Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas in profile and full face

The book "Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas in Profile and En Face. From the History of Friendly Caricature" opens up a little-known page of Belarusian culture. It gathers all currently known caricatures of the classics – a total of 44 works created during their lifetime by both famous and forgotten artists. This is the first publication that conceptually explores the phenomenon of friendly caricature and shows how contemporaries humorously and respectfully depicted the image of the people's poets. The book is addressed to lovers of Belarusian literature, art history, and everyone who wants to discover Kupala and Kolas from an unexpected side.

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How did artists joke with Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas? The book for the first time tells about all currently known friendly caricatures of the two classics. Created during the poets' lifetime, they became a valuable document of a bygone era.

Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas, even during their lifetime, became subjects of friendly caricatures by both famous artists and those forgotten today. Among them are Boris Antonovsky, Berk, Leonid Boyko, Valentin and Anatoly Volkov, Evel Gankin, Galina Dakalskaya, Konstantin Eliseev, Iosif Igin, Yanka Kashkel, Dmitry Krasilnikov, Kukryniksy, Nikolay Malevich, Zenon Pavlovsky, Sergey Romanov, Grigory Roze, Anatoly Tarasenkov... However, despite a hundred-year history, this original genre has never been conceptually explored, and most of the drawings seemed to be forever "buried" in old magazines and newspaper archives. In the book "Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas in Profile and En Face. From the History of Friendly Caricature" by literary researcher Sergey Shapran, all currently known caricatures of the poets are presented for the first time – a total of 44 drawings. This is the first such publication in Kupala and Kolas studies and in the genre of Belarusian friendly caricature.