Very soon, many of us will be celebrating a wonderful holiday—St. Nicholas Day. On this day, some of us will receive gifts, while others will help St. Nicholas give them out.
Children will be delighted with the candy, toys, and books they receive. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, just as today, beautifully designed and illustrated children’s books were considered one of the most coveted gifts on St. Nicholas Day.
What were the books that our distant great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers read like, and what did they look like?!
In the 1840s, they might have received a copy of *One Thousand and One Nights*, a collection of Arabian folktales, as a gift.
In 1891, bookseller F. A. Bitepazh offered “Children’s Games” for purchase as a gift for young and well-behaved children. This book consisted of 15 colored illustrations on cardboard accompanied by poems by S. I. Lavrentyeva.
In 1892, the same publisher released an even more beautiful sequel. Indeed, looking at this book, you can’t help but say, “How lovely!”
The “Tales of Murlyka the Cat,” which were popular at the time, are steeped in mysticism and symbolism. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that their author, Nikolai Petrovich Wagner, was himself deeply influenced by the ideas of spiritualism. Of course, young readers were unaware of this and simply read the book with rapture.
In 1902, children who loved to draw could receive this wonderful and useful book from St. Nicholas and color it in themselves.
The title “Grandfather’s Tales” was quite popular among the printed works of that time. As a result, books with the same title were published at various times by different authors and publishers.
However, it wasn’t just grandfathers who wrote fairy tales back then—grandmothers did, too… and even nannies!
By the way, the Blue Fairy could write down magical stories, too.
For those young readers who wanted to show their appreciation to their loved ones for the gifts they received, special books were published featuring a wide selection of greetings for every occasion.
The youngest children might find *”First Word: A Reader for Little Ones Ages 3 to 8″* useful.
Fairy tales familiar to many people in the early 20th century could have been titled and illustrated in quite unusual ways. The Tar Bull frolicked through a poppy field. The Nutcracker was actually called “The Nutcracker,” and the fairy tale “Teremok,” which seemed harmless at first glance, resembled more the cover of an album by some heavy metal band. The publishers of the fairy tale “Bluebeard,” meanwhile, managed to make their creation resemble a medieval manuscript.
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin became famous as a masterful illustrator and designer of fairy tales and as a brilliant artist. The book covers he created can certainly be classified as works of art.
Thanks to him, enterprising merchants in Kharkiv were able to reap considerable profits. In the early 20th century, the “D. K. Kromsky Steam-Powered Factory of Candies, Gingerbread, and Macaroons” produced a line of chocolate bars called “Vasilisa the Beautiful.”
If you bought several bars of this chocolate, you could put them together to read the corresponding fairy tale.
However, far more than Bilibin, children living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were familiar with Nikolai Nikolaevich Karazin, a nobleman from the Kharkiv Governorate and the grandson of the founder of Kharkiv University.
This exceptionally talented man not only wrote children’s books himself, but also illustrated countless fairy tales published at that time.
Long ago, in 1844, K. Zhernakov’s printing house published a four-volume set titled *Fairy Tale After Fairy Tale*. One of the stories—*Tatar Raids*—began with the following words, which to this day could well serve as a life motto for many Kharkiv residents:
We, the people of Kharkiv, are fortunate to live in these times! It’s just like the saying goes: we live as if under God’s protection. Everyone’s property is inviolable, and no one restricts our freedom to pursue our chosen occupations; God is high above, and the Tsar is far away—in other words, our immediate superiors are, as they say, right at hand, and justice and punishment are right around the corner…
May St. Nicholas bring everyone plenty of magical gifts—many of which will be from Kharkiv.
- About the military pilot school and the airfield in Kharkiv… - 04.11.2020
- Nikanor Savich—A Political Career by Mistake - 13.07.2020
- And once again, about the Cavalry Guards… - 21.01.2020