Rodnye Otgoloski [Echoes from the Homeland].

finely bound collection of Pushkin and friends

Beautifully fresh example of a fine production for Russian readers, gathering classic Russian poems together with illustrations – a lovely, charming piece of book design. A fantastic, spotless example of this anthology of some of the most popular 19th century Russian poetry for the youth, luxuriously designed and produced in Paris.

The historian of literature, writer and educator Petr Nikolaevich Polevoi (1839-1902) invited the artist Ivan Stepanovich Panov (1844-83) to illustrate this collection of some of the greatest Russian poets' works for youth. This laborious project involving numerous wood engraved figurative illustrations, plant and allegorical headpieces, tailpieces and initials, proved to be Panov's 'best artwork' (Novitskii). Polevoi saluted Panov's art in the preface: 'Studying each poem with great love, as a separate whole, in all its details, the artist began his work, and step by step becoming more and more fascinated, pushing wider the narrow framework of the original plan, he created the whole host of drawings in the course of the last year'.

The famous Belgian-French engraver François Pannemaker notably acknowledged the merit of Panov's drawings and offered Polevoi to engrave them himself: 'the first drawings made for my new collection impressed not only me, but also the kind Pannemaker, this patriarch of Parisian engravers, so much that he paid special attention to them […] At the same time, Pannemaker advised me to print my collection in Paris, fearing that the most important aspect of it — artistic — could lose a lot from careless printing' (Polevoi). The edition was thus authorised and collated in St Petersburg by the publisher Anton Kotomin, but printed in Paris at the Motteroz printing house on paper specially commissioned from the Imprimerie du Marais; the binding was designed and executed (in various colours) by two other Parisian workshops — all those involved in this production are listed at the end of the book.

The collection includes poems by some of the greatest Russian poets, such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Vasily Zhukovsky, Fedor Tiutchev, Afanasiy Fet, Nikolai Nekrasov and, oddly, an abridged translation by Mikhail Mikhailov of Robert Burns' poem 'To a Mountain Daisy'. This is the first edition; the anthology was published again with some changes in 1880 by Mavrikii Volf, and in 1881 Polevoi issued another collection, Familiar Echoes. Malorussian [Little Russian] Life and Nature, reflecting the everyday life, past and present of Ukraine.

4to, half-title, title in red and black, introduction leaf, t.o.c., 118 pp., [1] leaf, with wood engravings by Pannemaker after Panov; publisher's green cloth by A. Souze, Engel & Fils, Paris, after Panov's drawing, upper cover with green, black and gold decoration and lettering, lower cover with blind and black decoration, flat, plain spine, brown endpapers, all edges gilt, a fine copy.