J. R. R. Tolkien – The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (Moscow, Prosveshchenie 1982) In 1982, the Moscow publishing house Просвещение (Prosveshchenie) issued a special edition of Tolkien’s The Hobbit intended for teaching English at Soviet pedagogical institutes. The book bears the full title The Hobbit, or There and Back Again and is printed in English, with only the colophon and publishing information given in Russian (Cyrillic). The publication has 159 pages and a soft cover. The text is abridged and adapted to suit English language students – some chapters are simplified or combined. According to the imprint, the book was designed “к чтению на III курсе педагогических институтов” (“for reading in the third year of pedagogical institutes”). At the time of its release, this edition represented one of the first publications of Tolkien’s work in the USSR in its original language. Although the text was not intended for general readers but for students, it has since become a sought-after rarity – precisely because of its unusual origin and limited educational purpose. The print run is reported to have been around 75,000 copies, yet well-preserved examples are now relatively rare.