The cartoonist Yuri Kosobukin (1950 - 2013) can already be called an established master of his craft - the number of awards he has received is close to 500, he is well respected by colleagues, art critics and ordinary viewers, and editors of major publications are happy to buy his cartoons for printing. In some ways, Kosobukin's cartoons are reminiscent of Gogol's “The Overcoat” - they also show the problems of the “little man”, they are ironic, touching and a little sad, making us think about our lives.
Radiation snowmen
Kosobukin is from Dalnerechensk, but spent his childhood and youth in Volgograd, where he moved with his parents when he was 3 years old. He studied diligently, eventually managed to enter the prestigious Kharkov Aviation Institute. After graduation he settled in Ukraine, worked at Antonov Design Bureau, but the 90s came, and it turned out that no one needed everything he had been doing all his life. At work paid pennies, so he had to find new ways to make a living.
A gentleman and a lackey
And Kosobukin began drawing cartoons for various newspapers and magazines, of which there were many in those years. They soon became popular, and gradually Kosobukin was promoted - he became a staff cartoonist of the newspaper “Kievskie Vedomosti”. Kosobukin's cartoons about unlucky, unshaven, ridiculous men from the people, emphatically poorly dressed in various rags and patches, appeared there almost daily.
Why don't you support reforms?
But this was not an outright mockery of those who failed to succeed at the time - and such were the majority - but rather a desire to identify with his characters the bulk of the population, who, like Kosobukin, found themselves at a crossroads and did not know where they could somehow earn a more or less decent living. That's why his cartoons are more sad than funny, they contain sincere sympathy, and irony acts as a lifeline that prevents them from sinking into the abyss of gloomy hopelessness. Not surprisingly, Kosobukina's cartoons were in great demand at the time, and those unshaven men from the social underclass became his signature feature.
Meeting under the New Year
But at the same time, Kosobukin's cartoons are not always obvious, the artist avoids straightforwardness, and to understand them you need to use imaginative thinking. They are also “mute”, i.e. there are no “clouds” with inscriptions so often used by cartoonists, so they should be understandable without translation to people in any country. However, they are much closer and more understandable for those who lived in the 90s in the former Soviet Union, and caught that strange and dashing time of social breakdown.
Wrong place
Kosobukin's creativity is truly original and talented, one can only be surprised at the number of non-standard ideas he generates, his original view of our world, and his ability to reveal an intriguing and extraordinary plot in a single drawing without inscriptions.
Sculptors
And in ordinary life he was a man cheerful and companionable, jokes and humor for him were an integral part of existence, so and difficulties with coming up with subjects for his cartoons at Kosobukhin never arose, artwork was given to him easily, and this is a sign of real talent.
Necessary defense
However, sometimes Kosobukhin was also joked about, as cartoonist Valentin Druzhinin told in his interview. “In Soviet times, there was a large magazine called Sovetsky Soyuz, which was printed in several languages, including Arabic. So I decided to play a trick on Kosobukin: I wrote a letter with the first lines in Russian: “Dear Yuri Kosobukin”. And then I simply copied the Arabic text and wrote at the end: “We are very much looking forward to your reply. As Kosobukin later admitted, he searched all over the city for a suitable translator, but no one even tried to take on such work.
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