At the Anglo‑Italian Crossroads

The Kukryniksy were a creative collective of three Soviet graphic artists and painters: Mykhaylo Kupriyanov (1903-1991), Porfyriy Krylov (1902-1990), and Mykola Sokolov (1903-2000), who worked in a caricature style. The collective was formed in 1924. The artists worked under the pseudonym "Kukryniksy", which consisted of the first syllable of the surnames Ku (Kupriyanov) and Kry (Krylov), the first syllable of the name Nikolai (the Russian equivalent of Mykola), and the first letter of the surname S (Sokolov). The letter Y at the end, a plural suffix, indicated that it was not one artist, but a collective. The masters of culture met in 1921 while studying at VKHUTEMAS (The Higher Art and Technical Workshops) under teachers Oleksandr Rodchenko, Volodymyr Tatlin, and Volodymyr Favorskyi. The artists' works were constantly published in the newspaper "Pravda" and the magazine "Krokodil". During World War II, they actively participated in "TASS Windows" (caricatures, posters). Stage works for the Kukryniksy were grotesque topical caricatures on topics of domestic and international life. The artists became the authors of a unique phenomenon in world culture - "positive satire". They worked using the method of collective creativity. Since the 1920s, they illustrated books: "12 Chairs" (1933, 1967) and "The Golden Calf" (1971) by Illia Ilf and Yevgen Petrov, "The Lady with the Dog" and other works by Anton Chekhov (1940-1946), "Don Quixote" (1949-1952) by M. Cervantes, and works by other authors.