Economic Studies and Articles. The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Two earliest Lenin's books

[Lenin, Vladimir] Il'in, Vladimir [Economic Studies and Articles] Ekonomicheskie Etudy i Stat'i. [The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Process of the Development of the Internal Market for Large-Scale Industry]. Razvitie Kapitalizma v Rossii: Process Obrashcheniia Vnutrennego Rynka dlia Krupnoi Promyshlennosti.

S.-Peterburg, M.I. Vodovozova], 1899.
8vo, [4], 290 pp.; [2],IX,IV,480,II-VIII, [1] pp., 3 pl.

In contemporary quarter leather. Original wrappers preserved inside.
Near very good condition, small losses to spine, lightly rubbed, dampstaining to pages (vol.1). 

Economic Studies...

Lenin’s first legally published book and his first work to appear in book format. One of 1 200 copies published.

Printed in October 1898, the book appeared in bookstores on November 18, 1898. It was published under one of Lenin’s pseudonyms — Vladimir Il’in. The publisher, Maria Vodovozova, whose name does not appear in the edition, specialized in Marxist literature.
In 1897, Vodovozova had edited a posthumous collection of articles by her late husband, Russian economist Nikolai Vodovozov, titled 'Ekonomicheskie Etudy'. This publication reportedly inspired Lenin to publish his own work, and he later chose a similar title.
Lenin’s 'Ekonomicheskie Etudy' includes four previously unpublished articles and one that had already appeared in a periodical. The book analyzes the economic development of Russia from a Marxist perspective. All of the included articles were written while Lenin was in prison or in exile in Siberia.
The article 'K Kharakteristike Ekonomicheskogo Romantizma' ('On the Characterization of Economic Romanticism') had been published earlier in the journal 'Novoe Slovo' under the pseudonym Tulin. To write it, Lenin used the resources of one of the finest private libraries in Russia — Yudin’s Library in Krasnoyarsk, which was later purchased by the Library of Congress in 1906.
Lenin wrote to his sister asking whether it would be wise to include the article in the book, as 'Novoe Slovo' had been shut down by that time. He was concerned about possible censorship. To avoid scrutiny, he deliberately made the book more substantial in length, believing that a thicker volume would be less likely to require pre-publication censorship review.

Khronologicheskii Ukazatelʹ Proizvedenii V.I. Lenina, #134. The Bernstein-Souvarine Collection, #740.

Very rare. OCLC locates three copies of this edition: in the British Library, the NYPL and the University of Liverpool Library.

The Development of Capitalism...

Original legal edition of Lenin’s most important work on economics. This version of the text was never republished. The second edition, issued in 1908, was revised and published without the diagrams. One of 2 400 copies published.

The book was completed in August 1898 and published in March 1899 by Maria Vodovozova. In 1900, she was expelled from St. Petersburg, and her publishing house was shut down by the authorities. As with his first book, Lenin wrote this work while in prison and in exile, drawing on resources from Yudin’s renowned library.

Khronologicheskii Ukazatelʹ Proizvedenii V.I. Lenina, #269.