“Human Faces, Character Masks: On Alexander Eliasberg's Picture Gallery of Russian Literature (1922)” provides a biobibliographical description of this special volume as a small form of philological ekphrasis. The bilingual (German/Russian) edition from 1922 is outwardly captivating due to its bibliophile book design, which was of particular importance to the publisher Woldemar Klein for the books of his Orchis publishing house. In this article, the collection of portraits and writing samples of Russian writers from Vasily Trediakovsky to Anna Akhmatova will be portrayed itself. The focus is on the image-text relationships, particularly the iconographic canonisation strategies of the editor Alexander Eliasberg and their support through the introduction by Thomas Mann.

This article is written in German.