kindermann, Scaria, Schelper, the two Vogls, and Reichmann, with Seidl as conductor’ (Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, IV, 673), ‘according to Richard Wagner’s own opinion, the best interpreter of his works’ (p. [2] of the flyer here).

 

 

 

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The wrongs of women, a novel

Posted on 30 April 2013 by simonbeattie

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a very rare German novel on the rights of women.  This is another rare German novel, published only the year before, in 1800, a translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s important proto-feminist novel, The Wrongs of Woman.  This German version is translated via a French edition, Maria, ou Le malheur d’être femme (Paris, 1798), and dedicated to the Leipzig bookseller Ernst Bornschein.

‘Her most radical work’ (Sapiro, p. 266), The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; a fragment, Wollstonecraft’s gothic novelistic sequel to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was published by William Godwin as part of his wife’s Posthumous Works in 1798.  The translator here is unknown, even though the title points to the recently-published Das schwarzbraune Mädchen vom Schreckhorn (Leipzig, 1799).  Better marketing, perhaps, is seen in offering Wollstonecraft’s novel as a counterpart to Wilhelmine Karoline von Wobeser’s Elisa, oder das Weib wie es seyn sollte (1795), one of the most widely-read novels of the late eighteenth century in Germany (and which had incidentally been published in English translation, Elisa or the Pattern of Women, in 1799).

The engraved frontispiece, by Schröter, is reminiscent of John Opie’s portrait of Wollstonecraft, now at the Tate.

See Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: the political theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992), passim.

 

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‘Probably the strangest private press of all time’

Posted on 23 April 2013 by simonbeattie

As today is Shakespeare’s birthday(/deathday), I thought I’d post a rare piece of Shakespeareana:

This little book, printed in Darmstadt in 1912 in an edition of only 200 copies, is the sixth book to be produced by ‘probably the strangest private press of all time’ (Horodisch).

It was run by Gottlieb von Koch (1849–1914), a zoologist and artist who had an interest in education.  The dozen or so books produced by the press, which ran from 1911 to 1914, were all printed by children, under the guidance of the printer–typographer Christian Heinrich Kleukens, who gave them weekly instruction.  For Pyramus und Thisbe, a reworking of Shakespeare’s play within a play by Koch himself, a sans serif (grotesk) typeface is used, which was highly unusual for the time in German education.

On the background, see A. Horodisch, ‘Eine unbekannte deutsche Presse’, Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde XXXVI (1932), pp. 103–5.

 

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The rights of women, a novel

Posted on 18 April 2013 by simonbeattie

This is the first edition of a utopian novel by the American friend of Wieland, Schiller and Goethe, James Lawrence (1773–1840).  Born on Jamaica (his family had lived on the island since 1676), Lawrence was educated at Eton and Göttingen.  ‘In 1793 his essay on the heterodox customs of the Nairs of Malabar with respect to marriage and inheritance was inserted by Wieland in his Der Teutsche Merkur and in 1800 Lawrence, who seems in the interim to have lived entirely on the continent, at Schiller’s behest completed a romance on the subject, also in German, which was published in the Journal der Romane for the following year, under the title of “Das Paradies der Liebe”, and reprinted as Das Reich der Nairen.  The book was subsequently translated into French and English by the author himself, and published in both languages [though in the event it banned in France]; the English version, entitled The Empire of the Nairs [or the Rights of Women.  An utopian romance] was published in four volumes in 1811 by Thomas Hookham …  The novel’s attack on the institution of marriage and its advocacy of matrilineal inheritance was influenced by William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the French philosophes …  On 17 August 1812 Percy Shelley wrote to Lawrence “Your ‘Empire of the Nairs’, which I read this Spring, succeeded in making me a perfect convert to its doctrines”, and he met with Lawrence in London the following year.  The novel exerted an important influence on Shelley’s poem Queen Mab (1813) and other works’ (Oxford DNB).

 

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Used in the trenches

Posted on 4 April 2013 by simonbeattie

Earlier in the year, I wrote about a couple of books relating to the First World War.  Here’s another with a WWI connection: a miniature Qur’an produced by the Glasgow publishers David Bryce & Sons between about 1900 and 1910.  (The coin, in case you’re wondering, is a nickel.)

In general, I’m not that taken with miniature books.  Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors sums them up as ‘books whose principal (usually only) interest lies in their very small size’.  But this Qur’an is different.  Louis Bondy calls it an ‘almost legendary title published by Bryce …  The bindings vary from richly gilt-stamped red or black morocco with gilt edges to plain stiff wrappers and yellow edges …  Lately it has become increasingly difficult to find copies of this book’ (Miniature Books, pp. 111–2).

The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz takes up the story.  ‘The production of miniature Korans in manuscript has a long tradition, but the printing of them in this form had to await the arrival of photolithographic techniques in the late 19th century.  Such Korans were published in Delhi in 1892 and Istanbul c. 1899, but the one which seems to have achieved the widest circulation is this Scottish edition.  It was one of a long series of miniature books produced by David Bryce and Sons.  All the copies were issued with metal lockets and magnifying glasses.  Many were supplied to Indian and other Muslim soldiers fighting for the British in the First World War, and served also as talismans’ (Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution, exhibition catalogue, 2002, no. 79).

It was in this last context that the book was mentioned by T. E. Lawrence: ‘[Auda] told me later, in strict confidence, that thirteen years before he had bought an amulet Koran for one hundred and twenty pounds and had not since been wounded …  The book was a Glasgow reproduction, costing eighteen pence; but Auda’s deadliness did not let people laugh at his superstition’ (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book 4, Ch. 53).

Given the condition of this copy, I don’t think it was ever actually taken into battle, but it is still a wonderful little book.

 

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