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KUZMIN RUSSIAN CHILDREN's LITERATURE SEGODNYA RAR

KUZMIN, Mikhail Alekseevich (1872-1936). Dvum [For Two].

[Petrograd: Segodnya, 1919.] 8 pp., small 4to (205 x 153 mm). Original wrappers with linocut by Ekaterina Turova and printer's device designed by Vera Ermolaeva. Condition: minor soiling, top of backstrip partially split. One of 1,000 copies. first and only edition of kuzmin's only children's book. "Segodnya" (Today) was an artist's artel or artist's collective that met in V. Ermolaeva's apartment. A year after the October Revolution, they formed the world's first avant-garde children's book publisher. "The collapse of printing today has given birth to a new kind of 'handicraft'-art publishing. In St. Petersburg a cooperative of writers and artists has developed. They themselves compose and make the linocuts, they themselves set and print the work. One can find a measure of consolation in the fact that the present crisis makes us return to the fine old handcraft skills, which are now cheaper to use" (Tvorchestvo [Creativity], 1919). The artel broke up when the Commisariat of Enlightenment appointed Ermolaeva rector of the art academy in Vitebsk. She later died in The Gulag.