Mstislav Dobuzhinsky — The Author of the Graphic Design of Mikhail Kuzmin’ Books

Between 1918 and 1922, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky created the design for four books by Mikhail Kuzmin: the story The Wonderful Life of Joseph Balsamo, Count Cagliostro, the play Mary’s Tuesday, the collection of poems Unearthly Evenings, and the musical and poetic suite The Forest. The artist’s ‘Kuzmin series’ is rather well-known, but this article for the first time considers it as an object of special consideration in the context of art history, which determines its novelty and relevance. The article identifies the two directions of Dobuzhinsky’s creative searches — retrospective and modern, which are reflected in the book design of the ‘Kuzmin series’. It has been found that the book design for the story and the poetic suite associated with the traditions of E.T.A. Hoffman, one of the favourite authors of both Kuzmin and Dobuzhinsky, was dominated by retrospective tendencies. The drawings for those books reflected new aspects of the artist’s interests, such as chiaroscuro, the landscapes by Nicolas Poussin, the painting The Last Day of Pompeii by Karl Bryullov, along with an appeal to Jugendstil magazine graphics and Japanese woodcuts, already traditional for Dobuzhinsky’s work. Meanwhile, his fascination with the graphic power of Cubism based on the black and white illustrations in the books by A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, as well as G. Apollinaire, influenced the design of the drawings for the covers of Mary’s Tuesday and Unearthly Evenings. In this case, the drawings are not literally related to the text, unlike the illustrations. The author comes to the conclusion that the designs for the works of one writer whose literary reference points were close to the artist clearly reflected Dobuzhinsky’s creative searches: new directions of retrospective interests, as well as the use of the external features of Cubism.