Vesela Pratsia: narodnia pisen'ka na novyi lad [Fun Work: a Folk Song for a New System].

£2,950 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

rare complete set Series of seven satirical anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet Ukrainian underground propaganda postcards attributed to children's illustrator artist Okhrim Sudomora. Sudomora is credited with the work as five of the postcards are adaptations of illustrations from his children's book: Vesela Pratsia: Narodna Pisen'ka [Fun Work: A Folk Song] published in 1944 in Krakow by the Ukrainian Publishing House. What was originally a folk style children's book has been modified into a subversive cartoon. The title has been altered to include na novvyi lad or 'in a new system' and although the publisher and date is not identified, it's most likely they were printed after the end of WWII at a DP camp. Sudomora moved to Lviv in 1943 and then worked as an illustrator in Kharkiv from 1945. Although he wasn't in DP camps himself, he had other children's books published in Munich in 1946 and 1949 so it's possible these were also published in West Germany given their sentiment. For this revised version, the artist has added two new illustrations and significantly changed the meaning of each of the existing images. The traditional children's tale has been transformed into a scathing attack on both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. The illustration for the first line from the song, 'Two bears, two bears, threshed the peas' features German and Russian bears identified by their swastika and hammer-and-sickle armbands 'threshing' Ukraine, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Georgia, Belarus, Latvia and Poland.

• Binding: Hardcover

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