Finding Balmont’s hand in a UL copy : the November 2021 Slavonic item of the month

This guest blog post is written by one of our UL Reading Room colleagues.  David, also a learner of Russian, came across a hidden treasure in our older collections – a book of poetry by the poet Bal’mont (normally Balmont in English, as below) with inscriptions by the author.

Balmont’s portrait in the book

The book’s original cover

An example of Balmont’s correction

Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont was a well known poet of the Silver age of Russian Literature. The last book he completed, Свѣтослуженіе (Svi︠e︡tosluzhenīe; Liturgy of light), was published in Harbin, Manchuria in June 1937 to coincide with Balmont’s 70th anniversary.