First and only edition of Koestler's first published book 'From White Nights and Red Days'. Koestler was embedded as a journalist in the 1931 Zeppelin Arctic expedition. He then travelled around Russia and what was then Soviet Central Asia.

Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen was intended for global publication by the Comintern, and several of the illustrations (after photographs) are propagandist in nature: 'Collective farmers go to their field work in an organised manner', shortly before the Soviet famine of 1932-3. Koesler would recall, however, that 'in spite of my numerous contracts... only one edition of Red Days did, in fact, appear. This was the Kharkiv edition in German, intended for the German-speaking national minorities in the Ukraine. It is a thin, paperbound volume, so thoroughly expurgated that less than half of the original manuscript was allowed to stand' (his autobiography The Invisible Writing, 1954, pp.149, 153).

Rare: WorldCat records only four copies (Edinburgh, BL, Frankfurt and Leipzig).

One of the very few absolutely verifiable copies of the rare first work by Arthur Koestler, unknown to many bibliographers and literary encyclopedias (for example, not in Kosch, Killy, the exile bibliographies and the monograph by P.A. Huber). Only three copies are recorded in public libraries (in London, Leipzig and Frankfurt), and the book has not been traced at all for the last 60 years. As a reference to literature, see for more details Chr. Buckard, Arthur Koestler. An extreme life 1905-1983. Munchen 2004. p. 404 and p. 118ff.).

Arthur Koestler (Kosztler Artur) was born in Hungary in 1905, later travelled to Austria, Palestine, Russia, France and England, where he committed suicide in London in 1983. He spoke fluent Hungarian, German, English and French and wrote mostly in German and English. In 1931 he joined the KPD and travelled to the Soviet Union on behalf of the Comintern from 1932 to 1933. The present publication emerged from this journalistic journey. The Repor dayshe wrote in the last months of his trip in Kharkov and was also printed there in 1934, edited by R. Knorre, the foreword is dated spring 1933. They are divided into two parts. Part I: The Arctic from the Zeppelin window. Part II: The heirs of Genghis Khan. The photographs show buildings and a day nursery in Bukhara, workers on a cotton plantation, 'Collective farmers go to work in the fields', a stylised map of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Russian science station on the Arctic Franz Josef Land, etc.

'When he wrote the first part of this book, the author was still editor of the Berliner Vossische Zeitung. On behalf of this and the other newspapers, he took part as a reporter in the polar expedition of the German airship Graf Zeppelin, which took place in the summer of 1931, under the leadership of Prof. Samoilowitsch and Dr. Eckener. The experiences of this expedition contributed to his breaking off his career as a civil journalist and joining the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers in Germany and, in the autumn of 1932, undertaking a second trip through the Soviet Union. The results of this second to the Afghan border, form part II of this book. Kharkov. Spring 1933.' (Foreword)

The work ends with the dictum: 'And let the dreamers bury their dreams.' 'Koestler's year-long stay in the Soviet Union marked the beginning of his long farewell to communism. Even if he was at first quite ready to explain the angry famine as a legacy of the dark tsarist times and thus as a symptom of a difficult transition period, the crushing poverty and sadness of everyday Soviet life and its oppressive, depressing 'reformatory' atmosphere were noticeably troubling him...' (Buckard p. 119)

Sole edition; 8vo; 9 plates (2 folding); publisher's wrappers lettered in green and red, dust-jacket, yapp edges slightly bumped, extremities lightly rubbed.