[Conquista Chronicle. First Russian Edition] Solis y Rivadeneyra, Antonio de. History of the Conquest of Mexico. Part One (Antona Solisa istoriya o pokorenii Meksiki / Historia de la conquista de México). Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1765.

Солис-и-Рибаденейра, Антонио де (1610-1686). Антона Солиса история о покорении Мексики, или Новой Гишпании. Часть первая (из двух) / переведена с немецкого языка Академии наук переводчиком Васильем Лебедевым.
В Санктпетербурге : при Императорской Академии наук, 1765. [2], 561 страница ; 19,5 x 13 сантиметров.
Цельнокожаный переплет эпохи, корешок с бинтами, блинтовым и золотым тиснением, тонированный красный обрез.
На переднем форзаце - владельческая подпись красным карандашом. На заднем форзаце - штамп советского букинистического магазина.
Переплет удовлетворительное: кожа потерта и растрескана, утраты у головки и хвостика корешка. Блок хорошее: крепкий, полный; равномерное пожелтение и краевые разводы от влаги, текст полностью сохранен и читается свободно.
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Solís y Rivadeneyra, Antonio de (1610-1686). Anton Solis's History of the Conquest of Mexico, or New Spain. Part One only (of two) / translated from the German by Vasily Lebedev, translator to the Academy of Sciences.
St Petersburg : at the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1765. [2], 561 pp. ; 19.5 x 13 cm.
Contemporary full calf, spine with raised bands, blind and gilt tooling, red-stained edges.
Front free endpaper with a former owner's signature in red pencil. Rear endpaper with a Soviet second-hand bookshop stamp.
Binding fair: leather rubbed and cracked, losses at head and tail of spine. Text block good: firm and complete; even toning and marginal damp-staining, text fully preserved and legible throughout.

The first Russian edition of one of the most widely read early modern accounts of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Antonio de Solís y Rivadeneyra (1610-1686), dramatist, poet, and Chronicler Major of the Indies to the Spanish crown, published his "Historia de la conquista de México" in Madrid in 1684, drawing on Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Antonio de Herrera, and the archival holdings of his office to produce a stylistically polished narrative of Cortés's campaign against Moctezuma and the Aztec empire. The work became a European bestseller, translated into French, English, Italian, German, and Dutch across the eighteenth century, and shaped how educated Europe understood the conquest for well over a century until Prescott's account displaced it. This Russian rendering was made from the German by Vasily Lebedev, staff translator to the Imperial Academy of Sciences and one of the most productive translators of the Elizabethan and early Catherinian period, whose output also included Lord Anson's circumnavigation and Gerhard Friedrich Müller's celebrated address on the origin of the Russian people. The Academy of Sciences press was at the time the principal channel by which Western geographical and historical scholarship entered Russian, and this volume stands among the earliest substantial Russian-language treatments of the Americas. A second edition followed in 1789. Books of Russian civil-type printing from the reign of Catherine II, particularly Academy of Sciences imprints in contemporary full leather, are of standing interest to collectors of eighteenth-century Russian books and of the literature of the Spanish conquest alike.