"AN IMPORTANT PUBLISHER OF RUSSIAN LETTERS": FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH OF STAVROGIN'S CONFESSION, THE KEY CENSORED CHAPTER FROM DOSTOEVSKY'S THE POSSESSED, NEWLY DISCOVERED IN MOSCOW IN 1921, PUBLISHED BY THE WOOLFS' HOGARTH PRESS, WITH THE TRANSLATION OF VIRGINIA WOOLF AND SAMUEL KOTELIANSKY

DOSTOEVSKY, Fyodor. Stavrogin's Confession and The Plan of the Life of a Great Sinner. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf. Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1922. Octavo, original half pale blue cloth, blue patterned paper boards, paper spine and cover labels, uncut and largely unopened.

First edition in English of the long suppressed and nearly forgotten "central chapter" from The Possessed, Stavrogin's Confession, discovered in Moscow in 1921, together in one volume with Dostoevsky's plan for Life of a Great Sinner, never written, both with the translation of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Koteliansky, published by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, uncut in original boards.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf were pivotal in the translation and publication of Russian classics in England. They made "Hogarth an important publisher of Russian letters" (Willis, 101). Virginia Woolf, in particular, "felt that Russian literature offered new ways of writing that were more in line with her modernist aesthetics… In addition to admiring Russian writers, both Virginia and Leonard Woolf collaborated with Samuel Koteliansky, a Russian Jewish expatriate who became a close associate of the Bloomsbury circle." Virginia Woolf's work translating Dostoevsky "left a very definite mark on her… as she borrowed from a writer she greatly admired at a time when she was created a novel, and a style, of her own."

"Stavrogin's Confession, known in Russian as U Tikhona (At Tikhon's) has been widely regarded by literary critics as 'the central chapter' of The Possessed in that it constitutes a graphic examination of Stavrogin's psychology absent elsewhere in the novel. However, because of its controversial content, publication of this crucial chapter was long delayed in Russian… The Possessed was originally serialized in 1872 in the journal Russkii vestnik (Russian Herald), whose editor refused to publish the chapter on the grounds that the material was not fit to print." Discovered in Moscow in 1921, in a "tin case" of Dostoevsky's papers, "the text survived in two variants… one was the galley proofs prepared for Russkii vestnik… together with an outline for a novel entitled The Life of a Great Sinner, which he never wrote; this [galley proof and outline] was the version translated by Koteliansky and Woolf. A second version was based on a copy of the chapter held by Dostoevsky's wife… an incomplete and substantially different variant… Koteliansky's and Woolf's translation appeared less than a year after the opening of the tin case in Moscow, making theirs the first English language version of the chapter" (Modern Language Review V.104). Dostoevsky's plan for Life of a Great Sinner "was published by L.P. Grossman in his book on Dostoevsky [Dostoevsky's Genius, 1921] but not in full nor accurately, with such important omissions that the text [herein] can along be considered accurately to reproduce the original" (15). Serialized the same month in T.S. Eliot's Criterion. With the Soviet government's "Note" on the "New MSS. of F.M. Dostoevsky"; "Stavrogin's Meeting with Tikhon" by V. Friche; "Introduction to the Unpublished Chapter of The Possessed" by V. Komarovich, and "The Unfulfilled Idea: Note on The Life of a Great Sinner" by N. Brodsky. Issued by Hogarth Press in October 1922. One of 750 copies in first issue binding (total 1050). Six pages of ads at rear; without rare glassine. Kirkpatrick B2. Woolmer 20. Willis, 98-101. Not in LEG.

Text very fresh with trace of scattered foxing, scant edge-wear to bright original boards. A handsome about-fine copy.