Our Notes & References

First edition in the original Russian, with Parain’s striking illustrations – Teffi’s only work for children.

At the height of her career, before the October Revolution, the prominent Russian humorist writer and poetess Nadezhda Teffi (pseud. for Nadezhda Lokhvitskaia, 1872-1952) “was admired by literally everyone, from postal and telegraph officials and pharmacy students — as we know, the lowest level of readers of those years, — to… Emperor Nicholas II” (Odoevtseva, our translation). In the 1920s, she settled in Paris, and wrote this symbolic adaptation of a famous Slavic fairytale of a forest witch called Baba Iaga.

The famous, colourful illustrations were created by the Ukrainian-born graphic artist and illustrator Nathalie Parain (also Natalia Paren, née Chelpanova, 1897-1958). In 1926, she married the cultural attaché of the French Embassy Brice Parain and moved to France. A former student of VKhUTEMAS (Higher state artistic and technical studios in Moscow), she illustrated a series of Russian and French books in the constructivist style, including the ‘Père Castor’ picture books which became classics of children’s literature in France. In 1944, she received a prize from the Académie des Beaux Arts.

Printed on nice thick paper, this edition is decorated with 17 chromolithographic images, including seven full-page and one on a two-page spread. The style of the illustrations shows influences of cubist collage art, Soviet constructivism, and strikingly bright geometric forms of the suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich.

The work was also published in a French adaptation the same year, by Flammarion, with the same illustrations.

Bibliography

Tishkova, Olga. “Narodnaia skazka N.A. Teffi ‘Baba Iaga’: folklornye istoki i individualno-avtorskoe nachalo” // Filologicheskie nauki. Voprosy teorii I praktiki. 2018. №5-1 (83); Odoevtseva, Irina. Na beregakh Seny, “Zvezda”, 1988, No. 8, p. 167.