In 1924, Vera Khlebnikova married Pyotr Vasilyevich Miturich and moved to Moscow.
Around the same time, mass-production of radios and street loudspeakers — by today’s standards, of the simplest designs — began in the USSR. Wired radio was installed in every house to receive radio waves. At first, radio broadcasts were characterized by low sound quality and unsystematic programming, and humorists often wrote about it. A funny riddle appeared in the magazine “Crocodile”: “There is a pole, on the pole hangs a bowl, and no one understands what it is yelling.”
Stationary radios were considered a luxury. Externally, such a device resembled a player with a ground wire.
Vera Vladimirovna fell in love with this fashionable novelty. In 1926, she wrote to her parents, Vladimir Alexeyevich and Ekaterina Nikolaevna, “Now I have taken a break and am listening to the radio: Italian romances…” She advised them to try out this invention too, and even reported that in Astrakhan “a radio… can be installed by someone named Usachev.” In a letter from 1927, she had already directly promised to send her parents a receiver assembled by Pyotr Miturich’s brother Vladimir, and described in detail how it works.
In June 1931, Vera moved her elderly parents to Moscow. The drawing made by her son-in-law Pyotr Miturich is also dated that year.
The receiver itself is not depicted in the drawing, and one could assume that the elderly woman (Ekaterina Nikolaevna was already 72 years old) simply sits, deep in thought. This is due to the fact that the device was very compact, the handset installed instead of headphones fit comfortably in the hand.
In 1921, ten years before this drawing was created,
Velimir Khlebnikov’s article “Radio of the Future” was published. In it, the
poet assigned radio broadcasts a key role in the spiritual life and development
of both the individual and society, and even entrusted the mission of
establishing public education “to Radio”. He called radio “the main tree of
consciousness” and claimed that stopping broadcasting “would produce a
spiritual swoon of the entire country.”
