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[EARLY SOVIET KYIV BOOK FOR CHILDREN] Galoshi [i.e. Galoshes]

Dirsh, N., Rachiov, E.

Item #2457

Kyiv: Kultura, 1930. 10 pp.: ill., including front wrapper. 20x14 cm. Original illustrated front wrapper preserved. No back cover (blank), few minor holes along spine, light soiling of pages, otherwise good.

First and only edition. Very rare. In Russian.

This book is an early work by Soviet artist and animator Evgenii Rachiov (1906–1997). He was born in Siberia but after the Civil war he got over half of the country and settled on the Black Sea coast. In 1928, he graduated from the Kuban Art College, then studied at the Kiev Art Institute. Since 1930, he began collaborating in various publishing houses as an illustrator. Two years later he moved from Kyiv to Moscow where continued to contribute to children’s book design. Rachiov is best known as an animal artist who illustrated folk tales of various peoples.
This book develops a relevant contemporary topic of rubber production and represents the genre of children’s “industrial” books that were popular in the 1920s. They explained to young readers various processes of production and cultivation to easier educate a new generation of socialist workers. The author Natalia Dirsh had written several books of this type, including “Sakhar” [Sugar], “Bumaga” [Paper] and “Galoshi” [Galoshes].
The account starts with galoshes popular on cold rainy days – and then the authors transfer children’s imagination to hot South America where the path of galoshes starts. The book shows how local workers harvested latex before heating and transportation by steamships. The author writes: the cargo is delivered to Leningrad port and then is supplied to Soviet factories; there it is processed and mixed with other substances to obtain rubber. Rubber products are placed on the following pages: tires on car wheels, a toy elephant, different shoes, including galoshes. The last page expectedly tells about Soviet substitutes of South America latex. One of the noteworthy projects of Soviet agriculture was chondrilla plantations in Central Asia. In 1930, it was supposed to establish experimental plantations and reserves of сhondrilla in the Kazakh republic and guayule plantations in the Turkmen and Azerbaijani republics. These experiments didn’t solve the shortage of imported rubber, but they hastened the creation of Soviet synthetic rubber at the Yaroslavl plant in 1932.
The pages are mostly covered with the illustrations on colored backgrounds while the text pieces are located on one third of each page.
To accommodate the ship on the page (and not overload the design with many details), Rachiov turned the ship diagonally. In the same position but much smaller, the ship is depicted on the previous page – a worker leading a carriage is drawn large and the far ship is reduced in size and put away to an upper corner. The rubber products are also turned and placed freely.

In all, an interesting echo of early Soviet culture.

Worldcat doesn’t track this edition.

Price: $1,900.00