The ceremonial book “Drums” with the works of a married couple of artists – Valentina Khodasevich and Andrey Diderikhs (Moscow, Leningrad, Izogiz, 1930-1931) also belongs to the rarest editions.
What necessity forced their owners to “share” treasures?
Marina Tsvetaeva’s handwritten book “The Apprentice” sold for a record price of 7,250,000 rubles. The handwritten poems of the great poetess were put up for auction by the descendants of the theater actor. Vakhtangov Anatoly Nal. Nal began as a poet, he was friends with Maximilian Voloshin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pavel Antokolsky, Boris Lavrenev.
Marina Tsvetaeva’s handwritten book “The Apprentice” sold for a record price of 7,250,000 rubles.
For the first time, a rare edition of Peter by the fabulist Aesop (bought for 3,100,000 rubles) appeared at auction. The ancient book includes 40 fables (parables). Aesop’s parables were printed in Moscow in the summer of the Lord 1712 in March by order of the Tsar’s Majesty. The book begins with a biography of “Naturally Witty Aesop,” who lived in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC. me. Aesop’s Fables were first printed in Russian in Amsterdam in 1700.
For the first time, a rare edition of Peter by the fabulist Aesop (bought for 3,100,000 rubles) appeared at auction.
They sold a rare, though not so old album – “Seventeen Portraits” by Yuri Annenkov with a foreword by Anatoly Lunacharsky. An anonymous collector bought it for 2,800,000 rubles.
You open an album from a hundred years ago and gasp, filled with portraits of revolutionaries: Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Kliment Voroshilov and other prominent figures of the Communist Party. Many were soon suppressed. And the disc was subjected to repression: it was withdrawn from sale two years after the release, almost all circulation was destroyed. Annenkov himself wrote about this in his memoirs: “… by order of Stalin, this album was seized in the USSR from all libraries, shops and private collections and destroyed, with the exception of the page with a portrait of K. Voroshilov, who became a Stalinist supporter. My album did not reach the next generations <...> In 1956, immediately after de-Stalinization, an American bibliophile came to me and offered 600,000 (old) francs for it. I refused to sell.” Now sold by his descendants.
They sold a rare, though not so old album – “Seventeen Portraits” by Yuri Annenkov with a foreword by Anatoly Lunacharsky.
The ceremonial book “Drums” with the works of a married couple of artists – Valentina Khodasevich and Andrey Diderikhs (Moscow, Leningrad, Izogiz, 1930-1931) also belongs to the rarest editions. The book was sold for a million rubles. Contains portraits of labor shock workers and a photo montage “The USSR is a shock brigade of world socialism” with portraits of Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin and other USSR leaders. This is one of the first small-format propaganda books. But what setting! A constructivist flap cover, which is designed like a chessboard, and 24 front hero portraits are inscribed in the cells.
From the dusty mezzanine they took out a letter of nobility and brought it to the auction (it was bought at the auction for almost one and a half million rubles). The letter was issued more than 200 years ago to State Councilor Andrei Mikhailov signed by Emperor Paul I (Gatchina, October 31, 1800). Brocade binding. The endpapers are lined with green silk. The text is written on parchment with ink and gold. The document is crowned by a double-headed eagle, the monogram of Emperor Paul I and his signature. The beauty!
From the dusty mezzanine they took out a letter of nobility and brought it to the auction (it was bought at the auction for almost one and a half million rubles).
The letter of nobility was presented to a unique person – Andrei Sidorovich Mikhailov, a royal state councilor. He began serving as a private in 1760, a year later he was promoted to corporal. In 1769, he had risen to the rank of adjutant to Lieutenant General Eustace Palmenbach. And in 1781 he went into civil service and served as provincial treasurer of the St. Petersburg Treasury. For ten years he moved quite deftly through the ranks, until in 1799 he became the first director of the Assignment Bank. And as the crown of the labor path, in 1800, Mikhailova received a diploma of hereditary nobility. Now an anonymous millionaire has become the owner of the old letter.
