The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself

A very good copy, cover unevenly faded and slightly waterstained but interior bright and clean. An extremely scarce book. This copy is from the collection of the Russia specialist Pierre Pascal, and is signed by the translators, Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees.

Hope Mirrlees is most famous for her Modernist work, Paris: A Poem, which was The Hogarth Press's fifth publication. A few years later they published this 17th-century Russian text in a translation by Mirrlees and the classical scholar Jane Harrison, who taught Mirrlees and shared a flat with her. 1000 copies were printed, of which 248 had sold by December the following year. 

Avvakum's Life is one of the classic works of 17th-century Russian literature, written while the author, an outspoken preacher of the Old Believers sect of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, was exiled in Siberia.