VRANGEL', Nikolai Egorovich, Baron.

Vospominaniia (ot krepostnogo prava do bol'shevikov) [Reminiscences (from serfdom to the Bolsheviks)].

[Berlin,] “Slovo”, 1924. Small 4to, pp. [viii], 256, [1], [2] advertisements, [1] imprint; lightly browned, more so to edges; still a good copy in contemporary quarter red calf, spine lettered gilt, spine scuffed at foot, the front original printed wrapper mounted and bound in. First edition. Wrangel (1847–1920) was from a noble Baltic family, dating back, as he writes in the first sentence of this book, to the 11th century. This is a volume of very personal reminiscence from his birth to his flight from St Petersburg to Finland in 1917. He includes much verbatim conversation and the text is alive with the impressions he receives. Arriving at a pension in Geneva where he will attend college he meets other students including red-faced Englishmen who shake his hand with painful vigour. He gets drunk at a christening party for one of them and abjures drunkenness, a pledge Wrangel tells us he has faithfully kept. He has an eye for social detail; for a foreigner his most interesting reminiscences are perhaps accounts of communication between the classes in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Of the Russians he met in Geneva he writes (p. 56) as follows, after describing the uninteresting ones of, as it were, the old school: ‘More curious were those who tried with all their might not to seem Russian and to make of themselves enlightened forward-thinking foreigners. As far as what they said went they were “terribly” liberal, significantly more liberal than the European liberals themselves, but in essence they remained what they had been before the new fashion. By disposition and nature of an earlier generation they only played with new fashionable ideas, some as it were unconsciously and with good conscience pulling the wool over their own and other people’s eyes, the others from calculation, to please whoever they needed to please, and to earn their daily bread.’ He does not bother to moderate his opinion of people. ‘It is still unintelligible to me how a man with Krivosheins’s reputation could get to be a minister. Even in the old days it may be that some people of not exactly unimpeachable honesty got such posts, but until 1900 we did not see them filled by those everyone knew to be crooks’ (p. 142). His account of living under the Bolshevik administration is strong because it is personal; a decision was made by a twenty-year old Commissar, a carpenter, that unless provisions were sent to the workers of the gold-mining company of which Wrangel was a director, he would be shot. Wrangel replied that he could not pay until sales were made of the gold the company mined, and that in winter it was impossible to mine. ‘How did you do it in the past?’ ‘By borrowing from a bank.’ ‘Do so now.’ ‘We cannot; they have all been nationalized.’ ‘That it not my business,’ said the Commissar. As there was no possibility of raising funds the directors of the company, including Wrangel, decided to leave Russia.A French translation of this book, Du servage au bolchévisme, was published in 1926 in Paris, and an English version by Brian and Beatrix Lunn, From Serfdom to Bolshevism, by Lippincott in Philadelphia, in 1927.

• GBP 200.00 > otras divisas
• nº de pedido: H250.6

• librero: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)