Treasures on the Bookshelf: Books from the Old City and Picture Books from Soviet Russia

The book is an object with which we all engage on a daily basis, yet most of the time we take this for granted, without stopping to think about what we are holding in our hands. When we encounter a book that is interestingly old or otherwise unfamiliar, it becomes a thing of great discovery, something which asks us to make the leap of imagination to another time and another place. This might be through the dog-eared pages, the strange smell it has acquired from many years of storage, or the content, which may be startingly different from that of its contemporary neighbors on the bookcase. In New Georgian Book Design, 1920s–1930s, the bookseller and collector Pavel Chepyzhov presents us with an anthology that charts his own voyage of discovery into the overlooked past of Georgian book design. Sharing a personal collection of books and journals from the 1920s and 1930s, which has been painstakingly gathered and preserved, he gives us a tantalizing glimpse of a vivid literary and artistic episode that is ripe for further exploration.

In his introduction to the volume, Chepyzhov states that Georgian book design of the 1920s and 1930s has up to now remained unnoticed by researchers, due to the dominance of Socialist Realism from the mid-1930s onward. Yet he asserts that it "can justifiably be considered one of the most distinctive national schools of avant-garde book design of the 1920s" (24). It is explicitly stated that the anthology is not intended to be an academic monograph but a catalogue of a single collection, with the hope that the publication will stimulate further discussion on and interest in the topic (25). To navigate our way through the images, we are given a reflective essay by the art historian Ketevan Kintsurashvili in both English and Georgian, followed by the catalogue of books. The catalogue is arranged in thematic sections such as art theory, literature, and "books for the masses"; within these sections, the books are displayed in chronological order. Each individual book is given a double page spread, with an explanatory text on the left-hand side and full-color illustrations on the right. At the back of the volume, we are given biographies of the most well-known authors and illustrators and a bibliography for further reading, which has a comprehensive list of publications in Georgian and a small selection in Russian and English. The only thing missing is a chronology of key names and events, which would be of great assistance to the reader hitherto uninitiated into the world of Georgian literary and artistic culture.

The brief period of Georgian independence from 1918 to 1921 saw a migration of Russian avant-garde artists and writers to Tiflis, and this cemented links that had been made between Russian and Georgian artists during the 1910s. The Georgian capital hosted such figures as Aleksei Kruchenykh and Ilya Ehrenburg (Il´ia Erenburg), some of whom were invited to Georgia by Il´ia and Kirill Zdanevich, who were known in St. Petersburg Futurist circles (8). Georgia became a part of the Soviet Union in 1922, and most of the Russian artists and writers left, but as Chepyzhov explains, their influence remained on young Georgian poets and book designers. A group of writers, including the poet Simon Chikovani, formed a Futurist alliance, publishing a manifesto titled Georgia—the Phoenix in 1922, followed by the landmark journal H2SO4 in 1924, which saw the writers joined by artists such as Beno Gordeziani and Irakli Gamrekeli (9–13). Shortly afterward, the group disbanded, and some of the artists and writers adopted the approach of the Russian-based Left Front of the Arts (LEF), while others sided with the Association of Revolutionary Writers (RAM). Just as in Russia, the formal and ideological discussions between these groups were complex and lively, but in essence...