To Whom It May Concern: The Story of Victor Ilyitch Seroff

New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Very Good+ in Fair dj. 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. [nice solid clean copy, slight fading to cloth at ends of spine; the jacket is a bit on the tattered side, with numerous small chips, tears, etc.]. Very uncommon account of the early life of Victor Ilyitch Seroff (1902-1979), whom the author (Werner) met in Paris in the late 1920s, and found so fascinating that he "laid aside other projects and devoted himself to writing [Seroff's] story." Seroff was a young musician who had escaped from Russia in 1920 "on the last American oil tanker to leave [Batoum, his birthplace in the Caucasus] before the Bolsheviks took it over." The book is written in the first person (i.e. narrated by Seroff himself), who describes "his desperate and sometimes humorous effort to gain self-support and continue an artistic career in Constantinople, Vienna and in Paris" during the 1920s. Of particular interest is the last chapter, which presents "a new and penetrating study of the late Isadora Duncan, [including] a moving narrative of her last years and death." (Isadora had attended a piano recital in Paris where she was impressed by Seroff's playing, and he soon found himself drawn into her circle of intimates.) He later became a musical biographer of some note, writing books about Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Ravel and others, as well as a biography of Isadora Duncan herself. .