Homer. The Odyssey (Odisseya). Translated from the Greek by V. Veresaev, 1953. First edition of the translation. In Russian

Гомер. Одиссея / перевод с греческого В. Вересаева ; редакция акад. И. И. Толстого ; примечания С. Поляковой ; словарь И. Феленковской ; художник Г. Д. Епифанов.
Москва : Государственное издательство художественной литературы, 1953. 320 с. Первое издание перевода.
Твердый издательский переплет из темно-серой ткани. Увеличенный формат. Тираж 25000 экз.
Переплет - хорошее: неравномерное выцветание ткани. Блок - хорошее: крепкий; пятна на нескольких страницах.
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Homer. The Odyssey / translated from the Greek by V. Veresaev ; edited by Academician I. I. Tolstoy ; notes by S. Polyakova ; glossary by I. Felenkovskaya ; artist G. D. Epifanov.
Moscow : State Publishing House of Fiction, 1953. 320 pp. First edition of the translation.
Publisher's dark grey cloth hardcover. Enlarged format. Print run 25,000 copies.
Binding good: uneven fading of the cloth. Text block good: firm; stains on several pages.

The first edition of Veresaev's translation of the Odyssey, published in Moscow in 1953, eight years after the translator's death and four years after his Iliad of 1949. Vikenty Veresaev, a physician by training and a prose writer and critic best known for his Notes of a Physician, took up Homer late in life, and both poems were first published posthumously. He aimed at a literal and readable Russian hexameter, closer to the sense of the Greek and addressed to a wide readership, in contrast to the elevated nineteenth-century versions of Zhukovsky for the Odyssey and Gnedich for the Iliad. The text was prepared for the press under the editorship of Academician I. I. Tolstoy, the classical philologist, and the volume carries notes by S. Polyakova and a glossary of mythological names and geographical terms by I. Felenkovskaya. It was issued by the State Publishing House of Fiction in a print run of 25,000 copies, printed in Leningrad at the Ivan Fedorov printing house, with design by G. D. Epifanov, whose Greek-key borders mark the title page and the openings of the songs and whose volute frame is blind-stamped on the cloth binding. No earlier publication of the complete translation is recorded, and the 1953 text became the basis of the many later editions that made Veresaev's version one of the standard modern Russian Odysseys. It will interest collectors of Russian translations of Homer, historians of Soviet translation and classical studies, and readers of the Russian Odyssey in its first printing.