Old postcards Children

The name that appears most often in the captions of this section is the artist A. Bazhenov. His cards from 1956 to 1969 show children playing, doing sport and helping at home. “Knocking the Goat” (Soviet slang for playing dominoes) and “Bishop’s Move”, both from 1956, refer to dominoes and chess, “Ping-Pong Champions” (1961) to table tennis, while “Mail from the Zoo” (1969) belongs to the late part of this run.

The second strand is fairy-tale illustration. Two 1967 cards with pictures for The Golden Key by Aleksey Tolstoy, the Russian retelling of Pinocchio, are by Leonid Vladimirsky (1920–2015), best known for his Buratino illustrations. Puss in Boots (1956) was drawn by the book illustrator Nika Golts (1925–2012). There are also “At the Pike’s Command” (1956), The Three Little Pigs (1964 and 1969), illustrations to Korney Chukovsky’s Doctor Aybolit (1978) and “Zhabreev’s Envoy”, based on a tale by Pavel Bazhov (1961).

A separate 1956 series carries moralising captions: “The Capricious Girl”, “The Untidy Girl”, “The Greedy Girl”, “The Grubby Boy” and “The Bully”. Overall, these vintage postcards for children span 1952 to 1984, with most printed in the 1950s and 1960s.

What you see here are scans of period copies, not redrawn versions.