Balmont, Konstantin Dimitrievich.

containing working drafts of his own poems, including many from his most striking and celebrated collection Let Us Be Like the Sun (1903) and Birds in the Air (1908), translations of Shelley, Blake, Longfellow, Poe, and others, quotations and reading notes from a wide range of authors including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Rutebeuf, Rider Haggard, Perez Galdos, St Augustine, Mickiewicz, Marlowe, the Koran, Lafcadio Hearn, the Upanishads, Frazer's Golden Bough, works on archaeology, mythology, Egyptology, comparative religion, folklore, and critical works, with closely-written reading lists of works on similarly varied subjects, some entries in other hands (often addresses, in Paris, Oxford, and elsewhere), many poems dated (not always within a year) and signed with initial K; together with: a 1-page typed poem ("Morskaya stranica"), signed and dated by Balmont, 20 June 1924; a 1-page autograph document signed and dated, 2 September 1925; a signed cabinet photograph of Balmont; and a letter by his wife



in the region of 2000 pages, 8vo and 16mo, largely in ink, some pages in pencil, some with newspaper cuttings loosely inserted, some notebooks containing leaves or dried flowers, morocco wrappers, 1894-c.1925 where dated, a few pages detached, some wear

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Autograph material by Balmont is of the greatest rarity. One of the first Russian modernists, and the first of the Russian Symbolists to win popular acclaim, he has been described a "born virtuoso, the Paganini of Russian verse", and his place as one of the finest of Russia's lyricists is assured.

The present series of notebooks bears vivid witness to his creative processes and to his virtuosity during his most productive years. Balmont believed in the first "divinely inspired" version of a poem, rather than in constant revisions, and that belief can be seen at work in these notebooks: many of the poems signed with a K are written with few revisions. They also testify to his familiarity with a wide variety of languages and his voracious appetite for works on the vast range of subjects which interested him: not only the original texts of the authors he translated, and critical works relating to them, but writings on exotic religions, arachaeology and mythology. It was thanks to his wide reading that Balmont was able to widen the bounds of Russian poetry and "introduce into it entire new civilisations" (see V. Markov's "Reappraisal" of Balmont in Slavic Review, 1969). Translations were for him anything but a sideline or amusement; they were an integral part of his poetic output. Like Pasternak, he had, as Markov notes, "the gift of making anything he translated peculiary his own". Balmont's poetry is widely acknowledged to have a particularly musical quality; it was his translations of Shelley and Poe which Rachmaninov chose to set to music. Some of the present notebooks can be directly linked to a particular collection of his poetry: for example that containing quotations from Blake, Calderon, Cervantes and English Jacobean dramatists was preparation fro his collection Silence, published in 1898.

This collection is an eloquent witness to Balmont's daring and dazzling virtuosity.