Russian illustrator Elizaveta Bёm

6 November 2020

Confusingly you see the name Елизавета Бём transliterated from Cyrillic in various ways – Elisabeth Boehm, Elizaveta Bёm, Elizabeth Bem, Boem, Böhm…

She was born in St Petersburg in 1843 and studied in formal art schools there, as well as privately with the great painter, Ivan Kramskoi. She became best known for her illustrations for postcards. These, in reproduction, are still very popular today and can be bought in Russian bookshops, museum shops etc. Many of the designs mark important festivals, notably Easter, or illustrate popular sayings.  They invariably feature appealing small children who, judging by their clothes, are either from the peasantry or the nobility.

Some of the images are too sentimental for my taste but I admire her technique. And I really like her illustrated letters of the alphabet because they are so detailed and it’s intriguing to look for all the elements in each picture that start with the appropriate letter.  It’s difficult to work out all the words, though, because they are rendered in a highly decorative old-Cyrillic style, and some have extra hard or soft signs, which have been dropped from the modern language. My knowledge is not nearly good enough to cope with these unfamiliar forms. In the captions to these images I’ve included the main word chosen to represent the given letter and one other that also appears.  There are lots more to be found by Russian-language enthusiasts.

The above images are all scanned from postcards that I have. They are rather poorly produced reproductions of the original drawings, printed some decades ago, I would guess, so not as pleasurable to look at as they should be. The following pages from the Alphabet book are clearer and include the text in virtuoso illuminated manuscript style, but I’ve only been able to find the first twelve letters.

L N Tolstoy among the Yasnaya Polyana children

I came across this photograph recently – clearly the model for Bёm’s illustration. (The photo was taken by Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s editor and disciple – who was despised by Tolstoy’s wife, according to the novel and the film The Last Station.)

Elizaveta Bёm – born and died in St Petersburg, 1843 – 1914