LONDON, July 9. / TASS /. The first edition of Alexander Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin was sold at the Christies auction in London for · 467,300 ($582,000)
The first edition of the famous Pushkin novel in verse, released in 1825 by the printing house of the Department of Public Education of St. Petersburg, was sold with a three-fold excess of the estimated value. What was of particular interest to collectors was edition of the first chapter of the novel in its original binding, which was part of the lot. Twice as much as expected - $218,000 was the final price for the rare two-volume edition of "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka" (1831-1832) by Nikolai Gogol. Among the previous owners of the two-volume book were princes Vorontsov, as evidenced by the monogram applied to the book.
In total, more than 120 rare print editions from the private European collection were put up for auction, including works by Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy and other authors. The first lifetime edition of Ivan Krylov's fables (1809) was sold for $93,000, a rare first edition of Pushkin's poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila" (1820) sold for $179,000.
Russian art are traditionally popular among collectors. The total revenue of the "Russian auctions" spring week, which ended in early June in London, in which Sotheby's, McDougalls and Bonhams besides Christie’s, was 35.74 mln pounds ($45 mln)|.