Lubok

For other uses, see Lubok (disambiguation).
The Mice Are Burying the Cat, a 1760s lubok print, has been commonly thought to be a caricature of Peter the Great's burial, authored by his opponents. The caption above the cat reads: "The Cat of Kazan, the Mind of Astrakhan, the Wisdom of Siberia" (a parody of the title of Russian tsars). Modern researchers have said that this is a representation of carnivalesque inversion, "turning the world upside down".

A lubok (plural lubki; Russian: лубо́к, лубо́чная картинка) is a Russian popular print, characterized by simple graphics and narratives derived from literature, religious stories, and popular tales. Lubki prints were used as decoration in houses and inns. Early examples from the late 17th and early 18th centuries were woodcuts, followed by engravings or etchings, and from mid-19th century lithography. They sometimes appeared in series, which might be regarded as predecessors of the modern comic strip. Cheap and simple books, similar to chapbooks,[1] which mostly consisted of pictures, are called lubok literature (Russian: лубочная литература). Both pictures and literature are commonly referred to simply as lubki. The Russian word lubok derives from lub - a special type of board (secondary phloem) on which pictures were printed.

  1. ^ Lyons, Martyn. Books: A Living History. Getty Publishing, 2011, 158.