Poliarnaia zviezda, Nos. 1-14 (Polar Star)

S. l. (St. Petersburg): M. V. Pirozhkova, 1905. First Edition. Very good. First edition, 1905 - 1906, nos. 1 to 14 (all published); 7 3/4 x 5 1/2; greenish-beige wraps, printed in black; most issues partially unopened; condition varies from good, foxing to wraps and a few small chips to edges, to very good or better, with light wear to edges and tips of spine; vol. 1, 7, 10 with manuscript numbers to front wrap and title page and/or stamps; vol. 4 and 14 rebound in boards and 1/4 leatherette, with the original wraps preserved; vol. 14 with three leaves towards the end with their margins clipped (only one affecting a small paragraph). A rare, complete run of the influential, albeit short-lived journal, it was published weekly and survived for just four months, before the Russian censorship shut it down. The editor, Petr Struve (1870 - 1944), was one of the brightest Russian philosophers and political economists of his time, starting out as a Marxist (his first book on Russia's economic development would be the first legally-published Marxist work in the country), he later turned liberal and, yet later, he would join the White Movement after the Revolution. He was also the co-founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party and represented it at the Second State Duma. After 1918, he fled Russia and lived in exile, first in Finland and Bulgaria and then in Paris. Contributors to the journal were some of the most prominent representatives of Russian "liberal conservatism," including Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870 - 1922) - father of author Vladimir Nabokov, journalist, progressive statesman, and criminalist; Semen Frank (1877 - 1950) - considered one of the most important names of Russian 20th-century thought; Dmitrii Merezhkovskii (1866 - 1941) - religious thinker, literary critic, and one of the seminal figures of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry; Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii (1865 - 1919) - author, politician, economist, and co-founder of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Nikolai Berdiaev (1874 - 1948) - one of the most important Russian Orthodox thinkers of the last century; etc.