ROMANOF, Panteleimon. Three Pairs of Silk Stockings: A Novel of the Life of the Educated Class Under the Soviet. Trans. from the Russian by Leonid Zarine. Edited and with an introduction by Stephen Graham. London: Ernest Benn. 1931. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the striking and visceral dust jacket which goes uncredited. A near fine copy. The cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and square. Mild strip of toning to front and rear endpapers, with attractive bookplate of Adrian Homer Goldstone to pastedown. Else fine. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), gently rubbed with a few tiny nicks to extremities, but a very pleasing copy.
An unusual novel of 20s Moscow, originally published under the title ‘Comrade Kislyakov’ in Russia, for one of the novel’s two arcs relates to Kislyakov, a bureaucratic, educated man who eschews tradition to join the Bolsheviks. Somewhat attuned to Western readers, the English title adopted here, ‘Three Pairs of Silk Stockings’, nods at the author’s secondary arc, of Tamara, the stage-struck nymph, ‘a butterfly broken on an elaborate wheel’ of Bolshevism, whose mysterious and grisly demise is wonderfully expressed in the dust jacket artwork. Romanof was a leading novelist at the time of publication, later suppressed by Stalin and unlike many such authors post-Stalin, his work was never rediscovered or re-examined. His initial fame came through his piercing satirical short stories of Russian life, and that can be seen here. A major theme for him was sex, and his satirisation of the sexual revolution post-1917—glibly, ’the Russian woman has lost all moral standards’, says the foreigner in Moscow, ‘give her three pairs of silk stockings and she is yours’. From the library of Arthur Goldstone, a notable book collector and bibliographer of Arthur Machen and John Steinbeck. Scarce in the dust jacket.
ROMANOF, Panteleimon. Three Pairs of Silk Stockings: A Novel of the Life of the Educated Class Under the Soviet. Trans. from the Russian by Leonid Zarine. Edited and with an introduction by Stephen Graham. London: Ernest Benn. 1931. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the striking and visceral dust jacket which goes uncredited. A near fine copy. The cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and square. Mild strip of toning to front and rear endpapers, with attractive bookplate of Adrian Homer Goldstone to pastedown. Else fine. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net), gently rubbed with a few tiny nicks to extremities, but a very pleasing copy.
An unusual novel of 20s Moscow, originally published under the title ‘Comrade Kislyakov’ in Russia, for one of the novel’s two arcs relates to Kislyakov, a bureaucratic, educated man who eschews tradition to join the Bolsheviks. Somewhat attuned to Western readers, the English title adopted here, ‘Three Pairs of Silk Stockings’, nods at the author’s secondary arc, of Tamara, the stage-struck nymph, ‘a butterfly broken on an elaborate wheel’ of Bolshevism, whose mysterious and grisly demise is wonderfully expressed in the dust jacket artwork. Romanof was a leading novelist at the time of publication, later suppressed by Stalin and unlike many such authors post-Stalin, his work was never rediscovered or re-examined. His initial fame came through his piercing satirical short stories of Russian life, and that can be seen here. A major theme for him was sex, and his satirisation of the sexual revolution post-1917—glibly, ’the Russian woman has lost all moral standards’, says the foreigner in Moscow, ‘give her three pairs of silk stockings and she is yours’. From the library of Arthur Goldstone, a notable book collector and bibliographer of Arthur Machen and John Steinbeck. Scarce in the dust jacket.
