Maupassant, Guy de. Bel-Ami (Milyy drug). A Novel / original lithographs by K. I. Rudakov, 1936. In Russian.

Мопассан, Ги де (1850-1893). Милый друг : роман / перевод с французского Ан. Чеботаревской ; редакция А. А. Смирнова ; автолитографии К. И. Рудакова ; переплет, титул по макетам В. Д. Двораковского.
Ленинград : Художественная литература, 1936. 274 страницы, с иллюстрациями, [9] листов иллюстраций ; 31 x 23 сантиметра.
Издательский художественный коленкоровый переплет с золотым и блинтовым тиснением, крупный формат. Тираж 15 300 экземпляров.
На форзаце - две владельческие рукописные записи разных лиц и разного времени.
Переплет хорошее: потертость и бахрома ткани у головки и хвостика корешка. Блок очень хорошее: бумага слегка потемневшая, иллюстрации полностью сохранены, на форзаце легкий залом.
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Maupassant, Guy de (1850-1893). Bel-Ami : a novel / translated from the French by An. Chebotarevskaya ; edited by A. A. Smirnov ; original lithographs by K. I. Rudakov ; binding and title page designed by V. D. Dvorakovsky.
Leningrad : Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1936. 274 pp., illustrated, [9] leaves of plates ; 31 x 23 cm.
Publisher's fine decorative bookcloth binding with gilt and blind stamping, large format. Print run of 15,300 copies.
Front free endpaper bearing two former owners' handwritten inscriptions, in different hands and at different dates.
Binding good: wear and fraying of the cloth at the head and tail of the spine. Text block very good: paper lightly toned, illustrations fully preserved, light crease to the front endpaper.

A handsomely produced large-format Soviet edition of Maupassant's "Bel-Ami" (1885), illustrated with original lithographs by Konstantin Ivanovich Rudakov (1891-1949), among the most accomplished Soviet book illustrators of French literature in the interwar period. Rudakov worked from an unusually internalized method: rather than relying on documentary research, he drew chiefly on his own visual memory, having the text read aloud to him by his wife, and translated his sketches to the lithographic stone through the master printer O. E. Korotkov at the Academy of Arts' graphic workshop, first as black-and-white trial proofs and then, where warranted, as multi-stone color compositions; his illustrations for this novel were considered authoritative enough to be reused in the Soviet Union's major "Library of World Literature" edition of Maupassant decades later, in 1970. The translation is the work of Anastasia Nikolaevna Chebotarevskaya (1876-1921), a prominent Silver Age translator and essayist married to the Symbolist writer Fyodor Sologub, whose renderings of Maupassant's fiction and short stories remained in wide use throughout the Soviet period. The binding and title page were designed by V. D. Dvorakovsky. The novel itself, tracing the amoral rise of the journalist Georges Duroy through the drawing rooms and newsrooms of Third Republic Paris, remains one of Maupassant's most widely read works, and this illustrated large-format printing, issued in a run of 15,300 copies, holds strong appeal for collectors of Soviet book illustration and of Rudakov's graphic work in particular.