Private Collection, London
Sasha and Yashka, the short-form names of Alexander and Yakov, is based on the German-language poem about Max and Moritz, originally written in 1865, ‘A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks’.
This tale of two n’er-do-wells, the collection concentrates solely on the sixth trick, ‘The Baker’, where Max and Moritz are caught trying to steal from a baker, are baked in an oven and gnaw out of a bread loaf to safety. The denouement in the original poem, where Max and Moritz are ground to death in a grain mill, is radically changed, however, to reflect the theme of redemption if our heroes had taken a good communist path.
The date of collection, 1928, is significant, coming at a time when Communist Party propaganda was reaching its zenith and was a theme of many Soviet novels past and present.
