Salon

Some good things resulted from the Cold War and the Soviet Union's disregard of copyrights and authors' wills. Here's an example: In the West, editions of Pamela L. Travers' "Mary Poppins" invariably came with Mary Shepard's illustrations, which portrayed the magical nanny as a nice, smiling, close-to-middle-age woman in a bonnet. The whole Western perception of the story, including Julie Andrews' performance in the famous film, stems from those images. Soviet children were luckier. Since the publishers of the book's Russian version did not bother to consult the author's agents, they commissioned illustrations from artist Gennady Kalinovsky, and he drew Mary Poppins as she should be: a tall, young, prim, unnaturally upright, cool, vicious and somewhat butch brunette. It went much better with the text.

Kalinovsky, who died on Sunday at age 76, influenced the imaginations of several generations of children. Besides "Mary Poppins," he illustrated a few editions of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass," the first Russian edition of J.R.R. Tolkien, and children's books by Yury Koval, Sofya Prokofyeva and others. Not many others, though, for Kalinovsky was always very selective. More often than not, he declined publishers' offers, saying that the suggested book was "not interesting." He was highly scrupulous about the projects he did undertake. For "Alice," he curtained his studio windows, blocking out all daylight, and spent close to two years in isolation, drawing some of the time, but mostly just playing with images in his head. I hate to approve of Soviet times, but such things were feasible back then: A major creative work, once accepted, could sustain an artist (or a translator, for that matter) for months, if not years.

The post-Soviet years were harsh for the picky artist. He won several prestigious awards, but his financial situation remained difficult. There was eventually a bright side: In 2001, St. Petersburg's Vita Nova released a classy gift edition of Mikhail Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" with exquisite illustrations by Kalinovsky, a project that would have been unthinkable in the previous decade. His pictures brilliantly captured the contrast between the jerky satirical scenes set in Moscow and the epic biblical style of the Pilate chapters.

Nina Demurova, a researcher and translator of Lewis Carroll, is preparing a book about Alice and her influence on Russian culture. "Kalinovsky wrote a long essay for me, and he worried it was too long," she said. "But I'm not going to cut a single word from it. It's not just a story of his relationship with the Carroll books -- it's an artist's testament, a vision of what books should be."