Search Results: Authors starting with G from PY Rare Books

The most important early work focusing on the Caucasus, noted for the quality of both the text and the illustrations.
A fine example in boards, complete with the text volumes and the large, impressive view of Tbilisi.
Frenchman Jacques François Gamba (1763-1833) made two voyages to Russia, that of 1817 at the orders of the Duc de Richelieu, former governor of Odessa, and he became consul at Tiflis in 1823. Taking advantage of the easing of Russian embargoes in the Transcaucasian regions, he developed new trade relationships for the French government. He was favoured by the Russian High Commissioner of the Caucasus, Aleksei Petrovich Yermolov; Tsar Alexander I allotted him over 60 square miles of lands and forests in the Imereti region and supported his research and entrepreneurship. The Frenchman genuinely fell in love with his new land and paid tribute to the beauty of the Kutaisi district (see Vol. I, 240).
Gamba's predecessors explored the edges of the Caucasus, approaching it from the sea,… Read More

A lovely association copy, inscribed by the author, of a very rare travel account in the heart of Russian Central Asia.
We are not aware of another copy, whether on the market or in libraries (not in WorldCat).
Educated in St Petersburg, the young Geier (1860-1908) was arrested for participating in the anti-government circle Narodnaia Volia and exiled to Tashkent, then the centre of the Syr-Darya Oblast of the Russian Empire. Geier there worked as a secretary of the Statistical Committee and progressively became an authority on Turkestan's history and ethnography, particularly on Kazakh culture.
"Ot Tashkenta do Gavy" was Geier's first detailed publication on the region. Written in the form of a travel journal, it describes the route from Tashkent via Khujand (modern Tajikistan), Kokand and Andijan (modern Uzbekistan) to the Arslanbob valley and kishlak (settlement) Gava in Kyrgyzstan. Geier's interesting observations cover in particular some industrial aspects of the Fergana valley, the exploitation… Read More

The Russian Navy and the Americas: warmly inscribed by one of the authors to the first Russian submarine commander in the Pacific. "Very rare" (Savine) illustrated émigré publication, with historical folding maps featuring the arctic coast of Russia from Europe to the North-West passage and the Alaska.
The compendium is divided into two parts, each comprising thematic articles written by different Navy officers and commanders. The first part is an overview of the history and achievements of the Russian Navy from the times of Peter the Great (creation of the Russian fleet) up until the first post-revolution year. It focuses in particular on Siberia, the history of the Alaskan Russian-American colonies and on discoveries in the Arctic and the North Pacific.
The second part is dedicated mostly to Russian naval officers in the US, especially the Association of Former Russian Naval Officers in America, which was established in New York in May 1923 by a group of 90 senior officers of the Russian Navy.
The… Read More

Fine example of the first English edition of Grigoriev's celebrated extended cycle of Russian portraits. Limited to 500 copies only, this one num. 7.
Faces of Russia started its life as Grigoriev's initial project, the album titled 'Raseya' (a slang word for peasant Russia), published in Petrograd in 1918. At the time, Grigoriev was already scandalously famous: in 1913 he was expelled from the St Petersburg Art Academy and invited to take part in 'Mir Iskusstva' exhibition; in 1916 he produced one of his iconic paintings – a portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 'Raseya', he presented harsh, Cubist-style portraits of Russian peasants – a stark contrast to the idealised image of the spiritual Russian peasant popular in the West at the time. However, the album was neither in line with the Bolshevik vision of the Russian peasant class.
In 1919 Grigoriev left Russia and settled in Europe, where he published the 2nd, expanded, edition of 'Raseya': it appeared in Berlin in 1921 in Russian and in 1922 in… Read More