[HARBIN IMPRINT] English grammar. Aнглийская грамматика.

Harbin (Manchuria, China) : [s.n.], 1921. Octavo (185 x 150 mm), original printed wrappers (chipped at corners, along spine, and at edges of lower wrapper); pp. 184, [1], [blank]; text in English and Russian Cyrillic; last blank with wet-stamp of Harbin bookseller Vakhrusheva; upper corners dog-eared, some very occasional marginalia in pencil or pen, otherwise internally clean and sound.

A rare Harbin imprint, apparently unrecorded.

This rather exotic English grammar for Russian speakers was printed in Harbin, Manchuria, shortly after World War One. At this time, the vast majority of Harbin’s population were immigrants from the Russian Empire. Many had settled there soon after the completion of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway in 1898, but in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and Civil War there had been a second massive influx of people:

‘In 1920 more than 100,000 defeated Russian White Guards and refugees retreated to Harbin, which became a major center of White Russian émigrés and the largest Russian enclave outside the Soviet Union. Karlinsky noted that a major difference with the Russian émigrés who arrived in Harbin was: “Unlike the Russian émigrés who went to Paris or Prague or even to Shanghai, the new residents of Harbin were not a minority surrounded by a foreign population. They found themselves instead in an almost totally Russian city, populated mainly by people with roots in the south of European Russia.” The city had a Russian school system, as well as publishers of Russian-language newspapers and journals. The Russian Harbintsy[b] community numbered around 120,000 at its peak in the early 1920s. Many of Harbin’s Russians were wealthy, which sometimes confused foreign visitors who expected them to be poor, with for instance the American writer Harry A. Franck in his 1923 book Wanderings in North China writing the Russian “ladies as well gowned as at the Paris races [who] strolled with men faultlessly garbed by European standards”, leading him to wonder how they had achieved this “deceptive appearance”.’ (Wikipedia)

Not traced in OCLC.