Kharms, Daniil - "How Kol´ka Pankin Flew to Brazil..." - Russian Children´s Book

Published by Giz, 1928, Moscow-Leningrad. Full title is "How Kol´ka Pankin Flew to Brazil, and Piotka Ershov didn´t believe anything. Size is 5.1 x 6.8 inches, in very good condition.

This is a delightful children´s book, but one that triggered the Soviet authorities´ suspicion of it being a parody of the Marxist dialectic and hidden political tract.

The story involves two little boys in banter between the ideal and the real, mirroring much of the early days of the Revolution between communist ideologies. The authorities may have also been offended with the parrots on the front cover and monkeys on the rear, possibly reading more than the author intended, but the date was on the cusp of deepening suppression and conformity to party doctrine which jelled in 1930, when Kharms was arrested for sedition and his work banned for the first time, and he was exiled. 

The illustrator Evgeniia Konstatinovna Evenbakh (1889-1981) was an important children´s book artist who studied under V.V. Lebedev and initially employed Constructivist techniques in her work. The present work is considered to be her finest. OCLC locates only one institutional holding, in Princeton.