The Creation of the Book. Rare Books from Saint Petersburg

The graphic works were created as etchings, woodcuts, photogravures and drawings, some of them in mixed techniques. Visitors will also be able to see works by contemporary artists who collaborate with the publishing house. They include Mihail Chemiakin, Dashi Namdakov, Boris Zabirokhin, Mikhail Gavrichkov, Sergei Shvemberger, Yuri Kuper, Yury Borovitsky, Sergei Kondrashkin, Alexander Florensky and many more.

This is the ninth time that an exhibition devoted to the creative endeavours of the Rare Books from Saint Petersburg publishing house is being held in the museum. This year it will be featuring some unique books produced between 2016 and 2024.

“There is in Saint Petersburg a unique publishing house that produces some amazing hand-made artist’s books. They are our pride and our competitive advantage, and so the Hermitage supports and watches over it in every way we can,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, says.

The Rare Books from Saint Petersburg publishing house was found in 1991 by the Saint Petersburg book-printing enthusiast Piotr Suspitsyn with the aim of reviving one of the most demanding genres in publishing – the bibliophilic book. A publication of that kind is a work of art in its own right. The making of the books involves labour-intensive technologies that are almost forgotten nowadays: typesetting by hand, printing on an antique presses, hand binding and individual finishing of the covers.

Particularly noteworthy is an edition of Alexander Tvardovsky’s poem Vasily Tyorkin, prepared for the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. It possesses not only artistic, but also historical value: authentic items from the period 1930–45 were used to make it. The case is covered with canvas taken from a soldier’s cape-tent, while the field pouch of a wartime Red Army officer went to produce the binding, supplemented by a wristwatch and drawing equipment from the period. The etched illustrations and pencil drawings were created by the artist Yan Lelchuk. The copy of the book that appears in the exhibition was produced specially for the Hermitage Days and donated to the museum on 7 December 2020.

The publication Nutcracker with illustrations by Mihail Chemiakin (Mikhail Shemyakin) was brought out to mark the 20th anniversary of his celebrated production of that ballet. The book contains a facsimile of Piotr Tchaikovsky’s original score, the handwritten libretto drawn up by Chemiakin and his illustrations for the ballet – etchings hand-tinted with watercolours. An unarguable further adornment of the book is the silk cover decorated with hand embroidery. Visitors to the exhibition will see the first of 13 numbered copies of this unique publication, work on which went on for ten years.

Another example of a highly artistic work in the exhibition is an edition of the Tuvan epic Khan Ton Aralchyn with illustrations by the contemporary artist, sculptor and jeweller Dashi Namdakov, produced in the etching technique. The cover is embellished with a copper relief. The design of the publication incorporates drawings made by archaeologists during excavations of Tuvan burial mounds from the Scythian period. The heroic tale Khan Ton Aralchyn was first written down in 1946. The translation of the text from Tuvan into Russian was made by Margarita Kungaa and then rendered into verse by the well-known writer Yevgeny Vodolazkin. Dashi Namdakov’s works can be found in the stocks of the State Hermitage and other major Russian museums.

The exhibition curator is Irina Borisovna Gogulina, head of the Stocks Sector of the State Hermitage’s Research Library.