By Daniil Kharms (1905–1942)
Pictures by Vera Ermolaeva (1893–1938)\

1)

Kharms was a poet, writer, and playwright of the Russian avant-garde. He was born in Petersburg as Daniil Yuvachev. Since early childhood he had a lively imagination, inventing the pen name Kharms while still in elementary school. Kharms began writing poetry under the influence of the Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, and in 1928 he organized the literary circle OBERIU and published experimental works written with a new poetic sensibility. Since publishing the kind of avant-garde works of the absurd he wrote for adults was difficult, Kharms took the advice of Marshak, who had praised his literary talent, and began to write for children. From 1928 his work in children’s magazines as well as Ivan Ivanovich Samovar and Million were published. However, Communist Party oppression of the avant-garde movement became severe and Kharms was arrested three times; he died in a prison hospital in 1942 when he was only thirty-seven years old.

2)

Illustrator Vera Ermolaeva was also a Russian avant-garde activist born in the district of Saratov. She studied at Bernstein Art School in Petersburg and was much interested in abstract art such as Cubism and Futurism. In 1918 she established the art group Segodnia (Today) and published picture books. In 1919 she went to Vitebsk in Belorussia to teach at the art school there and in 1921 became rector of the school succeeding Marc Chagall. Attracted to the work of Kazimir Malevich, the founder of suprematism, she participated in UNOVIS, the group Malevich founded in Vitebsk.

3)

She began again to illustrate picture books and children’s magazines in the late twenties in Leningrad. Her drawings of animals and nature are characterized by bold original brushwork and dark hues. While creating lithographs of Goethe’s Reineke Fox, her work was charged as anti-Soviet, and she was arrested and sent to a penal colony in Kazafstan, where she is said to have been executed.

4)

Both the writer and illustrator of Ivan Ivanovich Samovar lived tragic lives, but the book itself is amusing and innovative. Kharms’ word play gives the poems rhythmical and musical quality. Ermolaeva’s illustrations have a cinematic sense of motion with the table growing longer as the number of characters increase and the samovar getting slimmer as the hot water it holds decreases. The rich colors of her illustrations give her work the feeling of folk art enlivend by new influences.