Slovo o Polku Igoreve (The Tale of Igor's Campaign) Images
Moscow: Academia, 1934 (2 copies)
The Rare Book Collection has two copies of Volume I of this edition. Copy one has had several of its color illustrations razored out, but copy two is intact. We are grateful to Professor Olya Samilyenko of the Modern Language Department for the translation, transcription, and explanatory notes.
Cover image: the cover is designed like a ceiling fresco seen from below.
Publisher's note and card: the larger note explains that this volume contains the Old Russian text of "Slovo o Polku Igoreve (Host of Igor’s Lay), one of the greatest literary masterpieces not only of Russia, but the world." The note further explains that the illustrator, I. I. Golikov, works "in the old artistic manner of the Palekh School." According to Olya Samilyenko, Palekh School works are painted in an ornate style "that usually utilized bright primary colors (especially red) against a shiny black background' to decorate "lacquer boxes with fairy tale motifs, which are popular to this day." The note continues to promise a second volume containing Modern Russian parallel text translations in prose and verse. The Goucher Rare Book Collection has two copies of Volume I and none of Volume II. The business card directs to the printers all comments about errors.
The Host of Igor's Lay
Igor, Son of Sviatoslav and Grandson of
The old Russian text was prepared for publication by V. Rzhygoj i S. Shambinogo and
written and illustrated by the Palekh master Ivan Golikov.
Academia
1934
Copy 2 owners' signatures (dated May 27, 1946): "To Nika Tolley / from / Vlada Tolley / 27.V.46" [Note: Vlada Gritzenko Tolley, Associate Professor Emerita of Russian, taught in Goucher's Russian program from 1962 to 1984. She married her husband, then Commander Oscar Kemp Tolley, in Moscow in 1944 while he was naval attaché at the U.S. Embassy at the height of World War II. He retired as a Rear Admiral and became a widely respected author on matters of naval intelligence and U.S. Navy activities in China and elsewhere in Asia. Vlada Tolley followed him to America when he was transferred to the U.S. North Carolina in the Pacific and, after his death in 2000, donated the bulk of his papers to the Nimitz Library at the Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland. See this web-based finding aid for further details: http://www.usna.edu/Library/sca/findingaids/tolley/index.html.]