Victor Chizhikov

Victor Aleksandrovich Chizhikov was born on September, 26th, 1935 into a family of office workers in Moscow. He started to publish drawings when he was still a schoolboy, in the newspaper ‘Housing Worker’ in 1952. After finishing school he entered the Art and Design Branch of the Publishing Faculty of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute (nowadays – the Moscow State University of Press), where he graduated in 1958.

How lovely are these trees !

From 1955 Victor Chizhikov worked as an illustrator in the comic journal ‘Crocodile’, from 1956 – in children’s magazine ‘Vesyolie Kartinki’, from 1958 – in ‘Murzilka’ (from 1965 – the associate editor), and from 1959 – in the travel magazine ‘Vokrug Sveta’ (Around the World).

In 1960 the young artist who was frequently published in the periodical press was admitted to the Union of Journalists. He also worked in other popular periodicals. Though Victor Chizhikov started his career as a caricaturist, from the early 1960s he was mainly engaged in illustrating children’s books, and co-operated with major Russian publishing houses. He was a versatile artist and worked in many different styles.

In 1968 Victor Chizhikov became a member of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation. His illustrations embellished books by almost all classics of the Soviet children’s literature – Agnia Barto, Sergey Mikhalkov, Boris Zakhoder, Samuil Marshak, Nikolay Nosov, Edward Uspensky and many other domestic and foreign authors.

Easily recognizable, full of kind humour and warm-heartedness, Chizhikov’s drawings became known to millions of readers of all ages. In 1980 he created the famous bear cub Misha – this emerged as the best out of 40,000 submissions for a contest to select the mascot for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. At once it became one of the most popular Russian cartoon characters. The same year, he was awarded the order of the Sign of Honour, and a year later gained the title of the Most Deserved Artist of the Russian Federation.

The mascot born out of the Communist bloc’s greatest power, the Soviet Union, ironically became the first to be a globally commercial success. Sadly, Victor said that he was promised the copyright but didn’t get it, and thus never saw any royalties from the stuffed toys, t-shirts and television programs related to Misha the Bear. “I hate to talk about mascots,” he told The Wall Street Journal but “This is like a thorn in my heel.”

Starting from 1966, for over more than thirty years, he repeatedly won the “Art of Book” competition, participated in exhibitions both in Russia and abroad, and got numerous professional awards, including the Diploma of Academy of Arts of the USSR (1980), Andersen Honourable Diploma (1980), and Diploma of Council on Children’s Books of Russia (1997). He also gained the award for the highest achievements in the genre of satire and humour – “Gold Ostap” (1997).

Victor Chizhikov also showed himself as the author of children’s fairy tales, such as “Petja and Potap”, “Petja Rescues Potap”, “Sharik and Vaska are Against”.

In the mid-1990s the publishing house Samovar started to issue the series “At Victor Chizhikov’s”, which included twenty books by different children’s writers, and two books written by the artist himself. Each of the books in this series was accompanied with Chizhikov’s illustrations and a preface.

Among his most significant works of recent years is the book 333 cats (2005), which was created jointly with the poet and writer Andrey Usachyov. During his life, Victor illustrated over 100 books, he sadly passed away in 2020 at the age of 84.