Pushkin, Aleksandr. The Bronze Horseman (Mednyy vsadnik / Медный всадник). Illustrated by Alexander Benois, 1936. In Russian.

Пушкин, Александр Сергеевич. Медный всадник. Петербургская повесть / рисунки Александра Бенуа. Фронтиспис портрет Александра Сергеевича Пушкина работы Ильи Репина.
Москва - Ленинград : Издательство детской литературы ЦК ВЛКСМ (Детиздат), 1936. 30 страниц.
Мягкая бумажная обложка. Уменьшенный формат. Тираж 300 000 экземпляров.
Состояние хорошее. Равномерное возрастное пожелтение бумаги, незначительные потертости корешка и краев обложки. Книжный блок крепкий, страницы чистые.
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Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich. The Bronze Horseman. A Petersburg Tale / illustrations by Alexander Benois. Frontispiece portrait of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin by Ilya Repin.
Moscow - Leningrad : Children's Literature Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Komsomol (Detizdat), 1936. 30 pages.
Paper wrappers. Reduced format. Print run of 300,000 copies.
Condition good. Even age-toning to the paper, minor wear to the spine and edges of the wrappers. The text block is firm, and the pages are clean without tears.

A notable pre-WWII Soviet pocket-sized edition of Alexander Pushkin's masterpiece poem, The Bronze Horseman, published by Detizdat in 1936. This publication was issued as part of the mass-market Pushkin Library series leading up to the grand 1937 Pushkin Centennial, a major state-sponsored cultural campaign across the USSR. The defining artistic and collectible value of this booklet lies in its reproduction of the iconic graphic illustrations by Alexander Benois, a master painter, art critic, and co-founder of the influential Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) movement. Benois spent decades perfecting these illustrations, which beautifully capture the melancholic, imperial atmosphere of St. Petersburg and the tragic conflict between state power and the individual. Crucially, from a bibliographical perspective, this 1936 printing is a later Soviet mass edition and not the first illustrated edition by Benois, which was originally published in its complete form in 1923 by the Committee for the Popularization of Artistic Publications in Petrograd. Despite its massive original print run of 300,000 copies, fragile softcover pocket editions from the 1930s suffered incredibly low survival rates due to heavy handling and the scarcity of paper during the war years. Finding a copy that preserves its original illustrated paper wrappers and a tight text block is uncommon, making this an appealing acquisition for collectors of Soviet book design, Pushkiniana, and classic Russian graphic arts.