Inzhenerniya zhurnal... No. 1

8vo (215 x 134mm.), 6 folding plates, contemporary blind-tooled green morocco, gilt lettering on upper cover, green silk endpapers, green morocco covered card slipcase, edges gilt, lacking first plate, plates slightly torn (with very slight loss) and spotted, spotting, 40mm. loss to head of spine, slipcase torn with loss

Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, inscription on front flyleaf; Ivan Semenovich Lebedev, signature

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first issue of this rare engineering journal with a manuscript dedication from konstantin kaufman, first governor-general of russian turkestan, to ivan lebedev, a contributor to the magazine.

The magazine was issued by the engineering department of the Military Scientific Committee in St Petersburg, initially as a quarterly. The following year an edition appeared every two months, and from 1866 it became a monthly journal. The magazine's inaugural editor was Vasilli L'vovich Sharngorst, who had been Head of the Engineering School since 1834. The magazine contained technical articles about the history of engineering and engineering innovations as well as lengthy reviews of new engineering and military works.

This particular copy of the first issue contains a manuscript dedication on the front flyleaf that reads "to the subcolonel of the Third Combat Engineer Battalion Ivan Semenovich Lebedev as a sign of remembrance from a friend, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, 3rd June 1857, St Petersburg".

Kaufman (1818-1882) had served as an engineer in a number of military campaigns in the Caucasus, and had commanded the sappers at the siege of Kars in 1855. He became Director-General of engineers at the War Office in 1861 and was created Governor-General of Turkestan in 1867, a role in which he was handed an unusual degree of autonomy and which he maintained for the remainder of his life.

Lebedev (1820-1868) had distinguished himself for bravery during the Siege of Sevastopol, being seriously wounded in the process. He subsequently joined the staff of the Military School and wrote widely on both engineering and humanitarian matters. An article "derived from the account of Captain Lebedev" is included in this edition of the Engineering Magazine and focuses on aspects of drilling through rock.

However, Lebedev himself seems to be deeply unhappy with the piece: presumably the result of some creative editing, as well as his mysterious demotion from Colonel to "Captain" by the magazine. He has scrawled such comments as "all this is not true, distorted and wrong" with a mixture of exclamation and question marks in the margins of the first page of the article. At the end of the article he has affixed the comment, "Not true: the groundlessness of that is proved by innumerable tests when developing the military Georgian road in the Caucasus... 1851-1852. I. Lebedev. 26th June 1857".

This is not only a rare reflection on Russian engineering and its military applications in the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War, but also a testament to the friendship between two of the period's leading military engineers and the perhaps surprisingly uneasy relationship between Lebedev and the text that claims him for its author.