The tale of the golden cockerel

Boris Zvorykin was one of the founders of the "Russian style" in book illustration. Since 1898 he illustrated and designed books for the Moscow and St. Petersburg publishing houses of I.D. Sytin, A.I. Mamontova, I.N. Knebel, A.F. Marx and A.A. Levinson. After leaving Russia in 1921, the artist ended up in Paris. Here he created a book of Russian fairy tales. Moreover, he created from beginning to end: he translated the tales into French (and he completely rewrote "The Snow Maiden", relying on the texts of both the Russian folk tale and the poetic tale of A.N. Ostrovsky), wrote them down in calligraphic handwriting, made illustrations and decorated them in leather binding patterned embossing. Zvorykin presented this in every sense a unique book to the director of the publishing house Louis Frikotel, his new employer. However, the book was published only thirty-six years after the artist's death. And no longer in France, but in the United States, thanks exclusively to the participation of the widow of the American president, Jacqueline Onassis-Kennedy. Boris Vasilyevich Zvorykin died at the beginning of 1942 in Paris, occupied by the Germans, in the same days when, by a strange coincidence, in besieged Leningrad on February 7, 1942, his fellow artist Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin, who also drew illustrations for Russian fairy tales, died.