Chernov, Viktor

[SIGNED] Konstruktivnyi sotsializm [Constructive Socialism], Vol. I (all published)

Prague: Volia Rossii, 1925. Item #1548

401, [2] pages; 23 cm. Original printed cover detached from text block; chipping and creasing to wrappers; small marginal tears on multiple pages; text block is loose. Author’s presentation copy, inscribed by Viktor Chernov on the title page to E. S. Ginzburg, dated October 14, 1945.

Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (1873–1952), a key figure in the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party and president of the Constituent Assembly of 1918, composed Konstruktivnyi sotsializm during his political exile. Issued by the Prague émigré publishing house Volia Rossii, the work represents one of the most comprehensive attempts by a Russian revolutionary thinker to synthesize socialist theory with practical reconstruction after the fall of the Russian Empire. The first volume, devoted to industrial socialism, was the only one published; a projected second volume, on agrarian socialism, remained in manuscript and long presumed lost. The book is an important document of interwar Russian political thought and émigré intellectual life, bridging the traditions of populism and Western European social theory.

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