Pop-up “Alice Through the Looking Glass”
Illustrated by Maxim Mitrofanov
3-D structures by Oksana Ivanova
Published by AST in 2023
I am here
enchanted by this rare jewel that is the pop-up edition of Alice through the Looking Glass illustrated
by the Russian Maxim Mitrofanov
with 3-D structures by Oksana
Ivanova.
Suddenly memories
of readings and arcane
experiences knocked
on my door. When I was 5 years
old I got a magical carousel
edition of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ by
the Brothers Grimm that I never found again, and from that
inspiration I created sock puppets and built a
small house made of sweets
and cookies and would write
and perform a post-modern
play reinterpreting the subject at school when I was just
12 years old. Along the way, I intensely
experienced this mental effervescent idea that books, their inner lands and inhabitants hold mysteries and
surprises and could reach our world.
The Italian writer Giorgio Manganelli once said in his brilliant “parallel reading” of the adventures of
Pinocchio: “A book cannot be read;
we dive into it. He
is, at all times, around us.” And if opening the cover of a book is really like opening the first door
that never closes again, I
revisit in Alice through the Looking Glass, a story so well known that I have delved into,
illustrated and crossed so many times,
and meet again with its characters who rise from the horizontality of the page
and live with me the desire for them to take on a life of their own and invite me
to also go through the liminary space.
Eliza, the heroine of the story “The Wild Swans” by Hans Christian Andersen, had a magical picture book,
in which everything was alive. The
birds sang, and people came out of the book and spoke to the girl and her brothers; but when the pages
were turned, they returned to their places, so that everything was in order. With the memory of this tale, philosopher Walter Benjamin
discusses whether it is the characters
who jump out of the book or whether it is the (his choice) children who immerse themselves in reading their
illustrated books.
Faced with this magic box, I would answer that both can happen in imaginary realms.
In one hand the
characters jump off the pages, as if they wanted to create a life of their own, reminding
me the classics of Brazilian children's literature by Monteiro Lobato in
XXth century, in which the
characters from
fairy tales stories and classics like Alice escape books to live new adventures in Yellow Woodpecker Ranch, a
magical fictional land in Brazil.
I have the hypothesis that one of
Lobato's inspirations for the characters' escape may have been the vision of an Alice in Wonderland book
with a pop-up page illustrated by
the English woman Ada Bowley, whose illustrations are in the first Brazillian Alices, first adapted and published by Lobato in
1931. It was written in the cover: “Come to life panorama”.
In this case in my hands,
opening the book is not just going through a door but also, literally, going through the
looking glass in its brilliant cover full of enchantment
and clever engine, and
entering the full book as a Sheep Shop cabinet of curiosities, which I
consider probably
the most intriguing space in this entire adventure, with shelves
full
of challenges and
interactive enigmas unveiled, but which become empty when we look at them. Here the look
plays hide-and-seek, the hand plays
once upon a new, the imagination crosses unexpected portals. At the same time, we also become Alices,
interacting with the pieces
of the game,
talking to them
and bringing to life the
challenges that Carroll's text presents to us and Mitrofanov and Ivanova invite us to play again as
an alicedelic literary toy.
Mitrofanov has already illustrated AIW in pop-up format in one also
brilliant accomplishment but with fewer paper architecture. Also reimagined multiple
plane editions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking
Glass with different drawings. I’m intrigued that I find out something obvious that I
didn’t notice before clearly or just hadn’t put into words. Illustrations of
Mitrofanov are very dynamic and alive, we can fell the rabbit running through
the book, the pool of tears overflowing the pages, we are placed in angles that
challenge our balance in Alice’s subtle terrifying transformations or falling
through the earth, and so on. The illustrator has a brilliant imagination
fulfilled with fairy tales and fantasy previous illustrated books, and
witnessing his Instagram make me come back to the shelves in Sheep Shop,
Eliza’s and Lobato’s books, or The
Magic Bookcase of
Robert Ingpen, and imagine the characters coming and crossing the little
squares to begin new stories.
But to find alicedelic curious details and unsuspected references
in his Alices is a perfect work for the nexialist comments of @semperluxus, who has a
magical cabinet of wonders
for lovers of special editions of Alice and
fantasy and her never ending multidimensional story. According to Semperlux,
Mitrofavov’s Wonderland… “It's one of loveliest Alice books on the market,
& is very richly illustrated - there are colour illustrations on all 140
pages, with a myriad of marvelous details in every picture”.
Images from: Ruslania bookshop
