Hesse, Hermann [The Glass Bead Game]. Igra v Biser. 

Series Zarubezhnyi roman XX v.
Translation from German by D. Karavkina and Vs. Rozanov.
Foreword by E. Markovich.
Commentary and translation of poems by S. Averintsev.
Book design by I. Prager.

Moskva, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1969.
8vo, 544 pp.

In original white cloth and dust jacket.
In good condition, dust jacket rubbed, tears and small losses to dj spine.

The first Russian edition of Hermann Hesse's last novel. This is the third Russian translation of any of Hesse's prose during the Soviet period and the only edition of this particular translation. 

The first of Hesse's books to be published in Russian was a translation of 'Peter Camenzind' in 1910, before the Revolution. The next was 'Siddhartha: An Indian Novel' in 1924, after which the writer's name was almost forgotten.
For a long time, it was not possible to publish Hesse's prose in the USSR. It was only in 1961 that Vsevolod Rozanov (1915-1985) translated Hesse's earlier novel, 'Beneath the Wheel'. In an attempt to gain permission to publish Hesse, Rozanov and the second translator, Dora Karavkina (1896-1977), resorted to a clever trick. In the publication application, Hesse was referred to as an 'outstanding representative of 19th-century German critical realism', since Soviet censors were less stringent with 'old' writers.
The novel became highly significant in the cultural life of the USSR during the 1970s, and its title became a widely recognized expression in the Russian language.

OCLC locates two copies of this edition: in the UC Berkley Library and the University of Tübingen Library (Germany).