KOZLOV, Ivan Ivanovich.

£2,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Chernets, kievskaia povest (The Monk, a tale of Kiev). First edition of Kozlov's Byronic poem, the work that established his literary reputation, and which spread Byronic ideals among the Russian literary scene. Kozlov (1779-1840) lost his sight in 1821 and had to forgo his successful military and civil service career. He instead took to writing, learning English and German to add to his Russian and French, and began his career as a poet and translator. Through translating Scott, Moore and Byron he was introduced to romantic literature, and fell under the sway of Byron especially. The Monk "is a Byronic confessional poem, a tale of love, death, and revenge shrouded in an atmosphere of mystery" (Terras, p. 234). Initially circulated in manuscript across Russia, its publication in 1825 spawned numerous imitators. Kozlov was soon compared to Pushkin, and indeed some felt he surpassed him: Pyotr Vyazemsky wrote to Alexander Turgenev in 1825 that "there is in Chernets more feeling, more thought than in Pushkin's poems". The first edition is rare - WorldCat shows only five copies, in Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia and the Library of Congress. Only one copy is known to have appeared at auction, in 2009, which is possibly this one.

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