Beschreibung
~COMPRISES: I: 1918-1922 (1973). Red wrappers. Frontis print. / II: 1922-1924 (1973). Grey wrappers / III: 1924-1926 (1974). Red wrappers / IV: 1927-1931 (1974). Green wrappers / V: 1932-1935, 2 parts (1974). White wrappers. Wrappers lightly foxed, wrappers to part. 1 marked (muddy pawprints to front wrapper). Insert: 'From the Triton Press with the printer's compliments and best wishes for Christmas and 1975, Andrew (Strickland)' / VI: 1935-1937 (1975). Red wrappers / VII: 1937 (1975). Green wrappers; mild fading to front wrapper / VIII: 1938 (1975). Pale grey wrappers; marking to front wrapper / IX: Before 1918, 2 parts, (1974). Black paper wrappers, gold lettering to front wrappers. Authors 'Irina Morley and Nicholas W. Morley'. Frontis print to part I (linocut of Romanov crest), with slight offsetting to t.p., and family tree with pencil annots. Folios. Mild edgewear to wrappers. Wrapper of IX part II detached. Vols each have two staples to spine, holding but rusted (except wrappers of IX pt II), with sometimes a little marking from rust to central pages. With loose sheet listing Triton Press publications up to 1974, including all vols of 'In Folio' present here (some then still in preparation). No further vols appear to have been published. Irina Platanova was born in 1918 to an aristocratic emigre Russian family. After a prosperous inter-war childhood, she studied at the Slade and in 1943 married the entomologist Derek Wragge Morley. The couple were friends with the elderly Bertrand Russell and in 1946 moved with their young children into his house in Cambridge, where, as Russell put it, 'they relieve me of housekeeping' (Griffin (ed.), 2002, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, p. 413). They also both embarked on affairs, Irina with Bertrand Russell and Derek with Russell's wife 'Peter'. Both affairs were short-lived, though Irina's relationship with Russell 'mellowed into a warm friendship that lasted until Russell's death' (Griffin p. 421). The Morleys separated the same year; Irina later remarried the biochemist L. H. Strickland and moved to Penzance, where these volumes were printed; the 'Andrew Strickland' who ran The Triton Press was presumably a relative. Russell's letters to Irina were published by the Triton Press in 1972. Her autobiography, covering the years 1918-1938 and including two further parts (IX) on the life of her parents, is a vivid, engaging, wry account of her early life and family background. Vol. IX offers a glimpse of aristocratic family life in imperial Russia, from the girls' school attended by Irina's grandmother, where the Tsar frequently visited - '(b)efore he left he would drop his handkerchief from the top of the main staircase. The girls would rush forward to pick it up. The most fortunate one was given the monogram after the handkerchief had been cut into small squares' - to winter at the Platanov country estate; a letter from a visiting American ambassador recalls the 'ecstatic and almost supernatural beauty of the forests', 'alight with snow' during a sleigh ride (IX, I, pp. 6, 7, 10). Vols I-VIII begin with Irina's Surrey childhood, when a 'muffin-man with a brass hand-bell and green-baize-covered tray came at dusk', punctuated by her occasional experiences of Orthodox services, 'completely incomprehensible as they were conducted in Old Slavonic', where, confronted with the 'authoritative humility' of the priest, she 'first experienced deep religious awe' (I, pp. 6, 7, 33, 34). Irina traces her life through the confines of her schooldays (elocution lessons; food parcels; porridge) to her time as an art student in 1930s London, where she makes bohemian friends and experiences the wider world growing 'more sombre and confused' in the lead-up to WWII (VII, pp. 16, 25). Extremely scarce: only one entry (for an incomplete set) on WorldCat. ~Robust packaging. Overseas orders trackable on request. Size: c. 35pp. per vol. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers QQ0065
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