Lot 34A email save

DOBUZHINSKY, Msistlav Valeryanov (1875-1957). (ill

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[Berlin and Petrograd]: Z. I. Grzhebin, 1922. 14 pp. Folio (300 x 230 mm). By Hans Christian Andersen. Original silver decorated blue papered boards. Condition: joints tender; backstrip faded with slight chipping at extremities, covers slightly rubbed and faded. One of 2000 copies. first edition of this classic silver age interpretation of the andersen fairy tale. Dobuzhinsky was one of the great graphic artists of the Mir iskusstva [World of Art] group in St. Petersburg. He was also Vladimir Nabokov's drawing teacher. Having served as a medical orderly on the Polish and Galician fronts during World War I, he began illustrating Svinopas as a diversion on his return to Petrograd in 1917. The story was one of his family's favorite fairy tales; a few years earlier, his friend Georgii Narbut designed the sets and costumes for a play based on the story for Dobuzhinsky's children. Dobuzhinsky entered these slightly satirical watercolors in one of the last of the Mir iskusstva exhibitions. This edition was created for the "Parus" publishing company, but the Russian Revolution intervened and the book was not published until 1922 by Z. I. Grzhebin in Berlin and Petrograd. Svinopas with its light lithe line drawings heightened with watercolor is considered to be Dobuzhinsky's masterpiece. MoMA 376.

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