Lot 156A email save

PNIN, Ivan Petrovich (1773-1805). Opyt o prosvesc

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St. Petersburg: Ivan Glazunov, 1804. 147 pp., small 8vo (163 x 105 mm). Near contemporary three quarter green calf over marbled boards, spine tooled in compartments, original wrappers bound in. Condition: joints tender, boards rubbed. banned appeal to alexander i for the abolision of serfdom. The liberal Pnin also dared suggest that the freed serfs be given their fair share of property. It is no surprise than that copies of this suppressed edition were confiscated and destroyed. Consequently few have survived. Pnin was the illigitimate son of Prince Repnin, a poet, a magazine editor and member of the radical Free Society of Lovers of Literature, the Sciences and the Arts founded in St. Petersburg in 1801. He was later embraced by the Constitutional Democrats of the early twentieth century and then by the Soviets who published his collected works in 1934. Vladimir Nabokov took the surname for his famous novel Pnin (1957) from the writer.

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