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Krylov by A.K. Zhaba

1944  Colored postcard representing “The Ass and the Nightingale” by Ivan Krylov.   Artist: A. Zhaba.  Circulation of 5000.  Leningrad.  €5 from Bartko-Reher, Berlin, April, ’21. 

This card has fascinated me for two reasons.  First of all, who was producing postcards in Leningrad in 1944?  Secondly, it has been hard for me to find other members of this series.  Etsy presents an image of FG but the card is no longer available.  Then I got lucky.  The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library has an image and a record of WL from the same series.  They seem to add a second artist, Alphonse Konstantinovich Toad.  They offer a good archival image.  A further look reveals that they have eight cards in the series, all using the second name above and all illustrated: https://www.prlib.ru/en/section/1176153.  The verso there, as here, has an image at its top of something like “The Great Patriotic War.”  The challenge now is to go after the whole series!

 

See also Zhaba's contributions to the 1977 Sovetsky Hudozhnik series in this collection.