Academia (from Platonic Academy[1]) was a Soviet publishing house prior to fusion with Goslitizdat. The house employed many eminent Russian graphic artists (Nikolai Akimov, Veniamin Belkin, Leonid Khizhinsky, Vladimir Konashevich, Mark Kirnarsky, Dmitry Mitrokhin, Leo Mülhaupt, Sergei Pozharsky, Pavel Shillingovsky, etc.) and issued over one thousand books during its existence (1922–1937).[1]
Academia was founded as a private publishing house at the Petrograd University. It came under the Soviet State Institute of Arts’ History shortly thereafter and was reformed to state publishing joint-stock company. The 1922 edition of The Works of Plato was first to bear Academia’s logo. There are four known alterations of Academia logo (all by Lyubarski), which differ by house’s name placement. In 1929 the publishing house was transferred from Leningrad to Moscow, and the woodcut artists were employed (Vladimir Favorsky, Andrey Goncharov, Aleksei Kravchenko, Mikhail Pikov, Nikolai Piskarev, Mikhail Polyakov, and Georgy Yecheistov).
Academia failed to accomplish its issuing. Several books, such as Michel de Montaigne's Essais, Demosthenes' Orations, Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Tacitus' Annals or the Divine Comedy, remained unpublished. Additionally, the issuing of a declared 5,300 copies (1935, 492 pages) of Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky was cancelled. Only a few examples, that turned a bibliophilic rarity, are known.[2] The last head of Academia was Lev Kamenev.[3] In 1938-39 Goslitizdat issued several books, marked with “the book was compiled by the publishing house Academia” (“книга подготовлена издательством "Academia").