Old postcards Konstantin Pavlovich Rotov

Konstantin Rotov (1902–1959) was a Soviet graphic artist and caricaturist who worked for the satirical magazine Krokodil from 1922 to 1940. As a book illustrator he drew, among others, Lazar Lagin’s Old Man Hottabych (1940) and Sergei Mikhalkov’s Uncle Styopa (1957).

Every one of these Soviet postcards was printed in 1958 and carries the same credit, “Illustration by K. Rotov”, with one literary character per card. Soviet children’s classics are represented by Uncle Styopa, Old Man Hottabych, Korney Chukovsky’s Doctor Aybolit and the absent-minded man from Basseynaya Street, hero of Samuil Marshak’s poem Such an Absent-Minded Man.

Beside them stand characters of world literature: Baron Munchausen, made famous by R. E. Raspe’s book, and Gargantua, the giant from François Rabelais’s novel. Munchausen had a real prototype, an eighteenth-century German baron (1720–1797) who served as a cavalry captain in the Russian army and became known for his tall tales.

The span from Rabelais to Mikhalkov shows how varied the books were that passed through one illustrator’s hands.