KESSEL Joseph (1898-1979) [AF 1962, 27e f]. - Lot 101

Lot n° 101
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KESSEL Joseph (1898-1979) [AF 1962, 27e f]. - Lot 101
KESSEL Joseph (1898-1979) [AF 1962, 27e f]. AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIPT, Memoirs of a People's Commissar, [1926]; 12 pages in-8 plus title page and 8 pages in-4 (lacking pp. 8 and 14-21), mounted on tabs, bound in dark green half morocco, smooth spine with gilt title throughout (spine faded, hinges rubbed). Original manuscript of this short story, published in 1926 by Édouard Champion, in facsimile of the manuscript. It is the diary of Fedia, a Russian exile in Paris, in 1914-1915. The narrator, who frequents revolutionary circles, comments vividly on the war between capitalist countries, his concern for comrades who "are going to be machine-gunned to defend the interests of Krupp, Creusot, Poutiloff", his joy at receiving Lenin's circular forbidding enlistment... He expresses the fear of seeing the war end prematurely, the wish that the Cossacks perish in Prussia, the disarray common to many exiles, including "TROTZKI himself"... An insipid letter from his father provokes memories of a sordid childhood on the edge of the Urals; he was saved by a deportee who made his intellectual and political education... He talks about Lenin's secret instructions, his own efforts to educate the French workers, acts of sabotage, rumors of espionage, news from the front and from abroad... Finally, the project of putting on a Russian show provokes drama in the circle of exiles: a betrayal, an arrest, suspicions, a terrible certainty, a summary execution... Two L.A.S. from the author to Édouard CHAMPION, [January 1926] (1 p. in-8 each, envelope or address), and a L.S. from Gaston GALLIMARD to Champion, related to the book (1 p. in-4, letterhead), are bound at the head of the volume.
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