FLETCHER, Giles.

Fletcher o gosudarstve russkom ili obraz pravleniia russkago tsaria (obyknovenno nazyvaemago tsarem moskovskim) s opisaniem nravov i obychaev zhitelei etoi strany. Sochinenie Fletchera.

[Basel?], 1867. 8vo (225 x 155 mm), pp. xi (short-title, editorial introduction), [i, blank], [iv],116 (translation of the English original, including its title-page and preliminaries); an excellent copy in recent black morocco-backed marbled boards, with the original blue paper wrappers bound in (the full title of the work, as above, is printed on the front wrappper, and ‘Prix: 6 francs’ on the back). First extant edition of the first translation into Russian of Fletcher’s Of the Russe commonwealth. This vivid and perceptive account, first published in 1591, remains one of the cardinal sources of information for Russia in the late sixteenth century. The original printing of this translation was confiscated by the Czarist authorities and the present edition was published abroad, probably by Russian emigrés in Basel (see Pipes p. 66).Fletcher had visited Russia as an ambassador to negotiate a trading agreement between England and Russia and drafted his Of the Russe commonwealth during his journey home. Soon after publication the book was suppressed by the English government at the behest of the Muscovy Company, fearful that Fletcher’s critical account of the Russian political system would jeopardise its position in Russia. Although some copies escaped this censorship, the book remained virtually unknown in Russia until ‘early in the nineteenth century when it was discovered by Russian historians. Karamzin located a copy of the 1591 edition in the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and referred to it frequently in . . . his History [of the Russian state] published in the 1820s. In his opinion, Fletcher gave on the whole a just estimate of sixteenth-century Russia. Karamzin’s severe condemnation of Ivan IV, which earned him the disapproval of Russian reactionaries, was in no small measure due to Fletcher’s evidence . . . . But much as it was used by specialists, the book itself remained inaccessible to the general public. An attempt to remedy this situation was made in 1845 by a group of archivists working in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Archive of this ministry was in the first half of the nineteenth century an active center of intellectual and scholarly life, in part thanks to its unique collection of books and documents on Russian relations with the West. With the encouragement of the enlightened director of the Archive, Prince M. A. Obolenskii, the archivists undertook to translate into Russian some of the most important foreign accounts of Muscovite Russia, beginning with . . . Fletcher’s. In so doing they took advantage of a regulation which exempted from censorship materials bearing on the period antedating the Romanov dynasty, that is, prior to 1613. Fletcher’s book was translated by one D. I. Gippius, and edited by the legal historian N. V. Kalachov. The text was ready in 1847, at which time Obolenskii made arrangements with the Imperial Moscow Society of Russian History and Antiquities to have the translation . . . come out in its quarterly Proceedings . . . issued in September 1848. One can hardly conceive of a less opportune time for the publication of a book as critical of Russia as Fletcher’s. Nicholas I, always a conservative, had been thrown into panic by the revolutionary wave which had swept Europe in the spring of 1848, and had adopted a policy of extreme reaction . . . . One of the unwritten axioms of this . . . was the sanctity of Russia’s past . . . . The publication of the Proceedings was suspended, the chairman of the society was reprimanded by Nicholas personally and . . . . the nearly one thousand copies of the Proceedings which had been distributed to subscribers were recalled . . . [and] placed under seal in storage. Efforts to lift the ban on Fletcher in the more enlightened reign of Nicholas’s successor, Alexander II, were unavailing. But somehow the impounded copies disappeared, and when early in the [twentieth] century a search was made for them . . . not a single one could be found . . . . The first legal Russian edition appeared in the Revolution of 1905’ (Richard Pipes, ed., Of the Russe commonwealth by Giles Fletcher, 1591. Facsimile edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, pp. 38–41).COPAC locates four copies (BL, Nottingham, Oxford/Taylor Institution, UCL). OCLC locates eight copies (Columbia, Illinois, Indiana, Stanford, Villanova in America; London Library, Oxford, School of Slavonic Studies in Britain).

• GBP 2,750.00 > autres monnaies
• Commande nro.: T2741

• libraire: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)