(Chagall, Marc, illus.)

Nicolai Gogol.  Les Âmes mortes (trans. Henri Mongault).  Paris: Tériade, 1948



2 volumes, folio (15 x 11 in.; 381 x 280 mm, uncut).  96 etchings (some with drypoint, roulette, and aquatint) variously signed on the plate "Chagall," "M. Chagall," or "Marc Chagall"; 10 etched headpieces, 10 etched pictorial initials, illustrated register of the etchings on 10 plates, by Chagall, original printed wrappers bound in; minimal spotting to wrappers.  Black buckram, spines with morocco gilt lettering pieces.  Pasteboard slipcase; some soiling.

Artist & the Book 50; Cramer 17; Logan/San Francisco 103; Mitchell, "At the carnival of masks," TLS, 10 July 2009, p. 23

Copy 141 of 285 numbered copies (of a whole edition of 368). 

The first of three books illustrated by Chagall for Vollard, Les Âmes mortes was left unpublished at the time of Vollard's death in 1939.  As Stanley Mitchell wrote earlier this year in the TLS, "Chagall's illustrations for Dead Souls were the artist's first commission after leaving Russia for good and settling in France.  They represent the most important turning point in his life.  They are not only illustrations to Gogol, they are farewell to Russia—and to the Jewish shtetl and to Chagall's brief political service to the Bolsheviks .... the etchings are grotesque and belong to a turbulent stream of grotesque art in the early years of the Revolution ....

"However important the etchings, they have remained the Cinderella of Chagall's work.  His dealer ... left them in the cellar for twenty years."  Tériade eventually completed the project in 1948, using 96 of Chagall's 100 etchings.  The etchings were awarded the grand prix at the Venice graphics biennale that same year.  "They have been ignored by curators and scholars ever since.

"The illustrations marked a new direction for Chagall .... [H]e was etching for the first time, searching exuberently for new techniques that ranged from drypoint to aquatint.  To quote from Marx in a different context: 'all that is solid melts into air.'  The characters heads grow in magnitude, bodies become transparent, physiognomy is constantly changing.  The effect is a diabolical carnival of masks" (Mitchell).