Friday, February 26, 2010

Travel to Distant Worlds (1960)











An updating of a 1958 book, this will be my last Russian for a while. It has been fun but as the 50s melt into the 60s the illustrations become more factual and less awesome.
I have been intrigued by how the flavor of these books changed very little over the decade. The books started out predicting space flight as an ultimate goal of the Russian people and ends with showing that it had been predicted all along and changes to concentrating on the true exploits of the Russian people.
The same subjects of the painting appear again and again but the visionary art is amazing. The romantic sense of these pictures is hard to deny. This impressionism was lacking from many of the western paintings of this same technology.










Thanks for the kind comments. I am afraid this series has used up a couple of months of my blogger storage space. I couldn't resist however showing some of the unseen art. When I discovered these books I was thrilled. Since I have no Russian language skill finding them has been hit or miss for me but I treasure each one I have found.

2 comments:

  1. I like so much your blog, I'm very happy to have discovered.

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  2. The ship in the first picture (interior, not the cover) on a Saturnian moon, is a "rip-off" from a Frank Tinsley illustration; you can see the original by going to the "Modern Mechanix" blog and searching for the "Fortress on a Skyhook" article. The colour pictures seem to have been re-used from a book by Karl Gilzin, I forget the title, but it's in your collection, and I have a non-illustrated English translation - I love the idea of a Moonship landing nose-first, with the engine for moon landing and take-off in the nose-cone!
    Grif Ingram.

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