Mikhail Yurevich LERMONTOV (1814-1841) The Devil A rare copy - Lot 185

Mikhail Yurevich LERMONTOV (1814-1841) The Devil A rare copy of the corrected and expanded 3rd edition of 1858, published by Ferdinand Schneider in Berlin. Format in-12°, 74 pages. Half leather binding (slight restoration). Ex-libris N.G. Keisserman on the first endpaper, handwritten ex-libris of a certain Turine at the end. Handwritten notes on the endpapers, on the title page appears an old diluted signature. Some foxing, stains on pages. History M.I. Lermontov's Demon was censored during his lifetime, and was only published in Russia in 1860, before that only abroad. In her book Destin posthume d'un poète: de Lermontov (1967), T.A. Ivanova talks about these foreign editions. Very few copies of the second edition are to be found today, and the third Berlin edition was totally unknown until recently: mentioned once in the press in 1935 in a bibliographical précis of Russian underground publications abroad, with reference only to a catalog of Russian books printed outside Russia, and to a Stur bookshop in Berlin. This edition is not recorded in any of the foreign catalogs published between 1860 and 1960, whether in Germany, England, France or America.