[Rarebooks] fa: RUSSIAN/SOVIET AFRICANA - N. A. Rubakin: ADVENTURES IN THE LAND OF SLAVERY - 1918

[ArCh]

Auction ends Sunday, November 19. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/mrsk4pr2

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

N. A. [Nicolai Aleksandrovich] Rubakin: Priklyucheniya b Strane Rabstva. Rasskaz'i o Zharkoy Strane. S Risunkami. [Adventures in the Land of Slavery. Stories of a Hot Country. Illustrated with Drawings.] Moscow: [All-Russian Central Executive Committee], 1918. Tall 8vo (24 cm) in original illustrated wraps; 109 + [3] pp.; illustrated.

Rare early Soviet work on colonialism in Africa by an important, if tangential, figure in Russian revolutionary circles. Nicolai, or Nicholas, Rubakin (1862-1946) was a bibliographer, librarian, educator, essayist, writer of popular works on scientific subjects, developer of the theory of "bibliopsychology," and an associate or intimate of Leo Tolstoy, Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaia (Lenin's future wife), Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and many other intellectuals of the left. An early member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Rubakin was constantly watched, and occasionally arrested, by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, and in 1907 he emigrated with his family to Switzerland, where he established a library of over 115,000 volumes of Russian works. For the next forty years, his library in Lausanne was a major center for revolutionary intellectuals and a waystation for the Russian diaspora, as well as the major source in western Europe for information about Russia. His magnum opus, Sredi knig, was the first annotated recommendatory bibliography in Russian.

Wraps with some wear to the edges and spine, chip to the upper corner of the front cover, closed tear to the upper edge of the rear cover; ink stamp of the Warsaw University Library (deaccessioned) on the verso of the title-page, no other library markings; mild toning to the contents, else clean and sound, securely bound. The text is largely unopened (meaning the leaves are still joined at the top edge as issued), hence unread.