first edition in English
TROTSKY, Leon.
My Life. The Rise and Fall of a Dictator.
London, Thornton Butterworth, Limited, 1930.
Trotsky (1879-1940) wrote the text during his exile to Kazakhstan, following his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929. The book contains a frank account of his fall from power in the years following Lenin's death in 1924, after which a 'division began to reveal itself between the leaders who expressed the historical line of the class and could see beyond the apparatus, and the apparatus itself—a huge, cumbrous, heterogeneous thing that easily sucked in the average communist' (p.428).
For sixty years, owning, smuggling, or quoting 'My Life' inside the USSR was considered a severe counter-revolutionary crime that could result in imprisonment, a sentence to a Gulag labour camp, or execution. The total ban on 'My Life' and other Trotsky's political texts was only fully lifted around 1989–1990, during the final collapse of the Soviet Union.
First edition in English; large 8vo (240 x 165 mm); portrait frontispiece, occasional light spotting, more pronounced to prelims; modern full burgundy morocco, with one-line gilt border, spine in 6 compartments, lettered and lined in gilt, all edges gilt, very good; 512pp.
Stock code 122525
DELIVERY & RETURNS
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My Life. The Rise and Fall of a Dictator.
WOTTON, William; BENTLEY, Richard.
Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning...
1697.
The second edition, much expanded of William Wotton's Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, bound with Richard Bentley's Dissertation for the first time
$1,026.00
HOBBES, Thomas.
The Art of Rhetoric,
1681.
This edition of Thomas Hobbe's Art of Rhetoric marks the first publication of his Dialogue between a Phylosopher and a Student of the Common-Laws of England
$6,834.00
CARLYLE, Thomas.
Chartism.
1840.
An excellent copy of Thomas Carlyle's essay on Chartism, with a tipped-in autograph letter and engraved protrait signed by him
$2,051.00
SARPI, Paolo; BROWN, Edward (translator).
The Letters of the Renowned Father Paul,
1693.
The first edition in English of the collected letters of Paolo Sarpi, translated out of the Italian by Edward Brown
$1,094.00
