Counting Rhymes. Tongue Twisters. Sketch for an Illustration for Genrikh Sapgir’s poetry collection Four Envelopes

A key figure of Moscow Conceptualism, Ilya Kabakov worked for many years as a children’s book illustrator. Having begun his career as an illustrator while still a student at the Surikov Art Institute, he collaborated with the publishing houses Detgiz (renamed Children’s Literature in 1963) and Malysh and the magazines Murzilka and Veselye Kartinki (Merry Pictures). The work on children’s books provided him—as for other unofficial artists—with a stable income, while also offering a space of relative freedom for formal experimentation and access to a very young audience.

For some artists, working with books was interesting and attractive, as in the case of Viktor Pivovarov; for others, such as Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vassiliev, it was tedious but demanded a conscientious approach; and for some it provoked outright aversion. Ilya Kabakov noted: “I did not like making illustrations, it did not come easily to me… I believed that I had to act slyly, to adapt myself as if the work had been done by a character—a typical Soviet artist who draws and produces exactly what is expected by the publishing house.” This detachment and the desire to deconstruct the figure of the author informed the artist’s stylistic choices. While in his conceptual albums Kabakov turned to the Soviet bureaucratic visual language of schedules, notice boards, and posters, in book illustration he mimicked the standardized “Detgiz style,” combining the artistic solutions of recognized, editorially approved masters such as Vladimir Konashevich or Boris Dekhterev. “The most paradoxical thing about this approved Soviet canon was that it revived exactly the style, form, and subject matter of the ‘children’s room’ which had been abolished by the spirit of the revolution. Illustration was dominated by a nineteenth‑century spirit, with its ‘realistic,’ nearly naturalistic manner of depiction,” Kabakov later recalled.

As for underground artists, collaboration with children’s publishing houses was a necessary step for Soviet writers. While the avant‑garde poetry of Genrikh Sapgir circulated in the USSR only in samizdat form until the late 1980s, his children’s books began to be published in the early 1960s, some of them illustrated by friends from the unofficial circle, including Ilya Kabakov. In Four Envelopes (Children’s Literature, 1976), Kabakov combined the realistic manner of Konashevich‑style fine hatching with a virtuoso play of horizontals and verticals. Here, lines form picture frames adorned with intertwining ornamental stems, banners for titles, and film‑strip frames for the drawings, in each case creating unique relationships between word and image. Often spatially separated, they nevertheless continuously “appropriate” features from one another. The illustrations resemble rapid text messages, while the text acquires a visual dimension through typography: notably, even the page number is designed as a drawing.