Illustrations by Lev Tokmakov for Fairy Tales about Animals, 1973:
Part of my collection of Soviet-era children’s books:
— Mummy was a robot, daddy was a small nonstick kitchen utensil
—Dedicated to you but you weren’t glistening
—Klop (The Bedbug)
—Smoking crack in the cosmic egg
Searching for information about the illustrator I came upon an interesting quote from Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991 by Catriona Kelly:
…children’s books became, as they had been in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a refuge for talented people who could not express their anti-realist sensibilities in adult art — illustrators as well as writers. Certainly, people working in this area did not have carte blanche. The illustrator Vitaly Statsinsky, editor of the children’s magazines Jolly Pictures and The Cottage Loaf (1956-64 and 1967-72 respectively), recalled how ‘every month they [the censors] carpeted us and wanted to know why we had hardly any Young Pioneers in the paper, and lots of silly bunnies and ponies and so on.’ But artists such as Statsinsky continued to draw their ‘bunnies and ponies,’ sometimes in the form of delicate wood engravings or pen-and-ink sketches, sometimes in a more robust, folk-inspired style, and sometimes according to the emerging canons of post-modernism. Grigory Pavlishin’s very brightly colored and psychedelic illustrations to Makarova’s Tale of an Ant called Ant, for example, were a good deal fresher than the poem itself. Prominent illustrators of the 1960s and 1970s displayed a wide range of talents, from the broad-brush style of Lev Tokmakov, whose robust figures looked like the decorations on painted ceramics, to the elegantly wayward gouaches and watercolors of the Traugot brothers or the emphatic designs of Mai Miturich, whose work for The Tales of Uncle Kornei (1972) included a sketch of a raging, scarlet-bearded ancient, his chest bearing, Tiresias style, two mud-pie-shaped, puce-colored bosoms.
Raduga published a couple books in English with Tokmakov’s illustrations (haven’t seen those). Here’s an interview with him “google-translated” into English.
I have one other Tokmakov book in this style which I’ll feature eventually.
