Tales of the Old Adamkova
This is a book of 44 pages in full colour with three magic stories both for kids and adults written by Natalka Kharytaniuk and illustrated by Vola Kuzmich. The book, the process of publication of which itself became a fascinating story, the publication of which was contributed by hundreds of people. Record-short crowdfunding took only three days!
The first story on how to avoid merging with the environment makes one recollect Buddha-narratives, on the one hand, and magic realism of Buenos-Aires, on the other. The story about two clods of dirt relates to the story about a turtle by Zhuangzi. And the third story refers us to nothing else but to a metaphor of the Belarusian childhood.
The illustrations in the book are not nostalgic images of the lost childhood of the Belarusian millenials. Instead, they teem with artefacts of the present day: there are books on the shelves that the small Natalka will write many years later, and kids learn ABC from a book with Pahonia (national symbol banned in the soviet times back in the 1980-s).
Let's see how we did it and how it looks!
A few photos from the wonderful process of creating the book, along with our families, the choice of printing house and quality control of printing 💫
Informal slogan of the book “All mysteries are hidden behind the garages” lives in the book literally in several dimensions: The stories of Natalka engaged me so much that I added my own plots into the pictures. A group of city pigeons-rascals accompany the heroes of the book and get into their own adventures breeding more mysteries for readers to solve at length! :) By the way, the prototypes of these characters were real pigeons, which settled on my windowsill just at the time when I was illustrating the book.
There is the presentation of Tales of the Old Adamkova in the art gallery Art-Belarus 💫
4-minute video about how we published this book of tales ⭐
