The collection of the Boris Kustodiev House Museum presents an illustration to the book by Nadezhda Pavlovich “A Rambling Steam Engine”, created by the artist in 1925.
Boris Kustodiev is well known as an illustrator. His artistic legacy includes both works of Russian classical literature by Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and those who became classics later, his contemporaries: Maxim Gorky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aleksey Tolstoy, and many others. Kustodiev enriched Russian art with his own understanding of famous images and characters — from Vladimir Dubrovsky to Grandfather Mazay, from Merchant Kalashnikov to Katerina Izmailova.
The collection of the Astrakhan Art Gallery includes a series of illustrations — six drawings in ink — for the book by the poetess Nadezhda Pavlovich “A Rambling Steam Engine”. Unfortunately, this is only a part of what Kustodiev created. The book had a cover and 12 illustrations. The children’s book by the popular poetess was published in 1925. The poems told the story of a steam engine, which was tired of keeping a strict schedule and standing at the depot and wanted to take a ride through a snow-covered forest on its own, and even try the delicacies that people were treated to. Of course, it could not end well: flying at full speed, the steam engine frightened the surrounding people, once accelerated, went off the rails and got stuck in a snow-covered forest. People helped it by finding the runaway and returning it to the home depot, where the subdued train resumed its usual business of transporting people and freight.
The illustration shows a telegraph operator and a secretary. They try in vain to gather information about the missing steam engine, as evidenced by the mountain of telegraph tape on which messages were being printed at the time. The amusing genre scenes are well composed by the artist and distinguished by a soft, good humor.
“A Rambling Steam Engine” is not the only children’s book, Boris Kustodiev created illustrations for. In the last years of his life the artist decorated books by Samuel Marshak “Miracles”, “Rainbow”, “Adventures of a Table and a Chair”, by Leonid Lesnoy “Jimmy Joy Visiting Pioneers”, by Elena Danko “A Real Pioneer”, by Nadezhda Pavlovich “Bolshevik Tom” and many others. Most of them were successfully published and are still preserved in libraries, museums and private collections.
