These images are of the title page and inscribed flyleaf of Burgess’s copy of Eugene Onegin, in the original Russian. Dated ’14 July 1961 Leningrad’ this is likely to be a copy acquired on Burgess and his first wife Lynne’s holiday in Russia in the summer of that year. As well as reading Dostoyevsky and a number of Russian primers, Burgess had memorised parts of Pushkin’s verse novel during his studies of the Russian language, from which he compiled a modified Russian vocabulary of around 200 words that formed the basis of Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange.

The inscription is not in Burgess’s hand. If anybody can make it out we would be very pleased to hear from them.

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