Woe from Wit. Over sixty illustrations by M.S. Bashilov and D.N. Kardovsky

«„Woe from Wit“ appeared before Onegin, Pechorin, survived them, passed unharmed through the Gogol period, lived these fifty years since its appearance and continues to live its incorruptible life, will survive many more epochs and will not lose its vitality».
The... most famous work of Alexander Sergeyevich Griboedov (1795–1829) (many consider it the author's only creation, but this is a mistaken opinion) was first published in 1825 with significant censorship cuts and almost immediately became quotable. The existence of handwritten copies - complete texts of the comedy, passed from hand to hand by enthusiastic readers - greatly contributed to this; it can be said that, among other things, «Woe from Wit» became the first work that was mass-published in samizdat. Unabridged, the comedy - one of the peaks of Russian drama and poetry, a magnificent satire on Moscow society in the early 19th century, one of the most quoted texts in Russian culture - was published only in 1862, and since then has been repeatedly reprinted, staged, and adapted for the screen. Each of us in everyday life often uses winged phrases, often forgetting that they have an author - Griboedov: «And who are the judges?», «Ah! Familiar faces all!», «The tale is fresh, yet hard to believe», «I would be glad to serve, but serving is sickening», «Happy hours pass unnoticed», «With feeling, with sense, with arrangement», - after all, they all come from «Woe from Wit»…
The popularity of the comedy, the brightness and originality of its characters led to the emergence of a large number of adaptations and continuations of the original Griboedov text, among which the most talented and well-known is the play by Yevdokiya Petrovna Rostopchina (1811–1858) «The Return of Chatsky to Moscow, or The Meeting of Familiar Faces After Twenty-Five Years of Separation», written in 1856. The well-known poetess not only managed to depict contemporary Moscow society in a satirical light, but also to reproduce one of the main features of Griboedov's comedy - its timelessness: the characters and types drawn by Rostopchina are remarkably relevant even today.
This book includes illustrations by two talented artists. The works of Mikhail Sergeyevich Bashilov (1821–1870) decorated the very first complete edition of «Woe from Wit» in 1862, while the illustrations by Dmitry Nikolaevich Kardovsky (1866–1943), created from 1907 to 1912, became classics in the design of the immortal Griboedov comedy since their first publication.
The collection includes the comedy by Alexander Sergeyevich Griboedov (1795–1829) «Woe from Wit» - one of the peaks of Russian drama and poetry, a magnificent satire on Moscow society in the early 19th century, and, as an appendix, the most famous continuation - a conversation in verse by Yevdokiya Petrovna Rostopchina (1811–1858) «The Return of Chatsky to Moscow, or The Meeting of Familiar Faces After Twenty-Five Years of Separation». The book is adorned with illustrations by talented Russian artists Dmitry Nikolaevich Kardovsky (1866–1943) and Mikhail Sergeyevich Bashilov (1821–1870).