Dolina Issy [The Issa Valley]

Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1955.

Price: $2,000.00

Softcover. First edition. Printed wrappers. Unopened. Text in Polish. Pages toned and darkened, the wrappers slightly less so, slight erosion to the paper spine at the crown, a very good copy. The Polish-born Nobel laureate Milosz's own copy with a label from the New York agent Curtis Brown, Ltd. affixed to the front wrap addressed to Milosz at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley. Agent's stamp on fly leaf. Accompanied by a copy of the first German edition of the book (*Tal Der Issa.* Koln and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1957), we speculate that the first edition was used by the agent in securing the German translation, and then returned both books to Milosz. Milosz's archive at the Beinecke Library includes a file of correspondence from this agent in 1960-61 (both volumes have the pencil notation "961" in pencil), and he began his career as a professor in the U.S. at Berkeley in 1961. Though born in Poland, Milosz was culturally Lithuanian and this early autobiographical novel is about his growing up with a Lithuanian heritage. In 1951 he defected from Poland to France, and then in 1960 moved to the United States. A very scarce volume (especially, one imagines, the author's own copy).

Item #393889

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Item #393889 Dolina Issy [The Issa Valley]. Czeslaw MILOSZ.
Dolina Issy [The Issa Valley]