It's the 'Wizard of OZ'.
There is an 'eastern block' version of the book by Alexander Wolkow . It was the very first book I have read for my own. In the east it was not just one book - but a whole series. The first book was more or less like the american 'Wizard of OZ' of Lyman Frank Baum and had the title 'The wizard of the emerald city'. It was very popular in the GDR. Maybe like Harry Potter today...
http://www.smaragdenstadt-fanpage.de...er/smaragd.htm
Quote:
The Wizard of the Emerald City (Russian: Волшебник Изумрудного Города) is a 1939 children's novel by Russian writer Alexander Melentyevich Volkov. The book is a loose translation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The names of most characters are changed, some elements of Baum's novel are removed, and some new elements are added. The book was revised in 1959 and became quite popular in the 1960s, leading to five sequels: Urfin Jus and his Wooden Soldiers (1963), The Seven Underground Kings (1964), The Fiery God of the Marrans (1968), The Yellow Fog (1970), and The Secret of the Abandoned Castle (1975, published in 1982). These sequels were written by Volkov himself and are not based on Baum's plot elements.
Volkov's Magic Land series, as it was called, was translated into many languages and was popular with children all over the Eastern bloc. Volkov's version of Oz seems to be better known than Baum's in some countries, for example in China and the former East Germany. The first four books in the series have been translated into English — or retranslated, in the case of the first book — by Peter L. Blystone, and were published by Red Branch press in two volumes (two books a volume) in 1991 and 1993. A very important cause for the big success were the pictures made by Leonid Vladimirsky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wiz...e_Emerald_City
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Good page in english.
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http://www.izum-gorod.narod.ru/eng/index.htm
Have a look at some of the illustrations:
http://emeraldcity.ru/images.htm