Bookvica

[SUVOROV] Gigant [i.e. The Giant]

Piskunov, K.

Item #2098

Moscow: GIZ, 1930. 32 p. 21,7x17,5 cm. Original illustrated wrapper. Near fine condition. Slight soiling on the right upper corner of the wrapper, Soviet bookshop stamp at the rear wrapper.

Design of the book by Pavel Suvorov, who also created montage designs of children’s photo books ‘Krasin in the Ice’, ‘Wings of the Soviets’, ‘How Human Thought Up God’. An art historian Mikhail Karasik wrote that Suvorov’s impressive method “to visually construct this book was manipulations with pictures, a combination of fragments, close-up views and panoramas”.

The book itself is a journalistic essay about the building of one of the most well-known stepp kolkhoz of late1920s – ‘The Giant’ in Rostov region of South Russia - a story about the development of the steppes, about the first settlers and their life in tents, about the construction of a headquarters, followed by dormitories, hospitals, schools - illustrated with a documentary film of photographs, turned into an epic work. The scale of field work is conveyed through filming rows
of tractors, combines, plows, seeders, and sheaf binders. One of the photographs shows a tower installed in the middle of a field, from which the cameraman and assistants film all these parades of agricultural machinery. The photograph of the “Budenovka tractor driver” has become widely known in many publications: during the Civil War, she fought with the whites in the same steppes, only before she drove a horse, and now she drove a tractor. The same tractor driver with
a huge wrench and her assistant with a hammer are “fixing” the tractor, or rather posing in another popular photograph - “Heavy layers of earth stuck around the wheels of the tractor.” The book ends with a telegram to Moscow: “The spring sowing of 1930 has been completed in full.” Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was right: “The Bolsheviks conquered both the wind and the earth.”
Suvorov masterly embroided the photography in the narrative of the story, in which one of his main heroes is another ‘giant’ – the American tractor Fordson, that was widely used in the first stages of the development of the land.
One of the best examples of Soviet children’s photo books of the 1930s.

Not found in Worldcat.

Price: $1,250.00