SATIRE AND SOLDIER–SAILOR SOLIDARITY
[1905 REVOLUTION.]
ЗРИТЕЛЬ [Zritel’; ‘The Observer’]. No. 24.
St Petersburg, “Sever”/A. M. Lesman, 24 December 1905.
Folio, pp. 12, with cover illustration by Shestopalov printed in orange and black and numerous illustrations in text printed in black, red, and blue; a little stained and dust-soiled, but generally in good condition, folded as issued.
Very rare penultimate number, confiscated by the authorities, of the very first of the satirical magazines to come out of the 1905 Revolution.
Twenty-five numbers were published in 1905, edited by Yu. K. Artsybyshev. Zritel’ was ‘the first de facto artistic and literary satirical journal of that period with a distinctly political, anti-establishment agenda … Geared to foment dissent among the public, these satirical journals reached a wide range of primarily urban readers as they were published exclusively in the cities’ (Minin, Art and Politics in the Russian Satirical Press, 1905–1908, PhD thesis (2008), p. 13).
Contributors include the poet, translator, and playwright Fedor Sologub, and the artists Epifanov and Shestopalov, whose cover design for no. 24, ‘Brothers in Arms’, is the ‘only work in 1905 to portray the alliance between worker, soldier and sailor’ (Porter, Blood & Laughter: Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution, (1983), p. 38)
Russkaia satiricheskaia periodika 100; Dul’skii 1; Smirnov-Sokol’skii 2229.
