Pushkin, A. S. Ruslan and Lyudmila (Ruslan i Lyudmila). Wrapper design by Ivan Kostylev, 1946. In Russian.

Пушкин, А. С. Руслан и Людмила / А. С. Пушкин ; обложка художника Ивана Костылева.
Москва : ОГИЗ, Государственное издательство художественной литературы, 1946.
Картонный переплёт с наклеенной иллюстрированной суперобложкой (оформление И. Костылева).
Состояние очень хорошее: обложка яркая и чистая, лёгкая потёртость по краям. Блок чистый, полный.
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Pushkin, A. S. Ruslan and Lyudmila / by A. S. Pushkin ; wrapper design by Ivan Kostylev.
Moscow: OGIZ, State Publishing House for Literature and Art (Goslitizdat), 1946.
Cardboard binding with the illustrated pictorial wrapper pasted on (design by Ivan Kostylev).
Condition very good: bright, clean wrapper with light edge wear. Text block clean and complete.

Published in 1946 as one of the vast mass-circulation editions through which Soviet state publishing kept the Russian classics in continual print, this pocket edition presents Alexander Pushkin's "Ruslan and Lyudmila" (1820), the poet's first major completed work. Composed while Pushkin was still in his late teens and early twenties, drawing on Russian and Slavic folkloric material alongside the mock-heroic and chivalric-romance traditions he had absorbed from Ariosto and Voltaire, the poem recounts the abduction of the princess Lyudmila by the sorcerer Chernomor and the knight Ruslan's fantastical quest to win her back; its original 1820 publication provoked both delight and controversy for its playful, colloquial tone, which conservative critics considered an affront to the elevated diction expected of epic verse. The present edition's pictorial wrapper, pasted over plain card boards in the mass-market manner typical of Soviet OGIZ/Goslitizdat pocket classics, was designed by the graphic artist Ivan Kostylev in a deliberately archaizing ornamental idiom - interlaced floral scrollwork, decorative columns, and a peacock - drawing on the visual vocabulary of old Russian manuscript illumination and folk lubok print, a register frequently used in Soviet design of the immediate postwar years to frame the classics within a specifically Russian national visual heritage. Issued in a print run of 250,000 copies at the fixed price of one ruble, the edition was intended for the broadest possible popular readership rather than the collector's shelf; well-preserved copies retaining the full brightness of the pictorial wrapper remain a pleasant example of mid-century Soviet book design applied to a canonical text.