‘Until the 1950’s, Jack London was by far the most popular American author in Soviet Russia.  Over thirteen million copies of his works have been printed since the Revolution.  Even today [i.e. 1962] he continues as a popular classic, and it is probable that over the Soviet period as a whole he has been read more widely than any other non-Russian author.

The novel that never was: Meyern’s book is a Bundesroman, a popular genre of novel in late eighteenth-century German literature which featured secret societies.  As for The Ruins on the Mountain-Lake, it never existed at all, except in Meyern’s mind.

Simon Beattie recommends a copy of the first separate edition in any language of Oscar Wilde’s unfinished play, A Florentine Tragedy, translated into Russian from a copy of Wilde’s manuscript and published in Moscow by Skorpion in 1907.

1927 saw two Russian translations of The Color of a Great City (1923), Dreiser’s classic memoir of early twentieth-century New York: this one (Gosizdat’s), by Pyotr Okhrimenko, and one for “Mysl’” (Kraski N’iu-Iorka) by V. P. Steletsky.  What was particularly nice about this copy was that it still had its original dust-jacket.