Post Cards of My Childhood
Cold days make us appreciate more the warmth of communication. As the holidays season is about to start I'd like to remind us all about an older and almost forgotten way of expressing ourselves, postcards.
Sending and receiving ones for me was always a highlight of holidays. I'm a tangible person so the real thing, a nice colorful card with a few sincere words in handwriting always created for me that magical holiday spirit.
During my childhood, my favorite cards were those with cheerful cartoons animals: smiley hares, bears and squirrels painted in New Year hustle near the Christmas tree or on sledges or skates. You could SOOO feel is the light of kindness and creativity radiating from them so brilliantly.
Imagine how surprised I was to recently learn that one person created my favorite card, the one portraying the New Year. The artist of the whole world of funny animals was Vladimir Ivanovich Zarubin. For 30 years of work, more than 1.5 billion postcards and envelopes with his drawings published, and yet he died in poverty.
According to his profile in Russian Personalities, Vladimir Zarubin (1925-1996) was a Soviet painter, cartoonist (animator) and perhaps the best Soviet postcard master. He was born on August 7, 1925 in the Andriyanovka village, Oryol region. Vladimir took part in the Great Patriotic War. According to his son, the Germans occupied the town and Vladimir was moved to Germany, worked in a labor camp in Ruhr. Later he was liberated by the U.S. troops. After the war, from 1945 to 1949 Zarubin served as a gunner in the Soviet army. Since 1949, he began his career as an artist. First he worked in the Ministry of Coal Industry and from 1950 to 1958 at the factory. In 1958 he graduated from the Moscow evening secondary school. From 1957 to 1982 Zarubin worked as an animator in Soyuzmultfilm studio, where he had taken part in the creation of about a hundred drawing cartoons. In the late 1970s, Vladimir was admitted to the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR. Also Zarubin is known as a greeting card artist. In 2007 the catalog of his postcards was published.
Vladimir Ivanovich Zarubin , the boy, grew up very gifted, and his parents, to the best of their ability, encouraged his passion for drawing. For example, his father prompted Volodya to start collecting his own collection of postcards. In those years, it was a real joy to receive a beautiful picture with a small letter from relatives by mail. It was this happiness associated with the postman and the message from distant friends that the artist managed to retain in his memory and then embody in his own drawings.
Together with a huge army of children who survived the terrible years of the Second World War, he managed to catch up and get what the war took from him - part of his life, high school, student years. He managed to enroll in animation courses, and for many years then the talented artist worked at the Soyuzmultfilm studio, the same artist was the author of images from hundreds of favorite Soviet cartoons.
In the 90s, when the Soviet Union dissolved and huge economic crises unfolded, he was already in his seventh decade, and at this age it is very difficult for some to adjust to the world that is crumbling before their eyes. The country was merging into its tumultuous somber age. Postcards were catastrophically losing their relevance, and it seemed that postage, in general, would soon sink into oblivion.
However, he did not stop working, until the last days such cute and familiar animals came out from under his brush, which suddenly ceased to be needed. However, human strength is not unlimited. After another phone call from a bankrupt publishing house, having received the news that he would not receive money for his work in recent weeks, Vladimir Zarubin fell ill with a severe and subsequently fatal heart attack.
I'm eternally grateful to him and people like him for childhood memories brightened and brought to life by their creativity. Those images taught me to be kind, believe in fairytales, and to believe in New Year magic which reminds us that each new year is a new start that we can take and new choices we can make to create a more beautiful world.
Just about to send postcards and pieces of my fairy-tale writings to my young friends. Communication with children is always a joy for me, their naive world is priceless.
By writing that column I found another interesting artist who could be a similar soul to the one I mentioned. It's William Kurelek, a Canadian of Ukrainian origin, who also found that bright images help us to go through hard times. That only shows that we people on two continents, separated by oceans and seas are more alike then different.