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[THE RADUGA PUBLISHING HOUSE] Kak primus zakhotel fordom sdelat’sia. Mashinnaia skazochka [i.e. How the Primus Stove Wanted to Become a Ford. A Machine Fable]

Agnivtsev, N.

Item #2722

Leningrad; Moscow: Raduga, 1927. [12] pp.: ill. 22,5x18,5 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Spine restored, foxing on back cover, small water stains and light soiling on inner margin, otherwise very good. Second edition.

This early Soviet children’s book features a Primus stove that is considered a symbol of Soviet everyday life in the 1920-1930s.

Due to the lack of private kitchens with gas stoves in the early USSR, portable stoves modeled on the Primus became widespread soon after the Civil War. Their production began at the Kolchugin factory in Moscow in 1922. During the 1920s–1930s, the Primus stove was an integral part of communal kitchens. The brand name turned into a regular household word in Russian. Writers like Zoshchenko, Kharms, and Mayakovsky frequently featured the “primus” in their works, capturing its noisy, dangerous nature as an unavoidable fact of domestic life. In Bulgakov’s novel about Master and Margarita, the cat Behemoth utters a line about the “primus” that became a popular catchphrase for a harmless activity. Meanwhile, the Ford company was a symbol of success, prosperity, and “the American dream” within the Soviet context. In this children’s story, the Primus stove is dreaming of a more exciting life. He doesn't want to spend his days on a kitchen shelf, stuck between a pot and a pan. He decides he deserves better. After all, the Primus stove reasons, he runs on gasoline just like a Ford car does. He dreams that if only he had wheels, he could outrun trams and omnibuses and be faster than barefoot street urchins! Since this seems so logical, he decides to take his brilliant idea to the top: to Mikhail Kalinin, the "All-Union Elder" who settles the affairs of workers and peasants.

The Primus stove gets in line to see Kalinin and is surprised to find him not a tall, terrifying figure dripping in gold, but an ordinary man. Kalinin patiently talks the ambitious stove out of his impossible dreams and reassures him that, in fact, the Primus stove is incredibly important to the people just as he is. The author of this story in verse, Nikolai Agnivtsev (1888–1932) was a Russian poet and playwright who collaborated with many cabaret theaters. In 1917, together with director K. A. Mardzhanishvili, Agnivtsev founded a cabaret theater in Petrograd and toured with its troupe. In 1921, he moved to Europe for a few years but came back. Upon his return to Soviet Russia, he contributed to satirical magazines, wrote sketches for the stage and circus, and authored children's books. The poems included in his books “How the Primus Stove Wanted to Become a Ford” (1925) and “Your Mechanical Friends” (1926) are educational in nature. The theme of internationalism, the friendship among people of different nationalities, and the struggle of the poorest strata of bourgeois society for freedom and human dignity is explored in his long poem “The Rickshaw Man from Shanghai” (1927). The book design was created by Konstantin Eliseev (1890–1968), a prolific artist whose career spanned theater, cinema, satire, and book illustration. He began in St. Petersburg in the 1910s, where he worked as a set designer for theater lobbies and drew caricatures of actors. He also published satirical drawings in newspapers and magazines. In 1918, he studied at the Free State Art Studios under V. Belyaev. In 1919 Eliseev moved to Velikiye Luki. There, he worked as a set designer for the newly founded Velikoluksky Theater and met the young director Sergei Eisenstein.

This led to a significant collaboration; together, they designed sets for productions like Maxim Gorky’s “Na dne” [The Lower Depths; 1920]. In the early 1920s, Eliseev continued his theater work in Minsk at the First Belarusian Drama Theater. Upon returning to Moscow, he became a mainstay of the Soviet satirical press. For decades, his political and everyday-life cartoons were featured in major publications like “Gudok”, “Krokodil”, and “Muzrilka”. During this time, he also took lessons from the engraver I. Pavlov and was friends with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. His earlier projects with Eisenstein brought him to cinema. In 1938, at Eisenstein's invitation, he worked as a costume designer for the epic film “Alexander Nevsky” and later contributed to “Lenin in 1918” (1939). During World War II, while evacuated to Tyumen, he contributed to the war effort by drawing cartoons for the magazine “Frontovoi Yumor” [Frontline Humor] and producing propaganda materials. In the post-war period, Eliseev worked as a costume and makeup artist for the Moscow Circus and collaborated with comedian Arkady Raikin’s theater in Leningrad. From 1959 to 1961, he headed the cartoonists’ studio of the Krokodil magazine. Eliseev brought the same illustrative manner from his satirical work to his children's books. His depiction of Kalinin, for instance, shares the distinct, recognizable style of his Krokodil caricatures.

Worldcat shows the only copy located in Princeton University.

Price: $3,500.00