A Selection of Cartoons from Puck

Chapter 29: A RUSSIAN NOCTURNE.

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About This Book

This collection gathers satirical pictorial essays and caricatures originally published in a humor magazine, pairing sharp visual exaggeration with allegorical scenes to comment on political and social issues of the late nineteenth century. An introductory essay explains the artist’s German-influenced approach that fuses caricature and cartooning into dramatic parables, and the plates reproduce large, detailed cartoons with accompanying captions and an index to aid interpretation. The volume emphasizes visual wit, topical parody, and the interplay of character drawing and symbolic narrative.

A RUSSIAN NOCTURNE.

PUCK, March 23rd, 1881.

The hideous cruelties practised by the government of the Czar of Russia on all those of his subjects who do not worship and adore the “Little Father” with single-minded devotion and reverent awe, have more than once furnished a subject for Mr. Keppler’s sympathetic pencil. At the time of the appearance of this cartoon, in March of 1881, these brutalities had attracted general attention throughout the civilized world. Perhaps they were no worse than they had been before; but there seemed to be reason to believe that they were just then of an exceptional atrocity, the recent Russo-Turkish war having noticeably stimulated the savage element in what one of their own artless writers calls the “semi-barbarian race” of Russians.

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