Bookvica

[RADUGA] Odnodnevki [i.e. Mayflies]

BIANKI, Vitalii V.

Item #2909

Illustrated by M. Rakhmanina and Sergei Rakhmanin. Leningrad; Moscow: Raduga, 1925. [16] pp., including wrappers: color ill. 22×18.1 cm [8 5/8×7 1/8 in.]. Original publisher’s illustrated wrappers. Light wear and foxing to the wrappers, occasional spotting internally; otherwise in good condition.

An early Raduga picture book by Vitalii Bianki, built around the life cycle of the mayfly. The insects spend approximately three years as larvae at the bottom of the water, emerge into the air, and live as winged adults for only a single day before laying their eggs and dying—the contrast between the “thousand days” underwater and one day in the air providing the central structure of the story.
The book is lithographed in a restricted palette of light blue, green, and black, with the illustrations extending across the pages to depict the pond as a connected ecological system rather than presenting the animals as isolated figures. Contemporary library records credit the drawings jointly to M.Rakhmanina and Sergei Rakhmanin.

Sergei Evgenievich Rakhmanin (1891–1957) was both a children’s writer and an illustrator, particularly active in the illustrated children’s book of the 1920s. He worked repeatedly with Bianki for Raduga: among their collaborations were Rybii dom (1925), Liagushonok (1926), and other natural-history picture books. He also wrote and illustrated his own books for children.
The second illustrator is M. Shatalova-Rakhmanina, another Raduga artist of the period. Her independently published picture book Figury (1926) is particularly interesting for its strongly geometric, Suprematist- Constructivist visual language; it has been discussed in scholarship on the avant-garde tendencies of Soviet children’s illustration. The collaboration of the two Rakhmanins in Odnodnevki is therefore noteworthy as an early example of natural-history illustration being treated through the simplified forms and limited-color lithography characteristic of the experimental Soviet children’s book of the mid-1920s.

Worldcat shows no copies.

Status: On Hold