Green Book (1989)

"...important direction in contemporary Russian artists’ books, following precedents set by the Futurists, is the fusion of poetic and artistic talent in artist-authors blessed with Doppelbegabung. <...> An artist who achieved equal mastery in more than one medium and combined an expertise in different arts is Parygin. His poetic collections Pesok (Sand, 1989), Zelenaia kniga (The Green Book, 1989), Tsvetnye zvuki (Coloured Sounds, 1990) and Moia mansarda (My Attic, 1990) represent an attempt to synthesize text and plastic figuration in books where literary and visual languages are calculated to have a simultaneous effect on the reader/viewer."

"Each illustration is protected by an interleaf made of blush tracing paper, an old book tradition often used in the livre d’artiste. This creates the peculiar effect of a curtain, behind which we can discern, as if in a haze, the full-page illustrations printed in a brownish ink on cream-tinted watercolour paper <...> The frontispiece shows the silhouettes of the Singer Company Building on Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg, where Dom Knigi (“House of the Book”) is located, and the Kazan Cathedral. Above them float the artist’s moving eye."