A Collector's Passion

When Valery Blinov started collecting early Russian children’s books in the 1970s, few people took him seriously. His collection was a curiosity which more often than not raised a smile ...

Now, after years of trawling through second-hand and antiquarian bookshops in search of the occasional rarity, Valery Blinov has amassed some 11,000 illustrations, posters, impressions and books for young children. His collection constitutes a cultural treasure which in many ways reflects Russian society in one of the most fascinating periods of its history.

Blinov describes himself as a “hereditary booklover.” The nucleus of his collection was an inheritance from his grandfather, an editor of Izvestiya newspaper in the 1920s. Though the books he inherited were mostly for adults, it was the children’s works among them which attracted his attention.

“I felt a certain emotional resonance in these books,” he said in an interview with Russian Life, “because children’s books portray completely different eras and do so on a very emotional, intimate level.”

Blinov’s collection spans the period from the very first Russian children’s books in the later part of the 19th century to the replacement of lithography by offset printing in the late 1930s.

He explained his interest in lithography as opposed to offset in his desire to sense the creator in each work.

“Offset printing completely destroys a drawing because it breaks it up into pixels – a synthetic reproduction rather than the original,” he explained. “Those printed lithographically carry the direct mark of the creator – each book has an uninterrupted link with this creator and... is a genuine work of art.”

One of the first Russian children’s book illustrators was Yelena Polenova, sister of the Itinerant artist Vassily Polenov. Influenced by Western artists of the day such as Britain’s William Morris, she was interested mainly in the decorative arts and man’s physical surroundings. At the same time, the Polenov family was famous for its commitment to education – at their estate south of Moscow they ran a school for local peasant children. So it was that children’s books seemed a natural outlet for Polenova’s art.

These were early days for printed illustrations in Russia – they were still relatively rare even in 19th-century Europe. The blurring of colors on the printed page proved a problem for artists, to which Polenova found an unorthodox solution. She arranged for the printing of one of her earliest books, War of Mushrooms, in black and white, bought back the entire print run and painted over it herself. Later, she introduced a technique whereby a black line was drawn between colors to make them more marked.

Close associates of Polenova’s from the Abramtsevo artists’ circle also contributed to children’s books. The group, sponsored by the industrialist Savva Mamontov and based in his estate outside Moscow, included, most notably, Viktor Vasnetsov.

But it was Ivan Bilibin, Vasnetsov’s student, who raised children’s book illustration to a genre in its own right. At the turn of the century, he illustrated a series of 10-12 books which were produced at a printing house better known for printing money. The quality was exceptional. Books like the fairytale Vasilisa Prekrasnaya (Vasilisa the Beautiful) represented the height of the era’s sumptuous, decorative style.

The next group of artists to take up the challenge was the Mir Iskusstva [World of Art] association. Drawing on contemporary French art and previous eras of Russian art, their work was often sensuous and highly aesthetic.

However, the days of mass literature were still far in the future. Russia’s first genuine children’s book publisher, Iosif Knebel, began producing high quality (and highly expensive) books illustrated by Mir Iskusstva artists, with print runs of around 1-3000 copies. Because of their value, these books were treasured by their owners and have generally survived well to the present day.

One of the best known of these books is perhaps the first Russian alphabet, illustrated by the leader of the movement, Alexander Benois. His unorthodox illustrations of letters included, for the letter “u”, the word uragan, Russian for hurricane, shown swirling through the normally docile city of St Petersburg.

If pre-revolutionary Russian children’s books were the domain of the affluent, the 1917 revolution opened the way for a mass culture. Children’s literature proved to be a focal point of the Russian avant garde, and the early Soviet years were flooded by a whole spectrum of oddities, many of which have become very famous.

Vladimir Lebedev’s cubist NEPman is perhaps as well known on his own as he is as an illustration to Samuil Marshak’s story Morozhenoye (Ice-Cream). Lazar Lisitsky’s suprematist Rasskaz o Dvukh Kvadratakh (Tale of Two Squares), meanwhile, may not seem like bedtime reading for the average four-year-old, but is now regarded as one of the most valuable children’s books ever produced.

As is inevitable in revolutionary art, sometimes the enthusiasm of the new generation of artists went clearly beyond the bounds of decency for such a delicate genre – Boris Grigoriyev’s Detsky Ostrov (Children’s Island, 1920) contained openly erotic elements.

Other works, though, were extremely educational. The Chichagov sisters (Constructivist artists) produced illustrated books like Akhmed v Moskve (Ahmed in Moscow, 1924), about a Central Asian country boy coming to grips with city life.

Such was the prestige of early Soviet children’s literature that it was considered obligatory for every self-respecting artist to illustrate at least one book. Many adult writers of the day also participated, and poets as different as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak had their work published in this form.

The most accomplished adult writer to move to children’s books was Daniil Kharms, leader of the OBERIU (Real Art Society) movement. Paradoxically, Kharms’ absurdity, waywardness and complete detachment from reality made for excellent reading for children.

The most successful works of the period were created as a result of writer-artist partnerships. The most famous of these was that of Marshak and Lebedev, who managed to create a fine equilibrium between text and illustration in such works as Ice Cream.

For the first 15 years of Soviet power, children’s literature went from strength to strength. While paper and ink shortages at the beginning of the decade made print runs miniscule, by its end, some titles were being produced with print runs in six figures. Along with state publishers like Detgiz (State Children’s Publishing House), the New Economic Policy encouraged rival private enterprises like Leningrad’s Raduga. In the eight years of its existence, Raduga produced thousands of original titles, all lithographically.

People began to show an interest in Russian children’s books abroad too. The 1925 Paris exhibition had a major section devoted to the genre. For the first time, children’s books were recognized as a serious movement in world art, and one which came mainly from Russia.

This combination of an explosion of creativity, economic prosperity and more efficient production methods conspired to make the 1920s and early 1930s the golden age of Russian children’s books.

Until the mid 1930s, there had been little censorship in children’s books, with many writers and artists able to express themselves in ways that they may not have dared elsewhere.

One particularly politicized early-1920s classic was Tarakanishche (Big Cockroach), Korney Chukovsky’s story of an insect which terrorizes the animal kingdom, illustrated by Sergey Chekhonin. This was a carefully concealed attack on the Bolshevik movement, though too early to have contained any veiled references to Stalin.

A decade later, such dissidence in Soviet children’s literature was no longer possible. The increasing power of Stalin could not fail to have an effect on this creative genre, as it had on all the others. In 1936, an article in Pravda denounced leading children’s artists like Vladimir Lebedev and Vladimir Konashevich for being anti-communist and anti-Soviet.

Many then served time in the camps or were forced to work in terror of their work failing to pass the censorship commission. Few actually perished, although Kharms and his illustrator, Vera Yermolayeva, both perished in the Gulag. Lebedev and several others continued to work under the jackboot, but what they did no longer had any real artistic value.

The wake left by the denouncements and the generally cloying atmosphere of the period was a socialist realist wasteland of militarized little boys and girls driving tanks, wearing gasmasks and firing rockets at external and internal “enemies.” A shining example is Samuil Marshak and Aleksey Pakhomov’s Nash Otryad (Our Detachment, 1935).

Some books,  like Lev Kassil’s Budyonnyshi (Little Budyonnys, after the Civil War cavalry hero Semyon Budyonny, 1935) depicted Soviet leaders posing with little children.

Only Stalin’s demise and postwar prosperity brought an end to this trough in the history of Russian children’s books. In the mid-1950s, Lebedev, Konashevich and others revived the genre, but there was little produced in this period that was genuinely new. Children’s books only became a mass industry again in the 1960s and 1970s.

In those years, the government poured huge amounts of money into children’s books and tens of thousands of titles were produced. Talented artists, who in the absence of a genuine market for art would otherwise have spent most of their lives penniless, were guaranteed a steady income. One of the best examples was Ilya Kabakov, now a highly successful emigre artist based in New York.

Like the Soviet system itself, this second flourish of Russian children’s literature, so dependent on subsidization, could not last. The end of state funding, the increasing domination of the television cartoon, and then, later, the advent of the computer and the interactive CD ROM, brought about what Blinov has called the “second death” of the Russian children’s book.

All may not be lost, however, for this fine and peculiarly Russian creative genre. So long as there are books, there will continue to be children’s books. Currently, Blinov said, many artists with no money to publish are producing books exclusively for their children and friends’ children, so the cultural heritage remains.

Also, as the children’s book genre began its decline in the 1980s, interest in its history began to grow, not just among homegrown collectors like Blinov, but internationally as well. At Sotheby’s and Christies’ auctions, some rarities have been able to fetch as much as $20,000.

Many of the ideas used in early children’s books are in demand again as well. Last year, items from Blinov’s collection were featured in the exhibition, Russian Children’s Books and Illustrations of the First Half of the 20th Century, at Nashe Naslediye (Our Heritage) magazine. It provided a colossal meeting of minds, as children of the books’ illustrators came together with admen and graphic artists.

“Artists saw the collection as a kind of huge database of creative ideas for computer graphics, for advertisements, for magazine graphics, for packaging and so on,” Blinov explained. It was “an endless freshness of creative ideas in graphics, and in anything which can be published.”