Moritz Ossipowitsch Wolff

Moritz Ossipowitsch Wolff

Moritz Ossipowitsch Wolff (born November 12, ^jul. / 24. November  1825 ^greg. In Warsaw ; † February 19 ^jul. / 3. March  1883 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; and Maurice Wolff , Polish Maurycy Bolesław Wolff , Russian Маврикий Осипович Вольф ) was a major publisher and bookseller in Russia .

Moritz Wolff began an apprenticeship as a bookseller in Warsaw at the age of 15 and then worked in Paris and Leipzig . Via Cracow and Lviv he came to a bookstore in Vilnius and worked in Isakov's bookstore in Saint Petersburg from 1848 , where he headed the French department. At the same time he began to publish Polish literature, a. a. Works by Mickiewicz . For a while he was the only significant Polish publisher.

In 1853 he started his own "universal bookstore" on the Nevsky Prospect . At the same time he began to work in the “M. O. Wolff Handelsgesellschaft “to publish Russian books. His first Russian work was a manual of mechanics . He moved Henry Buckles History of Civilization in England , world history Friedrich Schlosser , Charles Darwin's Origin of Species , Kuno Fischer's History of Philosophy and Adolphe Thiers ' History of the French Revolution , but also collected works of Pushkin , Lermontov and Lessing , Dante's Divine Comedy with Illustrations by Gustave Doré and Goethe's Faust in Russian . Although the importation of Mickiewicz 's works had been banned in Russia since the first Polish uprising, in 1882 he was able to present Mickiewicz's Collected Works in Russian. He also published the Proverbs of the Russian People (1861) and the second edition of the Annotated Dictionary of the Living Greater Russian Language (1880–1882) by the ethnographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dal .

With translations by James Fenimore Cooper , Jules Verne and Walter Scott , he was aimed primarily at young readers. He also edited a number of magazines. During his Siberian exile, Lenin read the illustrated news from the bookseller magazines of the M. O. Wolff Society .

At a time when literary clubs were banned or at least suspicious, Wolff's bookstore also served as a meeting place for St. Petersburg writers.

After his death, the bookstore and publisher continued to operate until the Russian Revolution in 1917, when they were nationalized .

Moritz Wolff's son Ludwig fled to Germany . His grandson Andreas Wolff opened a bookstore in 1931 in what was then Kaiserallee (today Bundesallee ) in Berlin-Friedenau (see also “ Literary ” on the Friedenau page). After the Second World War , he set up the Suhrkamp Verlag with Peter Suhrkamp in Frankfurt . He returned to his bookstore in Berlin in 1955 and founded the Friedenauer Presse in 1963 , which was headed by Moritz Wolff's great-granddaughter Katharina Wagenbach-Wolff until 2017 .

literature

• Doris Liebermann : The Tsar of Books. A Polish publisher with a German name makes a career in St. Petersburg Die Zeit , October 2, 2003
• Literaturnaja Entsiklopedija, Moscow 1929–1939 sv Вольф
• С. Ф. Либрович, На книжном посту. Воспоминания, записки, документы, St. Petersburg and Moscow 1916, reprint Tallinn and Moscow 1993
• Andreas Wolff: A bookseller in St. Petersburg around 1860: About my grandfather. Recorded , Berlin: Wolff 1967

Web links

• Literature by and about Moritz Ossipowitsch Wolff in the catalog of the German National Library