DODGSON, Charles Lutwidge (“Lewis Carroll”) (1832-1898). Ania v strane chudes [in Cyrillic]. Translated by V. Sirin [pseudonym of Vladimir Nabokov]. Berlin: Izdatel’stov Gamayun, 1923.
8vo (221 x 156 mm). 12 illustrations by S.V. Zalshupin in the Russian Constructivist style. Original blue paper-backed pictorial boards, the upper cover reproducing a design in color by Zalshupin (spine sunned with some light wear at ends, front free endpaper detached); folding cloth chemise and slipcase. Provenance: Alice P. Hargreaves (1852-1934), the “original Alice” (signature in brown ink on the front pastedown); Sir Leicester Harmsworth (Sotheby’s, London, 26 March 1947, part lot 2975); The Justin G. Schiller sale, Christie’s New York, 9 December 1998, Lot 4, with his booklabel on the chemise.
THE “ORIGINAL ALICE’S” OWN COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION OF NABOKOV’S VALUABLE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION, SIGNED BY ALICE HARGREAVES on the front pastedown. “This important translation into Russian was prepared by Nabokov at the age of 24 while an undergraduate at Cambridge. His faithful yet imaginative version of Dodgson’s text has made it one of the most successful renderings of Alice into another language” (Justin G. Schiller Sale). To make the story relevant for a Russian audience, Nabokov retold it in a Russian style and gave Alice a new name: “Ania”, perhaps to avoid the perceived German origin of the name Alice (a country that was unpopular at that time in Russia) or to avoid the name of the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna (Alix of Hesse), wife of tsar Nicholas II, infamously murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918.
Since its publication, many attempts at translating Alice had been previously made but all were met with the difficulty of translating Dodgson’s wordplay, nonsense verse, and mathematical and logical puzzling. Nabokov’s faithful rendering of the English text, using deliberate distortions of the characters’ names and nursery rhymes - now considered the best translation - was the work of a young novelist whose reputation for literary playfulness would ultimately rival Dodgson’s. His connection with the two Alice works at a young age would become the building material for his prose, and the ironic association for the author who coined the word “nymphet”, in his masterpiece: Lolita. “The Alice-books must have influenced Nabokov chiefly and directly in the formation of seeing things in abstract ways and absurd forms… One of the fundamental relationships between Alice’s fairy-tale world and Nabokov’s oeuvre is the permanent presence of other worlds, other dimensions, the multi-layered interpretation of this world and the beyond, and the possibility of crossing the border between the two” (see Zsuzsa, The Carroll Carroll Pattern. Nabokov and Lewis Carrol).
THIS IMPORTANT TRANSLATION IS NOW “ALMOST AS RARE AS THE SUPPRESSED FIRST EDITION OF CARROLL’S OWN ALICE” (see Morgan/Houghton). “Within twenty years of its publication, copies of [this] translation [...] would be deemed rarities. [Nobokov] later attributed his invitation to teach at Wellesley in 1941 in part to the fact that they had this edition in their Lewis Carroll collection” (Funke, p.47). Nabokov’s translation is now “one of the most sought-after of all translations - certainly as highly valued as the early Carroll-inspired creations” (Goodacre, The Real Flood of Translations in Alice in a World of Wonderlands, p. 103).
From the Alice Hargreaves collection of Alice editions and translations, part of which was sold in 1928. Later sold at the important Justin G. Schiller sale of rare Alice material in 1998. Juliar A7.1 (variant a); Lovett 793; Morgan/Houghton p. 132; Weaver pp. 90, 130.