Foreign Literature
Contact Donovan Rees
This department specialises in rare and important works of French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and South American literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Here you can find first editions and signed or presentation copies of authors as diverse as Akhmatova, Balzac, Borges, Camus, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Goldoni, Hugo, Kafka, Leopardi, Lorca, Manzoni, Pirandello, Pushkin, Schiller, Tolstoy, Zola, and many others. Among the important works which have passed through our hands are the original working manuscript of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, now in the Pushkin House in St Petersburg, the only known copy of the first edition of Brecht's first play, Baal (1920) with his working notes, and an extraordinary collection of Pushkin first editions.
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MESHCHERSKII, Elim Petrovich.
Les boréales par B. de G. et le prince Elim Mestscherski …
Paris, Bellizard, Dufour et Cie, 1839.
First edition of a rare French anthology of Russian poets, including early translations of six poems by Pushkin.
£800
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MESHCHERSKY, Elim Petrovich, Prince.
Les roses noires …
Paris, Amyot, 1845.
Scarce first edition of this anthology of French verse by Meshchersky, posthumously brought to press by his mother and friends, publishing – for the first time – Victor Hugo’s letter of condolence to the prince's mother.
£400
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MILHAUD, Darius, and Stéphane MALLARMÉ.
Deux petits airs …
[Paris, Éditions de la nouvelle revue française, 1921.]
First edition of Milhaud’s polytonal musical setting of two poems by Mallarmé, published as a New Year supplement for La revue musicale.
£750
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MURDOCH, Iris.
Sartre. Romantic Rationalist.
Cambridge, Bowes & Bowes, 1953.
First edition, the first published book of Iris Murdoch, in her capacity as a fellow and tutor in philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
£200
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MUSSET, Alfred de, and Nikolai Porfir’evich GREKOV, translator.
Rolla, poema … perevod N.P. Grekova [Rolla,...
Moscow, F.B. Miller, 1864.
First edition in Russian of Musset’s Rolla (1833), a poetic reinterpretation of the Don Juan myth, translated by the poet Nikolai Porfir’evich Grekov (1810–1866).
£1750
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NERVAL, Gérard de.
Lorely, souvenirs d’Allemagne. Paris, [Gustave Gratiot for] D.
Giraud et J. Dagneau, 1852.
First edition, second issue, of a collection of Nerval’s writings on Germany.
£800
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PASSI, Carlo.
La selva di varia istoria … la quale avanti andava attorno stampata sotto nome finto di Annotationi dell’Infortunio,...
Venice, Altobello Salicato, 1572.
An unsophisticated copy of Passi and Ruscelli’s elaborations and explanations of Paolo Giovio’s history of his own time, bound in contemporary limp vellum reusing manuscript waste.
£500
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PUSHKIN, Aleksandr Sergeevich. DUPONT, H. (translator).
Oeuvres choisies... traduites pour la première fois en français... Tome...
St Petersburg, chez Fd. Bellizard et Cie; Paris, Au comptoir des Imprimeurs-unis, 1847.
First collected edition of Pushkin in French, preceded in French translation only by some individual poems and stories, and a translation of The Queen of Spades in 1843. This is one of the earliest major collections of Pushkin to appear outside Russia.
£2500
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ROBBE-GRILLET, Alain.
Un Régicide.
[Paris], Les Éditions de Minuit, [1978].
First edition, one of 87 copies on Alfa mousse (first paper).
£300
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ROBBE-GRILLET, Alain.
Souvenirs du Triangle d’Or.
[Paris], Les Éditions de Minuit, [1978].
First edition, one of 87 copies on Alfa mousse (first paper).
£350
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ROBBE-GRILLET, Alain.
Topologie d’une cité fantôme.
Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1976.
First edition: a kind of intellectual detective story in which the reader becomes a collaborator in the solution of a crime as much his own creation as it is the author’s.
£250
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[SAURIN, Bernard-Joseph, attributed.]
Le nouvel an, pöeme heroī-fou.
‘A Brochuro-manie, l’an du deluge des Almanachs’, [i.e. Paris?], 1751.
An extremely rare satirical tale of two lovers in nine chants, fictitiously printed in ‘Brochuromania’ during the ‘year of the deluge of almanacks’, satirising the craze for literary almanacks in eighteenth-century France.
£950
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SCARRON, Paul.
Le Marquis ridicule, ou la comtesse faite à la haste. Comedie … Suivant la copie imprimée a Paris.
[Leiden, Elzevier], 1656.
First Elzevier editions, very rare, of these two plays by Scarron, pirated after the text of the first editions printed in Paris. A finely bound volume with excellent Elzevierian provenance.
£800
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UGARTE, Manuel, and Georges FOUCART, translator.
‘Contes de la Pampa’: a manuscript translation of Ugarte’s...
Paris, [c. 1923–5].
A fine, largely unpublished manuscript, with translations of all fourteen stories from Miguel Ugarte’s Cuentos de la Pampa (1903, here translated from the 1920 edition).
£1750
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YRVEN, Marcelle.
La comédienne et le féminisme.
Paris, L. Pichon, 1914.
First edition of this feminist work on the necessity of a thorough literary and cultural education for women in theatre, by the celebrated actress Marcelle Yrven, presented to the editor-in-chief of Le Figaro’s literary supplement.
£250
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ZOLA, Émile.
La Curée.
Paris, A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1871.
First edition of the second novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, La Curée. The first six volumes of the series were printed on ordinary paper only (no grand papier issue) and are all very rare.
£2500