(1922-1923)

Marc Chagall was introduced to printmaking in Berlin in 1922, at the age of thirty-five. (He would eventually complete one hundred twenty-three intaglios and woodcuts, more than eleven hundred lithographs, and thirty-eight illustrated books.) He had arrived there with an autobiographical manuscript he had been working on since 1911. The gallerist Paul Cassirer saw the text, and hoped to publish a translation of it that would include prints by Chagall. Responding immediately, the artist completed his first etchings within three weeks. They were issued as a portfolio without text, due to translation difficulties with Chagall's unusual prose. 

Drawing on vivid childhood memories of village life in Vitebsk, the artist depicted himself, his wife and child, his parents, his childhood home, local figures and events. These scenes of life in Russia were still fresh in Chagall's mind in 1923, when he began the etchings for Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls.