[SIBERIAN FOLK-SONGS] - [20 Siberian Folk-Songs for Solo Voice with Piano Accompaniment] 20 narodnykh pesen Sibiri

First edition, very rare: OCLC locates the Harvard copy only.

Nikolai Protasov (1865–1903), an active member of the Eastern Siberian section of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, was the first to go about a proper collection of the folk-songs of Siberia. In 1901 he recorded, on a phonograph, almost 150 songs, writing some of them out in notation. It is twenty of these songs which are published here as indicated in the long title: "From [the songs] collected in 1900 in the province of Irkutsk and the Transbaikal region by Nikolai Protasov. Arranged by Aleksei Petrov. Published … by the Song Commission of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society".
Protasov's complete collection did not appear in his lifetime, and it has even been suggested that he burned his manuscripts in despair at not being able to see his work in print.

According to the preface, it was thanks to Rimsky-Korsakov that these songs appeared at all. He gave them to the Commission set up by the Tsar in 1897 to collect Russian folk-songs, which published them as a follow-up to another folk-song collection, by Balakirev, Lyadov and Lyapunov.

Description
Large 8vo (27.2 × 19.5 cm). 34 pp. incl. title, plus final blank leaf.
Binding
Original chromolithographed wrappers designed by V. P. Shneider.
Condition
Wrappers a bit soiled or stained, upper wrapper with small surfaces of abrasion and mounted on a stub, with slight loss toward the spine, but far from the printed area, a few marks, later cloth spine and protective endpapers in the Soviet style; fresh internally, with only some light marginal creasing. ref: [2564]