Voina Korolei: iz serii 'Petrushka'. Kukolniy Teatr [The War of Kings: from the series 'Petrushka'. The Puppet Theatre].

a graphic masterpiece

A much sought-after Russian children's book. WorldCat locates just four copies: the BnF, the Getty, Princeton and Stanford Universities.

The emergence of propaganda puppet plays was largely facilitated by state agitprop, building on the already popular genre of slapstick style shows with handmade puppets. Plays were written for hundreds of newly established amateur and professional propaganda puppet theatres. They needed a fundamentally new repertoire that would align with Soviet ideology. Among the first such plays was 'The War of the Kings' by Yulia Obolenskaya and Konstantin Kandaurov, written for the 'Petrushka' Studio in Moscow (under the Theatre Department of the People's Commissariat of Education).

The War of Kings uses playing cards as an allegory for the class struggle between the Tsarist regime and the proletariat. The play's protagonist, Petrushka, isn't aligned to a particular suit and wears a costume with hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs on. He calls on all the pip cards (the rabochiy narod) to rally against the kings and waves a flag on stage which reads 'Long Live the Socialist Republic'. The kings are defeated and exclaim 'We held our trump cards, but we were left looking like fools.' The play is clear in its message against imperialist fighting amongst kings and the supremacy of the working class.

The lithographs are a wonderful example of stylised popular Russian art repurposed to support the political message of the October Revolution. Obolenskaya was a student of Bakst, Dobuzhinsky and Petrov-Vodkin and produced both the actual puppet production and these illustrations with her life partner Konstantin Kandaurov. Kandaurov had worked at both the Bolshoi and Maly theatres as a designer and the pair continued to produce puppet plays into the 1920s.

Oblong folio (25.5 x 34 cm); 3 leaves of introduction and prologue with illustrations, 13 numbered chromolithographs with text on brown paper, rectos only, small repairs to margins on six leaves; original chromilithographed stapled wrappers with some minor repairs to edges, 10 Ruble stamp to lower cover, minor age-toning and soiling, else a very good copy, 36pp.