Stated first edition, extensively inscribed in Cyrillic to Nicholas Nabokov on the fly-leaf by Stravinsky in his late, shaky hand (tentative translation into English): "To you, dear Nika, two words beyond ... and the most friendly ... from Igor Stravinsky, who loves you"; with a second inscription to Nabokov signed "B," from Robert Craft. Publisher's green cloth in dust-jacket, housed in a black cloth clamshell case. 8 3/8 x 5 1/2 inches (21 x 14 cm); x, 350, xii, [2] pp.  Light wear to the jacket, with minor tears and minor losses, the spine slightly faded; a fresh copy overall.

Stravinsky, like most first-generation émigrés, ignored the 1918 reform of Cyrillc orthography throughout his life. While the "old style" is well familiar to our translator, by 1969 (at earliest, the book's publication date), Stravinsky's handwriting was seriously affected by physical decline, making the present inscription here difficult to fully decipher.

Nicolas Nabokov was born in 1903 to a distinguished family of landed gentry (Vladimir Nabokov was his first cousin).  With the eruption of revolution, the Nabokovs fled to the Crimea and Nabokov later lived in Germany and France before relocating to the United States in 1933. Writing for Partisan Review and for Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, he consolidated a reputation as an authority on Soviet culture within the anticommunist left. In 1951, he was named General Secretary of the new Congress for Cultural Freedom. All of this submerged his continued vocation as a composer. Two big operas — Rasputin’s End (1958) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1971) — led nowhere. More noticed were his ballet-oratorio Ode (1928), premiered by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes; Union Pacific (1934), an “American ballet” for Colonel W. de Basil’s Ballet Russes; and Don Quixote (1966), for which George Balanchine famously returned to the stage to dance the title role opposite his muse Suzanne Farrell. While these works do not evince a highly personal style, their aesthetic direction is neoclassical — and Stravinsky, the king of musical neoclassicism, became Nabokov’s signature musical ally. In articles and books, Nabokov celebrated Stravinsky as the “discoverer” of new domains of rhythm, instrumentation, and harmony; his concert and stage works, perpetually evolving, signified “a necessary and sound development” in the dynamic evolution of 20th-century modernism, “overleaping” the 12-tone rigors of Arnold Schoenberg and his acolytes. Stravinsky in turn acclaimed Nabokov the “cultural generalissimo” of the non-communist West.