Les reliques vivantes - La montre - Ça fait du bruit : Pounine et Babourine - Les nôtres m'ont envoyé

First edition of the French translation, with false statement of second edition.

Full green cloth Bradel binding, flat spine decorated with a central gilt ornament, beige sheepskin title label, original wrappers preserved, contemporary binding signed in blind by Pierson. Some light foxing. 

Very rare presentation copy dated and signed by Ivan Turgenev to Anatole France: "Monsieur Anatole France / hommage de l'auteur / 1876".

Anatole France rarely wrote on foreign literature, but he left his finest prose for Turgenev. He published two lengthy articles on the writer in "Le Temps", one year after receiving this copy from him. France compares what he calls the "struggle for existence," of Western societies, to the "age-old slaughter" of generations of serfs. He acknowledges Turgenev's beneficial role in convincing the Tsar, through his work, of the necessity to abolish serfdom. Beyond this social and humanitarian role, the Russian writer appears to him as a remarkable painter of Russian women and the Russian landscape, which he masterfully expresses in the "The Hunting Sketches". The first story in this eponymous collection, "Living Relic", closes these Sketches that had so enthused Anatole France.

The two writers came to know each other more through their novels than during their rare meetings at Flaubert's gatherings from the beginning of the 1870s. Turgenev would even make an appearance in Anatole France's novel "La Vie en fleur". As Alexandre Zviguilsky emphasizes, the undeniable "presence" of the master in France's early and late works testifies to his faithfulness to Turgenev.

These "Relics" indeed remained very much alive in the writer's mind. Zviguilsky considers that France "was manifestly inspired by this story." The same year as the "Relics", Anatole France sent his Noces corinthiennes to Turgenev, who thanked him with a compliment: "Your most noble and poetic talent pleases me very much" (April 20, 1876). Turgenev, who acted as one of the principal promoters of Tolstoy's work, later gifted Anatole France a copy of "War and Peace" newly translated into French, and encouraged his influential colleague to review it in "Le Temps".