Our Notes & References

“One of the first experiments in the development of Soviet children’s books” (quoted in Karpov, our translation here and below).

First and only edition, this copy one of the preferred numbered hand-coloured examples, this one #88 out of only 125.

Scarce, especially in original watercolouring: we could confirm only two such examples at libraries (University of Michigan and NYPL), while other libraries provide no information on colouring or hand-numbering (Stanford, Getty, Johns Hopkins, BL, and BNF). The copy at Van Abbe Museum (Netherlands) may have questionable colouring, as it bears no number and has a price notation on the verso. We could trace only three coloured examples through auctions in recent decades, including one in 1981 and another in 2005 without an indicated number. No coloured copies at auctions in Russia, and just two uncoloured.

With the aim of “filling a gap in children’s literature, almost non-existent [at that time]” (Karpov), the artists’ collective Segodnia [Today] produced avant-garde and innovative children’s books in the first post-revolutionary years in Russia. Founded by the artist Vera Ermolaeva, the group was active in 1918–19, a period marked by significant shortages of paper and printing technology. The artists resorted to semi-manual methods, employing traditional techniques of engraving and lithography. Their small-format series — just eight pages including wrappers — were printed in runs of 1,000 on a hand press. The illustrations were cut in linoleum and printed from the original blocks.

In each edition, 125 copies were hand-numbered and intended for hand-colouring; these carried an indication of this tirage de tête on the verso of the title and omitted the printed price on the lower wrapper, which bore the cubo-futurist publishing mark of Segodnia designed by Ermolaeva. The coloured examples appear to have been sold at almost six times the standard price (Karpov).

Written by the modernist writer Aleksei Remizov (1877–1957), whom Marina Tsvetaeva described as the creator of “living treasures of the Russian soul and language”, this phantasmagorical short tale blends motifs from traditional fairy tales with the nonsensical imagery of the Russian Futurists, using both folkloric and deliberately anachronistic vocabulary. Each page is illustrated with linocuts by Ekaterina Turova, an associate of Ermolaeva and of the artist Mikhail Le-Dantiu in the Futurist group ‘Beskrovnoe ubiistvo’ [Bloodless Murder], an anarchic and absurdist collective active between 1914 and 1918 which anticipated the later work of the OBERIU group of Russian Futurists.

Remizov will leave the USSR in 1922 and later develop a prolific artistic career in France.

Provenance

Private NYC collection.

Bibliography

Not in MoMA.

Karpov, Dmitrii. “Artel khudozhnikov ‘Segodnia'” // Antikvariat. Predmety iskusstva i kollektsionirovaniia. Dec. 2003.

Tsvetaeva, Marina. Sobranie sochinenii v 7 t. Vol. 4, Moskva, 1994, p. 619.