Dogs

Original title: Собачки

This book was both written and illustrated by Vera Mikhailovna Ermolaeva (1893–1937), one of the most remarkable figures of the Russian avant-garde. A practicing artist as well as a leading theorist, she headed the Laboratory of Color at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK) in Petrograd, working under the direction of Kazimir Malevich. Ermolaeva also illustrated poems by Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Nikolai Zabolotsky, three key members of the OBERIU group.

Published in 1929 by Gosizdat, Dogs is a classic example of the early Soviet picture book. The story unfolds simply: during a dog exhibition, a boy sketches the animals he likes in his notebook. Yet there are so many amusing dogs that he must keep drawing more and more of them, filling every page with increasingly lively scenes. The number of dogs multiplies geometrically—from one, to two, to four, to eight—until, in the end, the reader is invited to count them all.

Ermolaeva began illustrating books in 1918, when she co-founded an art collective in Petrograd that produced limited-edition children’s books and popular prints (lubki), often using linocut techniques—such as in her illustrated edition of Walt Whitman’s Pioneers. Later, she worked in lithography, theater design, and art education, first in Vitebsk, where she served as rector of the People’s Art School and co-organized UNOVIS, and later in Petrograd, leading experimental research on color and composition.

Her distinctive artistic manner combined folk art traditions with modernist structure: in her illustrations, figures often face different directions, as if displayed in a curious living collection. Dogs, printed in an edition of 15,000 copies, captures this dynamic through playful, grotesque, and vividly characterized depictions of dogs both real and imagined.

Ermolaeva’s career was cut short by political repression: she was arrested in 1934 and executed in 1937 in a labor camp near Karaganda. For decades, her books remained known only to collectors. Only recently have they begun to return to print—such as the reissue by Ad Marginem Press in the A+A series, which revives masterpieces of the late 1920s and early 1930s by artists of the Leningrad school.