My Russian Venture
Philadelpha: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1931. First edition. Octavo (8 1/4 inches tall), original red cloth, gilt spine, top edge red, original dust jacket. Minor toning to dust jacket. A nearly-fine copy. Item #1736
"FOR ME, THE DESIRE TO SEE RUSSIA, HER PROBLEMS AND SUCCESSES, BECAME A NOSTALGIA OF THE MIND"
First American edition of My Russian Venture documenting Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's travels through the Soviet Union. Printed in the same year as the first British edition and complete the original Art Deco-style dust jacket printed with the letters "U S S R" accented in red.
Known today for her 1941 biography, The Chestertons—and as the founder of the Cecil Houses for homeless women—Ada Elizabeth Jones was a member of the Fabian Society and a journalist. After a long relationship, Ada married Cecil Chesterton before he left for France during the First World War. As Mrs. Cecil Chesterton, she was now the sister-in-law to G.K. Chesterton and A.K. Chesterton (a prominent British Fascist). Cecil survived being wounded but eventually he became sick and died in a military hospital in France in December 1918.
Chesterton intended to visit White Russia ("with the poorest soil, the reddest Communism of any republic in the Union") and the Ukraine, favoring the cities of Minsk and Kiev over Moscow and Leningrad. Her travel plans "precipitated a cloud of blood-red rumours" and she was advised not to go. "Warnings and prophecies rained on me over me the telephone, arrived in sheaves through the post. Friends and relatives remonstrated, people in authority protested, and the burden of their song was all the same—you may be robbed, you are sure to be imprisoned, you will never come back alive." The last chapter concludes: "A new and a terrific chapter in the history of mankind, Soviet Russia is the writing on Europe's capitalist wall." Ada was awarded the Order of the British Empire (1938) and converted to Catholicism during World War II. See Mark Knight. Chesterton, Ada Elizabeth (1869–1962), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Price: $200.00