Viktor Dragunskiy.
The Adventures of Dennis
Three short stories by Viktor Dragunsky illustrated by Olga Chernysheva.
In front of you is a book about Dennis—or Deniska. But who is he? Dennis Korablev is a boy of about eight years old. His father works as an engineer, his mother studies at college. The Adventures of Dennis cycle was created by Soviet writer Viktor Dragunsky with his own son as its main character. In just under a decade, from 1959 to 1968, Dragunsky would compose more than fifty stories about Deniska.
Все фото: Руслан Шавалеев
Olga Chernysheva (b. 1962) is an artist who works with video, photography, graphics, and painting. In 2001, she represented Russia at the Venice Biennale, her works were also exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Elsewhere, Chernysheva’s works have been exhibited at Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg (2014) and at the first Bergen Assembly in Norway (2013). In 2022, Chernysheva won the Daniel and Florence Guerlain Contemporary Drawing Prize. Chernysheva’s works are held in many Russian and international collections, notably the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, MMOMA, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
Misha snatched my dump truck and ran home, I just sat there looking at my little glowworm. It was as green as a fairy light and, even though it was right there in my hand, it seemed miles away. My heart was beating real fast and I had a funny, prickly feeling in my nose, like I wanted to cry. I sat there looking at it. There wasn’t anybody else in the yard. And I forgot about everyone in the world.
For this edition of The Adventures of Dennis, the contemporary Russian artist Olga Chernysheva has selected and illustrated three of Dragunsky’s stories: “It’s Alive and It Shines…, ” “Things I Like…, ” “…And Things I Don’t.” The stories selected by Chernysheva differ somewhat from others in the cycle—they are marked less by exciting adventures than by a lightness that comes from emotive attention to the hidden, barely perceptible details of everyday life. In this respect, they resonate with Chernysheva’s artistic practice, in which artistic techniques—graphics, watercolour, collage, and photography— accurately note the nature of things and the state of the characters, doing by artistic means what Dragunsky does through literary ones.
The Adventures of Dennis is the fifth book published in the