Vesela Pratsia: narodnia pisen'ka na novyi lad [Fun Work: a Folk Song for a New System].

rare complete set

Series of seven satirical anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet Ukrainian underground propaganda postcards attributed to children's illustrator artist Okhrim Sudomora. Sudomora is credited with the work as five of the postcards are adaptations of illustrations from his children's book: Vesela Pratsia: Narodna Pisen'ka [Fun Work: A Folk Song] published in 1944 in Krakow by the Ukrainian Publishing House. What was originally a folk style children's book has been modified into a subversive cartoon. The title has been altered to include na novvyi lad or 'in a new system' and although the publisher and date is not identified, it's most likely they were printed after the end of WWII at a DP camp.

Sudomora moved to Lviv in 1943 and then worked as an illustrator in Kharkiv from 1945. Although he wasn't in DP camps himself, he had other children's books published in Munich in 1946 and 1949 so it's possible these were also published in West Germany given their sentiment. For this revised version, the artist has added two new illustrations and significantly changed the meaning of each of the existing images. The traditional children's tale has been transformed into a scathing attack on both the Soviet and Nazi regimes.

The illustration for the first line from the song, 'Two bears, two bears, threshed the peas' features German and Russian bears identified by their swastika and hammer-and-sickle armbands 'threshing' Ukraine, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Georgia, Belarus, Latvia and Poland. The second line, 'two roosters, two roosters carried them to the mill' is represented by the Nazi and Communist secret police 'roosters' taking bags of victims to the concentration camp with gallows in the distance.

The caption for the final postcard (which was not included in the original book) states, 'People will stand up, look around, and will begin scattering them!' It depicts a determined, heroic Ukrainian who has broken free from his concentration camp chains along with his comrades with banners reading 'freedom to the people' and 'human dignity'. Holding a club he has hit the Nazi bear to the ground and is chasing the fleeing Soviet bear and his sidekick the NKVD rooster. The pair are heading back to their fortress of 'dictatorship' and 'jail of nations'.

Whether these postcards played a role in his arrest it's not known but Sudomora did not escape the attention of the authorities and he was sent to a labour camp in 1949 for drawing a caricature of Stalin with bloody hands. The illustrations tell a remarkable story of burgeoning Ukrainian hope in the wake of WWII of national sovereignty. Incredibly scarce. WorldCat locates just one set at Stanford University.

Set of seven postcards (10.5 x 14.9 cm); no text to the reverse, slightly age toned otherwise a very good set.