Peter Harrington
ZAMYATIN, Yevgeny Ivanonvich, & Nadezhda Liubavina (illus.). 
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Vereshki (“Waves”). St Petersburg: Today, 1918. ¶ Octavo, pp. 4. With 5 linocut illustrations. Printed on thick paper stock. Linocut-printed wrappers, wire-stitched. Bookseller’s stamps and lettering on rear wrapper verso. Head of spine starting: in very good condition. ¶ First and only edition, with skilful later hand-colouring in blue and red pencil by one O. Danilova. She also added a hand-drawn bookplate and inscriptions to the inside of the front wrapper, dated 1936. One of approximately one thousand copies, the booklet was produced by the artist’s collective Segodnia (“Today”), founded by the avant-garde artist Vera Ermolaeva and who specialized in handmade picture books inspired by the lubki tradition. Segodnia produced less than 20 booklets of poetry and children’s material, all in small runs of under 1,500 copies. In each publication, the aesthetic combination of text and image was carefully considered and crafted to form a single design. Alongside Zamyatin, authors and artists who were published by the collective included Sergei Yesenin, Nathan Altman, and Nadezhda Liubavina, the latter of whom provided the linocut illustrations here. However, the difficult political and economic situation meant that the collective was short-lived and disbanded in 1919. “The roots of Leningrad’s subsequent – and renowned- children’s book publishing industry can clearly be seen in the books and broadsheets put out by Segodnia. The modernists were the first Russian artists to pay attention to folk art, lowbrow urban art, and the ‘clumsy’ drawings of children. Liubavina’s interest in the techniques and principles of naïve art, and her desire to penetrate child psychology, are apparent in her book illustrations published by Segodnia” (Shatskikh, p. 39). We have been unable to trace Danilova. The inside front wrapper is lettered “Colouring is mine. 1936. A wet month - a leaf fall” (our translation). She also altered the price on the back cover from 50 kopeks to 20 rubles and 50 kopeks. As usual for Segodnia’s publications, Vereshki is rare. RareBookHub records only two appearances at auction in the last 20 years: Bonhams 2013 and Sotheby’s 2006. ¶ Aleksandra Shatskikh & Katherine Foshko Tsan (trans.), Vitebsk: The Life of Art, 2007.
4000,- EUR Sachgebiete: Kinderbücher, Kulturgeschichte, Illustrierte Bücher, Literatur ab ca. 1900, Russland Kontakt zum
Differenzbesteuert/Subject to margin taxation
