Contributors:  The exhibition was created by the collaborative efforts of eight graduate students, one former undergraduate student,  and two faculty members at the University of Chicago.

 

Robert Bird teaches Russian literature and film. He is the author of books on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and has published widely on the aesthetics of Russian modernism.

 

Kathryn Duda is graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature.  She is interested in late Soviet culture, but enjoys a good novel from whatever period or place.

 

Leah Goldman is a doctoral candidate in Soviet history. She holds a B.A. summa cum laude in music from UCLA, an M.Mus. in performance from Mannes College of Music, and an M.A. in social science from the University of Chicago. Ms. Goldman spent the 2009-2010 academic year conducting archival research in Moscow under the auspices of a Fulbright-Hays DDRA grant and is currently writing her dissertation, entitled “Art of Intransigence: Soviet Composers’ Fight Against Censorship, 1945-1957.”

 

Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches in the Departments of Visual Arts and Art History.

 

Michelle Maydanchik is a doctoral student in Art History. She is writing a dissertation about performance art produced in Moscow throughout the late and post-Soviet periods, focusing on actionist practices of the 1990s.

 

Daniel Phillips is a graduate student in the Department of Art History studying modern Russian art.

 

Katherine Hill Reischl is a Ph.D student in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research interests include Russian and Soviet photography, modernist prose, socialist realism, media aesthetics, and Russian iconography.

 

Flora Roberts is a history PhD candidate in the Department of History, writing a dissertation on Tajikistan during the Soviet period. She has previously worked in international development in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, and will be conducting field research in Central Asia in 2011. Flora also has a degree in Classics from Oxford University and three young children.

 

Claire Saperstein graduated in 2010 with a BA in Fundamentals: Issues and Texts and Slavic Languages and Literatures.  She spent the 2010-2011 school year studying ethnic pedagogy in the Chuvash Republic of the Russian Federation, and plans to attend graduate school beginning in 2012.

 

Andrey Shlyakhter is completing his dissertation, “Smugglers and Commissars: the Making of the Soviet Border Strip, 1917-1939,” in the Department of History.  His research interests include economic deviance, “borderness,” and Soviet state (in)security.  His departure from the USSR in 1989, at the age of eight and a half, interrupted what was by all indications a promising military career. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary:

Children’s Books and Posters in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago

Exhibition Catalogue

 

Edited by Robert Bird and Matthew Jesse Jackson

Contributions by: Robert Bird, Radoslav Borislavov, Kathryn Duda, Leah Goldman, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Michelle Maydanchik, Daniel Phillips, Katherine Reischl, Flora Roberts, Claire Roosien, Andrey Shlyakhter

 

The publication was supported by the University of Chicago Library Society, the Humanities Division and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

 

All translations are by the contributors.

 

Website address:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/webexhibits/sovietchildrensbooks/index.html

 

Cover Illustration: Bei v Baraban! (Bang the Drum! 1930)]

 

Preface by Alice Schreyer

 

 

Introduction

The Soviet Union was a world in pictures. [i] Its creation in the wake of the Russian revolutions of February-March and October-November 1917 was facilitated by a vibrant image culture based largely on new media technologies. Its periodic re-makings – during Stalin’s Great Leap Forward (1928-1932), World War II (1941-1945, the Thaw (1956-1964), Perestroika (1987-1991) – were all accompanied by media revolutions. Now, twenty years after the disappearance of the USSR, despite the decidedly mixed legacy of the Soviet experiment, the Soviet image continues to fascinate and to mystify.

 

Two of the most striking manifestations of Soviet image culture were the children’s book and the poster. Both of these media testify to the alliance between experimental aesthetics and radical socialist ideology that held tenuously from the 1917 revolutions to the mid-1930s and defined the look of Soviet civilization. The children’s books and posters featured in “Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary” allow us to relate this new image culture to the formation of new social and cultural identities under the watchful eye of a powerful and oppressive state. They cover a crucial period, from the beginning of Stalin’s Great Breakthrough in 1928 to the re-construction and re-grouping that followed the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets called World War II. As these works vividly show, there was no ideologically neutral space in the Soviet imagination. By the same token, though, there was no zone of Soviet life empty of the image.

 

“Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary” is drawn entirely from the collections of the University of Chicago Library. The Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) at the University of Chicago houses a large collection of over 400 Soviet children’s books published between 1927 and 1948, with the majority dated 1930-1935. This collection, the provenance of which is not known, is supplemented by a small but fascinating group of Soviet children’s books from 1930-1931 acquired by the Library as part of the R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company Training Department Library, where they were used in the company’s distinguished apprentice program for printers. Individual items have also been drawn from the Library’s general circulating collections. The posters in the exhibit are from the Dr. Harry Bakwin and Dr. Ruth Morris Bakwin Soviet Posters Collection, a group of nineteen posters from 1930-1932, collected on two trips to the Soviet Union and donated to the Library by their son E. M. Bakwin.

 

The exhibition was created by the collaborative efforts of eight graduate students, one undergraduate and two faculty members at the University of Chicago. The participants represent three distinct academic disciplines: history, art history and Russian literature. Each participant was responsible for one or more topic, each of which has a separate, signed page on the exhibition website. For this catalogue, the contributions have been gathered into a single narrative which foregrounds the exhibit’s unified theoretical core while retaining as much of the detail as possible.

[Full-page illustration 1: Marshak/ Lebedev, Bagazh (1931).

 

1. The Future’s Style

Every Soviet child was destined to live in a world that did not yet exist, a world very different from the one familiar to Soviet adults, including the illustrators of children’s books. [ii] With the harrowing and tumultuous experiences of war and revolution still recent memories, artists engaged in the production of children’s books during the 1920s and 1930s inhabited a paradoxical creative environment: the child-reader could not be shown the world as it really was, but only as it shall be. The child had to be imagined as a traveler biding time in the same visual universe as the illustrator, yet the Laws of History had already decreed that the young Soviet citizen would soon move on to the Future. Any truly “Soviet” children’s illustrations needed to find a way to exist simultaneously on several different planes of experience.

 

In such a collectively anticipatory atmosphere, the illustrations of famed pre-Revolutionary artists, such as Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942), could serve only as negative examples. Such ornate, yet tastefully rustic illustrations offered nostalgic pictures of a primitive Russian Past, a mental and physical space destined for oblivion in the technologically-advanced Soviet state. The traditional visual register of Russian children’s books¾comforting and comfortable pictures of cuddly creatures, cozy cabins and picturesque forests¾simply had no place in the new representational order. 

 

Rather than fleshing out such themes, the Soviet illustrator learned to place a protagonist’s activities in a kind of empty space, a zone dominated by boldly-rendered figures acting within an expanse of immaterial whiteness. Perhaps the most obvious stylistic transformation in Soviet children’s books revolves around the appearance¾and gradual disappearance in the years before and after World War II¾of the blank spaces that typically surround a book’s principal “action.” In illustrations such as Nikolai Denisovskii’s for Bei v Baraban! (Bang the Drum! 1930) the juvenile reader encounters a radically dis-incarnated world of bodies and objects lodged in barely imaginable landscapes.

 

Soon enough a new visual idiom began to emerge, one far more consonant with the pre-Revolutionary era. To see the change one need only compare Vladimir Lebedev’s illustrations for Samuil Marshak’s Bagazh (Luggage, 1931) and Raznotsvetnaia kniga (The Multicolored Book, 1947). Lebedev abandons the generic, generalizing tone of Luggage for The Multicolored Book’s welcoming grammar of colorful butterflies and luxurious banks of snow. It is as if those years of displacement and disturbance—rapid modernization, forced collectivization, and mass purges, not to mention the horrors of World War II¾ had transformed Lebedev, an avant-gardist of the first order and a master of Soviet pedagogical minimalism, into a devoted retro-traditionalist, a reassuring voice within the violent cacophony of Soviet mass self-improvement. Throughout the postwar era, these competing styles reappear in children’s illustrations, the soothing images of a Nostalgic Past resisting the abstracting will of a Communist Future.

 

[2 Illustrations: Bilibin; Marshak/Lebedev, Raznotsvetnaia kniga]
[Sidebar 1a: Aleksandr Deineka]

Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) defies the stark opposition between avant-garde and kitsch Socialist Realism, as the officially-approved aesthetic was known from 1934. Having fought in the Red Army during the Civil War, in 1920 Deineka left for Moscow to study in Vkhutemas, the state-sponsored “Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops.” Rather than following that school’s experimental path, Deineka preferred a more conservative aesthetic, co-founding in 1925 the “Society of Easel Painters,” which advocated for figurative painting to revolutionary art. Deineka’s desire to combine figurative scenes with a modernist aesthetic also informed his children’s book illustration work.

 

V oblakakh (In the Clouds, 1931), written as well as illustrated by Deineka, provides children with images of the kinds of aerial technology and physical or martial prowess which they might aspire to develop. A sea-plane flies before an urban landscape while the lithe bodies of rowers exert themselves on the water below. Throughout his career Deineka would return to the athletic body as a subject for his art.

 

In an illustration for B. Ural’skii’s Elektromonter (The Electrician, 1930), two workers stand atop an electrical tower, rendered by Deineka as a grid without context. The tower, power lines and workers’ bodies are a play of line that represents electrification through a general sense of dynamism, rather than through the delineation of logical relationships. We have no idea where this tower is or how it might be supported and connected to the ground. Thus, while clearly performing an ideological function, Deineka eschews the solid, archaizing literalism that would characterize much of later Socialist Realism, including Deineka’s own later work. The desire to figure and represent the future still stands in tension with its fundamental unknowability.

 

[2 Illustrations: V oblakakh; Ural’skii, Elektromonter]

[Sidebar 1b: Vladimir Mayakovsky]

Soviet children’s books and posters owed a great deal of their inimitable look and sound to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930). Under his pen Russian poetry began to speak with a more flexible and expressive (even anarchic) play of sound and rhythm. The prolific Agniia Barto spoke for many when she identified her discovery of Mayakovsky’s poetry as the “pivotal moment” in her development as a children’s writer. [iii]

 

First

               I’ll draw

A house

               as I

                              want it.

The main thing

Is to draw

A marvelous

               house,

Alive as if.

This is

               the front,

It’s called the façade.

Anyone

               can make this out:

this is the bath

and this the yard.

The plan is ready,

               around it

a hundred tasks

               for a thousand hands.

The scaffolding scrapes

               the very sky.

 

Mayakovsky wrote fourteen poems for children, utilizing exuberant word-play and staggered, step-like verses to take language apart and allow children to put it back together in new ways. Kem byt’? (Whom Shall I Be? 1929) encourages children to create their own identities, even as it channels their desire into specific existing roles. Nisson Shifrin designed this edition so that the consecutive stanzas interlock and overlap. The professions are visualized as a number of distinct, decentered scenes in incongruous scales and perspectives across the books’ pages. The result is a kaleidoscopic fantasy of overlapping professions, each one better than the last, right up to the concluding lines:

Having turned the book inside out

Keep it well in heart:

All jobs are fine for you:

Choose

for your own taste!

 

The stylistic development of books based on Mayakovsky’s verse clearly illustrates how his rambunctious personality was tamed after his death by suicide in 1930. The 1947 edition of Whom Shall I Be? divides the poem into logical sections and replaces Shifrin’s abstract depictions of constructivist buildings by realistic renderings of neo-classical edifices.

 

 [2 Illustrations: Kem byt’ 1932, 1947]

[Full-page illustration 2: Chto my stroim (What We Are Building, 1930) by L. Savel’ev and Vladimir Tambi]
2. Maps and Models

Upon visiting Moscow in the winter of 1926-27 Walter Benjamin observed, “The map is almost as close to becoming the center of the new Russian icon cult as is Lenin’s portrait.” [iv] Maps and other kinds of models not only informed Soviet citizens where things were and how they worked; by presenting global processes on a hand-held miniature scale, they also served as propaedeutic devices for the vast redesign of the world – and its people – envisioned by the Soviet project.

 

Chto my stroim (What We Are Building, 1930) by L. Savel’ev (pseudonym of Leonid Lipavskii) and Vladimir Tambi lists various kinds of construction projects (including power-stations and the Turksib railway), leaving space for children to add more new objects as they arise and as the children learn about them from school, newspapers, radio and other media. The interactive design underscore the point that the Soviet map was fundamentally open-ended and subject to change. Thus children were encouraged to imagine leaving their mark on the landscape.

 

Children’s books teach children to construct models of objects around them and, even better, to model new objects. In his book Otkuda stol prishel (Where the Table Comes From, 1946), Samuil Marshak concludes his list of the table’s purposes by showing how one can model an airplane on it:

On it I spread my draft,

And when the time comes,

According to the sketch

Build an airplane.

 

Beginning from the front cover, the reader of Piatiletka  (The Five-Year Plan, 1930)  is introduced to the artist Laptev, the book’s creator, who lives in Moscow but follows the tremendous changes across the entire country through the mass media. The reader finds three maps of on-going projects: the electrification of the country, the construction of factories and the collectivization of farms. If the reader turns the book over and starts from the back cover, she is presented with production targets for ten industries: electricity, factory construction, iron, coal, oil, the chemical industry, bread production, forestry, transport and culture. The number of literate citizens will practically double, and the number of books published each year will increase from 1 to 4 per person. The act of reading, which allows the individual to place herself on the large-scale maps of the country and is economy, is itself figured as a productive step toward the accomplishment of the plan.

 

[3 illustrations: Piatiletka x 2; Otkuda stol prishel]
Sidebar 2a: Modeling the new collectivity

Theorists of the Russian revolution placed heavy emphasis on the collective, both as a tribute to their own populist roots and as a means to stabilize and build a new society from the ashes of the Civil War. Not only were many Soviet children the first members of their households to achieve literacy, it was also believed that children’s minds, uncorrupted by the influences of the previous era, would imbibe the revolutionary gospel of the collective and even teach it to their elders (as well as, in time, their own children) thus creating a clean break with the past and a firm beginning for the new, collective future.

 

In an illustration of the good will created by and further facilitating the collective ideal, the characters in Mikhail Ruderman's Subbotnik (Saturday Work, 1930) voluntarily toil together on their day off, unloading sacks of potatoes from a train.

 

In K. Vysokovskii's Pionery v kolkhoze (Pioneers on the Collective Farm, 1931) young Pioneers (members of the Soviet organization for children aged ten to sixteen) go on a day trip to a collective farm, where they work eagerly alongside their elders installing a radio, ploughing, sowing, milking and collecting recyclable material.

 

The title character of Aleksandr Vvedenskii's Kolia Kochin (1930) initially prefers his own games to joining collective tasks. The text makes clear that such a child will be cast out from the warmth and camraderie of the collective. Fortunately for Kolia (and all other naughty individualist children), the collective remains welcoming to those who surrender themselves to its will.

 

The dynamic and exuberant style used to represent the collective reaches its apogee in Nikolai Denisovskii's illustrations to the 1932 edition of Elizaveta Tarakhovskaia's Bei v baraban! (Bang the Drum!), whose swirling colors, floating secular icons, and ranks upon ranks of marching, shouting, rejoicing citizens draws the reader into the giddy, overwhelming atmosphere of a true Soviet holiday.

 

[4 Illustrations: Mikhail Ruderman's Subbotnik (Saturday Work, 1930); K. Vysokovskii's Pionery v kolkhoze (Pioneers on the Collective Farm, 1931); Aleksandr Vvedenskii's Kolia Kochin (1930); Elizaveta's Tarakhovskaia's Bei v baraban! (Bang the Drum! 1932)]
Sidebar 2b: Modeling the new individual

As the Soviet Union's parallel drives toward industrialization and collectivization gained pace from the late 1920s through the 1930s, Soviet iconography turned to individual heroes: the model citizen, with proper values and behavior, and the shock worker, who exceeds production targets in prodigious feats of labor. The individual hero is drawn brightly and with detailed, clean lines and fully-realized face. His identity is never in question, marked either by his prominence in the scene, his distance from, and often ahead of, the others, or others' worshipful stance relative to him. Still a member of the social collective, the Soviet hero is unmistakably first among equals.

 

The hero was often an exceptional child, like the hale and hearty Valia Ermakov, the protagonist of Evgenii Shvarts and Vera Ermolaeva’s Kupat'sia katat'sia(To Swim, To Ride, 1931). In this vibrantly illustrated telling of a real-life story, the ailing Valia is sent to a sanatorium to recover from illness. He quickly puts on weight, regains his strength, and leads various physical activities, taking time to help the other children develop the abilities that come to him without effort.

 

Ia. Trakhtman's Tri shchetki (Three Brushes, 1930) tells the story of Marusia, a girl with exceptional hygiene. A rare female star, Marusia proudly proclaims her ownership of a toothbrush, a hair brush, and a shoe brush, and demonstrates their use for other children.

 

Adults can also be heroes for children. Petr Miturich's V pitomnike Michurina (In Michurin's Nursery, 1931) tells the story of experimental Soviet botanist Ivan Michurin, explaining his contributions to Soviet science as he leads a group of acolytes through his brightly colored garden. This book includes a note to teachers and parents emphasizing the importance of Michurin's story for children.

 

[3 Illustrations: Evgenii Shvarts and Vera Ermolaeva’s Kupat'sia katat'sia(To Swim, To Ride, 1931); Petr Miturich's V pitomnike Michurina (In Michurin's Nursery, 1931); Ia. Trakhtman's Tri shchetki (Three Brushes, 1930)]
[Sidebar 2c: Modeling the new woman]

After the 1917 revolutions the position of Russian women changed dramatically. Education for women became widely accessible, new legislation instituted women-friendly workplace policies such as paid maternity leave and work restrictions for pregnant and nursing mothers, and divorce law was liberalized. As the drastic increase in industry during the years of the Five-Year Plans demanded the mobilization of this new labor force, new jobs were made available to, even reserved exclusively for, women.

 

Our mothers

work with us

               in our / triumphant / nation.

To every, every

working mother

               we send / our Octoberite / greeting!

N. Sakonskaia, Mamin most (Mom’s Bridge, 1933)

 

The persistence of strict gender roles despite Soviet rhetoric to the contrary is illustrated by Tysiachu plat’ev v den’ (One Thousand Dresses a Day, 1931, by L. Kassil’). At the dress factory the sewing machines are operated exclusively by women, while all the other jobs in the factory, such as cutting and ironing, are performed by men.

 

In N. Sher’s Chadra Giulzarchi (Gulzarchi’s Veil, 1932) a young Central Asian girl is caught along the road with her veil off.  At the insistence of a black-clad older woman, she dons the veil again, but the other children of her town soon convince her to cast it off forever in honor of the newly established International Women’s Day, celebrated on March 8. 

 

Lev Kassil’’s Tvoi zashchitniki (Your Defenders, 1942) depicts a brave young nurse tending to a fallen soldier’s wounds on a raging field of battle. In contrast to Soviet war posters, which usually portrayed women as helpless victims, this book hails their contribution to the war cause, albeit in strictly defined role.

 

 [4 Illustrations: Tysiachu plat’ev v den’ (One Thousand Dresses a Day, 1931, by L. Kassil’). Tvoi zashchitniki (Your Defenders, 1942, by L. Kassil’) Chadra Giulzarchi (Gulzarchi’s Veil, 1932, by N. Sher), ; N. Sakonskaia, Mamin most (Mom’s Bridge, 1933)]

3. Seeing and Doing

Our fascination with Soviet graphic art of the 1920s and 1930s is at least partly explained by its mystifying combination of oppressive social policies and exuberant artistic imagination. Both the children’s book and the poster were closely monitored by government agencies and served as arms of ideological instruction and enforcement. For the most part, the posters’ striking visual layout insistently directed attention to their explicit political message. In the children’s books direct political content is usually less evident; instead of telling children what to think, the books involve children imaginatively (and sometimes also physically) in socially, economically or ideologically productive activities.

 

These two functions correspond roughly to the dichotomy of propaganda and agitation. If propaganda conveys an unambiguous message, agitation elicits an affective – and thus less predictable – response from viewers. From the beginning of the Soviet state agitation had been the privileged aesthetic mode, even for the poster. Interactive agitation broke down the opposition between performer and audience, allowing consumers of the image to construct meaning democratically. Often, this meant privileging the image over the word. One article from 1931 proclaimed:

[t]he poster must not limit itself to a bare slogan […] The poster must demonstrate our achievements in various sectors of the economy and cultural construction through images, not through diagrams. Such a poster would be the best means of agitation for the continued industrialization of the Soviet Union and for tense struggle for the realization of the Five Year Plan in four years. [v]

However, especially in the poster, this ideal was frequently displaced by forms of top-down propaganda, in which pre-programmed ideological messages were packaged in bombastic rhetoric.

 

Propaganda is exemplified by two posters created by Dem’ian Bednyi (pseudonym of Efim Aleksandrovich Pridvorov, 1883-1945) and Viktor Deni (pseudonym of Viktor Nikolaevich Denisov, 1893-1946), both of whom rose to prominence as satirists in the Civil War period. (Bednyi was rated so highly that he lived for many years in a private apartment at the Kremlin.) “The Bug,” dated 1930, is directed against the Social Democrats’ alleged appeasement of the National Socialists in Germany:

Here he is, with greased-down hair, all “cultured à la Europe,”

In unbridled baseness, in naked treachery,

The SD bug has slavishly lowered his dirty standard

Before the Fascist jackboot.

Two years later Bednyi and Deni teamed up again to extol the virtues of the international Left, known by its German moniker Rot Front (Red Front), in which the image serves as a visual epitome of the course of action that is described by the accompanying text. It is likely that Bednyi and Deni’s posters were directly commissioned to enunciate and publicize government policy.

 

[2 Illustrations: Deni/Bednyi posters]

Sidebar 3a: Military Preparedness

The need for military preparedness was communicated in children’s books in three ways: through the history and implied lessons of the Russian Civil War; through models of pre-military training and war games; and through assertions of the Soviet Union’s current military might, usually with an emphasis on the continued threat of war and need for vigilance. These books dealt with violent themes, but they did so in a way that made war fun.

 

Konnaia Budennogo (Budyonny’s Cavalry, 1931), about the legendary first Soviet cavalry, depicts three of the Bolsheviks’ Civil War opponents – the White Baron Vrangel’, the Ukrainian anarchist leader Nestor Makhno, and the Polish marshal Josef Pilsudski – with a rhyme by poet Aleksandr Vvedenskii:

Here before you

Is that famous trinity

That tried to impede

Our work and tranquility.

The use of discredited religious imagery made the old enemies appear even more distasteful.

 

Although labeled “for the preschool age group,” Na kreisere (On the Cruiser, 1932) depicts a troop of red-scarved Young Pioneers visiting a cruiser. Rather than idly stand around, they help the sailors scrub the deck; one lucky boy even gets to sit atop the imposing gun barrel while polishing it.  Whether or not Young Pioneer troops were actually invited onto Soviet cruisers, such illustrations invited children to revel in their country’s military might and to envision their own contribution to it.

 

Bud’ gotov k oborone.  Voennaia igra v ochage (Be Ready for Defense: War Game at Camp, 1931) offered younger children an alluring model of toy warfare, with deceptively simple instructions for constructing a castle, cannon, horses, and tents out of cardboard and plywood. A swastika flutters over the enemy fortress, alongside the flags of other hostile nations (Poland, Finland, France, Romania, Latvia, and the United States).

 

The increasingly tense international situation in the 1930s engendered a veritable cult of the Soviet border guard, usually accompanied by a trusty German shepherd, keeping vigilant watch on the frontier, as depicted on the first page of Oborona (Defense, 1937). Even as Defense celebrated the captivating technological wonders of the modern military, its front and back covers portrayed a cavalry charge that hearkened back to the heroic romance of the Civil War.

 

[4 illustrations: Konnaia Budennogo (Budyonny’s Cavalry, 1931) Na kreisere (On the Cruiser, 1932); Bud’ gotov k oborone.  Voennaia igra v ochage  (Be Ready for Defense: War Game at Camp, 1931); Oborona (Defense, 1937)
Sidebar 3b: Do It Yourself!

Do-it-yourself books invited children not only to enjoy reading, absorb information and reflect, but also to develop practical skills needed for the construction of a Communist society. Their themes range from the workings of technology, military preparedness, and voting to the more immediate tasks of drawing, printing, and making objects from such materials as cardboard, wood and even acorns.

 

Kak my delali Avroru (How We Made the Cruiser Aurora, 1931) asks children to model various objects associated with the historic events on the eve of the October Revolution and then to use these toys to re-enact the events in group play. These re-enactments hearken back to the massive theatrical commemorative events of the October Revolution organized on a huge scale during the early 1920s by avant-garde theater directors. 

 

A. Gromov’s Trafarety (Stencils, 1931) tells how to make posters and other printed matter using household materials.

 

F. Kobrinets’s Knizhka-kinoseans o tom kak pioner Gans stachechnyi komitet spas (A Cinema Book about Hans Who Saved the Strike Committee, 1931) touts the entertainment potential of cinema. While the book ends with the suggestion that children create their own films and show them to their friends, it also reminds its young readers to be aware that the films they will be making are not real.

 

I. Korshunov’s Detmashstroi: samodel’nye igrushki mashiny (Detmashstroi: Do-It-Yourself Machine Toys, 1931) explains how turbines work and how a simple toy turbine can be constructed, but it also reminds its readers that a “real turbine is made of steel and is quite complex.”

 

[4 Illustrations: Zheludi-igrushki; Kak my delali Avroru (How We Made the Cruiser Aurora, 1931); . Kobrinets’s Knizhka-kinoseans o tom kak pioner Gans stachechnyi komitet spas (A Cinema Book about Hans Who Saved the Strike Committee, 1931); I. Korshunov’s Detmashstroi: samodel’nye igrushki mashiny (Detmashstroi: Do-It-Yourself Machine Toys) Trafarety
4. Narrative Engagement

Soviet children’s books and posters made use of their distinct perceptual effects and modes of reception in order to realize pedagogical goals. Posters endeavored to communicate their messages as widely and instantaneously as possible by constructing a monumental space within a single plane. This is evident in Deni and Bednyi’s poster “The Victory of the Five-Year Plan Is a Blow against Capitalism,” which conveys an unequivocal message in a few iconic images, arranged symbolically so as to be both immediately comprehensible and compelling. By projecting a specific model of behavior, the posters efficiently project an unambiguous directive to a mass audience.The vertical format of the posters is appropriate for the medium’s issuance of instruction.

 

Children’s books were oriented towards individual consumption, encouraging a mode of viewing that was more personalized and contemplative than the posters. The innovative multi-page design of the books offers the opportunity to create a durational effect through the use of literary narrative and a long-term, tactile engagement. In Konveier (Conveyer Belt, 1932) the illustrators utilize the extended space of the book format to depict progress over time in two ways. On a two-page spread at the beginning of the book, the process of building a car is illustrated step-by-step in a sequential zig-zag around the plane of the pages. The majority of the book illustrates the collaborative, gradual process of creating a three-dimensional construction from a sheet of paper over several sequential pages.

 

Khlebozavod (Bread Factory, 1931) illustrates the method of baking bread from start to finish. The outer flaps of the foldout section in the middle of the book depict individuals performing the first and last stages of the factory’s procedure, mirroring the night and morning scenes presented at the start and end of the book. The four-page spread within portrays the complete process of bread-making with illustrations of machines and the individuals using them. In this way, as the viewer turns a series of pages, she perceives the passage from the present to the future.

 

The children’s book’s horizontal orientation facilitates a more interactive and individualized experience akin to a guided self-education. The books steer their viewers towards specific concepts, but in a manner that requires a greater deal of interpretive activity over a greater span of time, which unfolds both in physical interaction with the book and in the child’s own imagination.

 

[3 Illustrations: Deni and Bednyi’s poster “The Victory of the Five Year Plan Is a Blow against Capitalism,” Konveier (Conveyer Belt, 1932); Khlebozavod (Bread Factory, 1931)

Sidebar 4a: Obedience

Soviet children’s literature developed rapidly in the early 1920s, propelled by the energy of young writers, artists, editors and printers. As new journals and publishers sprang up, the industry offered young writers and artists a relatively stable income. The industry also benefited from technological and aesthetic innovations in book production, which allowed designers to play with dimension, color and layout. The books featured in this exhibit frequently boasted large print runs, from 10,000 to 100,000 copies, sometimes even more. Attractive and affordably priced, children’s books became a hallmark of the Soviet visual experience.

 

The children’s book industry was not an entirely safe profession, undergoing periodic purges of individuals judged to be subversive. Between 1926-1948, the Soviet authorities made numerous direct interventions in the institutional organization and aesthetic parameters of posters and children’s books. For several years children’s literature was dominated by the publishing house Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard). In 1933 the Central Committee of the Communist Party decreed the creation of a new publishing house Detgiz and called for tighter control over the quality and ideological rigor of children’s books. After 1933-1934, as the goals of the government turned from the creation of a new society to preservation of its own power, the variety and boldness of posters and children’s books steadily declined (though print runs remained massive).

 

In Natal’ia Zabila’s Bumazhnyi zmei (Kite, 1933) the first-person protagonist’s dream of flying on his kite to the stars flounders when his rope snaps and he comes tumbling down to earth. No matter: the lesson has been learnt and the protagonist has taken an important first step toward realizing his ambition of becoming a fighter pilot and even leading Soviet flight into outer space. He resolves to become “a mechanic of flying machines” that will let him fly up “where my home-made kite / Could not raise me.”

 

The individualistic ethos of Zabila’s Kite can be contrasted with Samuil Marshak’s 1947 story of Arctic adventure Ledianoi ostrov (Ice Island; drawings by O. Vereiskii), in which a medic is parachuted in to a distant outpost to treat a sick worker. After the treatment succeeds and the man returns to work, the poem concludes:

For this it was worth jumping from heights

Into the grey ocean, onto the cut ice,

Onto the snow between the dark melt pools,

Where the young paratrooper was sent

To help out a friend by Stalin.

Instead of bearing the promise of individual liberation, aviation becomes an instrument of central power. A similar process occurred with the children’s book.

 

[2 Illustrations: Natal’ia Zabila’s Bumazhnyi zmei (Kite, 1933); Samuil Marshak’s 1947 story of Arctic adventure Ledianoi ostrov (Ice Island; drawings by O. Vereiskii)]
Sidebar 4b: Imagination

Despite being complicit in a repressive political system, in their heyday Soviet children’s books were internationally regarded as a dramatic step forward in pedagogy. The poet Marina Tsvetaeva, an exile from the Soviet Union, hailed the books for dealing with “real” themes: “A child turns a toy lamb into a ram (life); why then should we turn life (nature) into a toy for children?” [vi] Acknowledging her personal sense of alienation from technology, she highlighted its importance in the books: “our children were born in it and with it, and it is their lot to live with it; even more: to create it.” [vii] In her view the books created agents capable of successfully navigating and even transforming their world.

 

One of the most vivid formulations of the liberating potential of the Soviet children’s book was given by Blaise Cendrars in his introduction to the catalogue of a 1929 Paris exhibit, which he co-organized:

I knew a father who made a book for his little son. It was a magnificent album, and since the father was a painter, it had lots of pictures of animals, pictures of birds, pictures of flowers. It showed people of all climates, all epochs, with their dress and their tattoos, their instruments, their tools, their weapons and their alphabets. And since the father also had the talent of a poet, it had equally the sea and the wind in this beautiful book for his young son: the sea, the wind, the sky with the stars and its huge letters. And all of this was admirably multi-colored. […] One day the father asked his little son:

               “Tell me, Jean, what do you like the best in your lovely picture book?”

               “Me? Daddy, it’s the red!”

               “What red?
               “But here, the red splash between the elephant’s hooves! It’s red!” [viii]

 

Wheels,

Wheels –

An obedient

Lot.

You gladly turn

Any way.

To the right,

To the left,

Straight on,

To the side, --

Wherever your axle

Turns.

-- From Marshak, Samuil, Kolesa [Wheels]. Ill. V. Tambi. Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1933.

 

[Ills: Sakonskaia, N. Mamin Most.  Ill. T. Zvonareva.  Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1933; Marshak, Samuil, Kolesa. Ill. V. Tambi. Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1933.

 

Sidebar 4c: Oberiu

A special place in the history of the Soviet children’s book belongs to a grouping of Leningrad writers known as “Oberiu,” which roughly stood for The Association for Real Art. Oberiu included Daniil Kharms (pseudonym of Daniil Iuvachev, 1905-1942), Aleksandr Vvedenskii (1904-1941), and L. Savel’ev (pseudonym of Leonid Lipavskii, 1904-1941). In their short lifetimes they were known mostly for their works for children; they enjoyed the patronage of Samuil Marshak at the journals Chizh (1930-1941) and Ezh (1928-1935) and at the Leningrad arm of Detgiz, the publishing house for children. The Oberiutes’ daring, sometimes absurdist experiments in poetic and dramatic form ultimately proved fatal for Kharms and Vvedenskii, who were imprisoned in 1931-1932 and died after being re-arrested in 1941.

 

Aleksandr Vvedenskii’s 1929 Avdei Rotozei (literally Avdei the Mouth-Gaper) tells of a peasant so absent-minded he loses all the sacks of grain he is transporting to the windmill. The first sack is lost when Avdei gawks at an airplane, apparently the first he’s ever seen. Under interrogation by the secret police, on 26 December 1931 Vvedenskii admitted that Avdei-Rotozei committed the grave ideological error of praising rich peasants and portraying the poor as “lazybones and drunkards”: “This image of the Soviet poor was borrowed by me from the anti-Soviet views of the Party’s policies in the countryside, views which were held by our group on the whole.” [ix]

 

In Daniil Kharms’ Igra (Play, 1930) three children run around their town imagining themselves as an automobile, a mail barge, and an airplane. The illustrations discourage the reader from thinking that the boys’ transformation is literal. But when the boys encounter a real cow, a vague, unsettling tension arises between fantasy and reality: which wins? Writing from Paris, the émigré critic Georgii Adamovich lamented that “not only will children not learn logic [from Kharms’ books], but adults will unlearn it.” [x]

 

One, two, three, four,

and four times

four,

a hundred four

times four,

a hundred-and-fifty

times four,

two hundred thousand times four!

And then four more!

Under interrogation by the secret police, on New Years Day 1932, Kharms confessed that his poem “Million” was “anti-Soviet” because “I consciously turned this book on the topic of the Pioneer movement into a simple counting game.” [xi]

 

The spirit of Oberiu infected other writers of works for children. Stop! (1931) by Evgenii Shvarts (1896-1958), a prolific author and dramatist, teaches children how to behave safely on the street: “Up to the middle of the street look left; after the middle – look right,” one page instructs. But how is one to understand the caption on the facing page: “Everyone, everyone, everyone, stop riding the sausage!” Perhaps understandably, the book’s accomplished illustrator K. Rudakov made no effort to represent this instruction pictorially.

 

[3 iIlustrations: Avdei Rotozei ; Daniil Kharms’ Igra (Play, 1930); Stop! (1931) by Evgenii Shvarts (1896-1958)]
[Full-page illustration: E. Shabad, Sever…]
5. The Soviet Imaginary

The term “imaginary” has been deployed in recent decades to denote the elusive glue that binds individuals into a society. One notable theorist of the social imaginary, the French sociologist and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis, defined the imaginary as the “unity and internal cohesion of the immensely complex web of meanings that permeate, orient, and direct the whole life of the society in question, as well as the concrete individuals that bodily constitute society.” [xii] Since it is both shared and constantly challenged by each of its members, inherited at birth but also subject to infinite acts of individual appropriation, the imaginary can be both remarkably mutable and surprisingly stable, often at the same time. Castoriadis compared the social imaginary to volcanic magma, subject to both incendiary and geological forces. [xiii] 

 

As an attempt to redefine the relationship between individual and society, communism also presupposed a realignment of aesthetic media as privileged material sites of the negotiation – or the conflict – between society and its constituent members. Soviet children’s books encourage young readers to channel their personal aspirations in socially productive directions by mimicking their elders and betters. Yet this medium of control also empowers the creators and consumers of images – the children – to make subtle (and sometimes quite bold) interventions in the way the collective visualizes and speaks about itself.

 

It is frequently assumed that the aesthetic dimension was especially important in the USSR because of tight government restrictions on the public debate of ideas. However one is repeatedly struck by the parallels between Soviet visual culture and that of the United States, which was also undergoing seismic changes in society and media in the 1930s. No less than Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, the social dislocations and public works projects of the Depression era are inseparable from the media technologies (photography, poster and mural art, radio and sound cinema) that lent the historical moment its palpable aesthetic form. In both cases one observes an almost obsessive need for modern societies constantly to visualize themselves amidst new technologies and social formations.

 

Soviet children’s books and posters vividly demonstrate how, within a single generation, the traditional, religious and agrarian society of Tsarist Russia ceded place to a markedly different Soviet society, one that was not only capable of overthrowing a three-centuries-old dynasty in the political revolutions of 1917, but also undergoing the full-blown cultural revolution instigated by Stalin in 1928, surviving World War II, and re-inventing itself after the death of its tyrannical dictator in 1953. One might argue that the Soviet image-world has even out-lived the demise of the ideology that spawned it. If there is one thing shared by almost all the books and posters in the University of Chicago collections it is their confidence in the power of the image to convey social change not only as an obligation, but also as an object of individual desire and a source of individual fulfillment.

 

 

Sidebar 5a: Resources

Some of the “realistic” books published during the first Five-Year Plan include those that introduce children to important raw materials as objects not only of concern, but even of individual desire. Some of these books show the process of refining the material and producing the goods, like A. Zaitsev's Derevo (Timber, 1931).

 

Nikolai Denisovskii's Tovarishch Artem (Comrade Artyom, 1930) dramatizes pure production with the story of how these materials were rescued from capitalist misuse.

 

Nikolai Denisovskii's Gold illustrates the transition from capitalist to socialist mining by shifting from black-and-white to color illustrations, shifting back to black-and-white for the presentation of gold's productive uses. The book ends with a particularly strong statement: “According to the Five-Year Plan, we need gold. It helps us build new factories, schools, houses, clubs аnd health centers for workers. We need gold in order to hasten the construction of socialism; quickly to reach and overtake capitalist nations; to wrest the workers of the whole world out from under the power of gold.” While the authors might mean to communicate a socialist narrative of political liberation, the child might be more impressed by the mere explosion of color.

 

[3 Illustrations: Les; Nikolai Denisovskii's Zoloto (Gold, 1931); Tovarishch Artem (Comrade Artyom, 1930)
Sidebar 5b: Samuil Marshak and Mikhail Il’in

Samuil Marshak (1887-1964), the most prolific and popular children’s poet in the USSR, was the elder brother of Il’ia Marshak (1896-1953), who under the pseudonym Mikhail Il’in specialized in presenting complex scientific topics to a young audience in ways that elided the distinction between the imagination and the real. Each in his own way, the Marshak brothers devoted many of their works of the 1930s and 1940s to representing the miracles wrought by humanity in the name of nature.

 

At his speech on children’s literature at the inaugural Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, Marshak referred to Il’in’s first book Rasskaz o velikom plane (The Story of the Great Plan, 1930) as proof of his claim that, “in essence, there is no break between our instructional and fictional literature. Both are oriented to the reader’s imagination.” [xiv] In a memoir about his younger brother Marshak celebrated his brother’s love of statistics: “behind all these numbers one can clearly see a multitude of future factories, manufactures, collective farms, electric power stations – entire complexes of power stations --, new railways and highways, new canals, lakes, a new country.” [xv] Il’in’s talent was to make statistical and scientific data available to children in an entertaining presentation, all based on the premise that, in Marshak’s words, “[i]magination helps ratiocination.” [xvi]

 

One of the new phenomena that Il’in helped to popularize was the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, which was also the subject of one of Marshak’s children’s poems of the time -- Voina s Dneprom (The War with the Dnieper, 3^rd ed., 1935):

Man said to the Dnieper:

I shall block you with a wall

So that

Falling

From the heights

The conquered

Water

Will Quickly

Move

Machines

And push

Trains. […]

So that

The plough

Is moved

Along the black soil

By electricity.

So that

It is light

On the street

And in homes

In the evening.

Marshak’s martial language and imagery clearly reveal the influence of avant-garde poetry, most notably Vladimir Mayakovsky. In particular one notes a constant telescoping of scale: a single individual is capable of blocking up an entire river, while the river’s giant force powers a single plough in a field.

 

 

[3 illustrations: 2 x Rasskaz o velikom plane (The Story of the Great Plan, 1930); Voina s Dneprom (The War with the Dnieper, 3^rd ed., 1935); Marshak, Samuil, Voina s Dneprom (The War with the Dnieper, 3^rd ed., 1935).

 

 

 

Sidebar 5c: Center and Peripheries

The years of the “great transformation” from 1928 to 1932 witnessed what historian Yuri Slezkine has described as “the most extravagant celebration of ethnic diversity that any state had ever witnessed.” [xvii] The Soviet policy on nationalities, or national minorities, was based on Lenin’s belief that, alongside the “bad” nationalism of predatory colonialist nations, there existed a “good” nationalism of oppressed states yearning for freedom. The formula “nationalist in form, socialist in content” meant that minority languages, local customs and traditions, ways of life and dress could be inscribed with the same socialist meaning. However, though all nations were equal in theory, some were decidedly “backward” and needed special help from their “Great Russian brothers.”

 

“Allow [a discontented minority group] to use its native language and the discontent will pass by itself,” Stalin once said. [xviii] Books were frequently translated into the languages of autonomous republics and regions. Noobatchylar (1930) includes text in both Turkmen and Russian.

 

Evreiskii kolkhoz (Jewish Collective Farm, 1931) shows a new collective farm peopled by former Jewish craftsmen. The book was written to debunk the stereotype that Jews are incapable of farming. On the “Don’t Lose Heart!” (“Ne unyvai!”) collective farm, Jews even turn their hands to pig breeding.

 

The ancient city of Bukhara was a particularly exotic setting for children’s stories, having been annexed only in 1920 when its Emir was driven out by the Red Army. A. Petrova’s Ot Moskvy do Bukhary, (From Moscow to Bukhara, 1931) juxtaposes the old way of life in Bukhara with the new lifestyle that – thanks to distant Moscow – is rapidly gaining ground: trains replace camels, canals are dug by heavy machinery and tractors accelerate the cotton harvest. A mosque has been re-labeled “Museum,” an electric tram has appeared, and new buildings – including a high school – have sprung up to replace the old.

 

The titular heroine of Khuriat (1931) is a girl from a traditional family in Bukhara. Khuriat spends her days doing household chores and waiting on her father hand and foot. One day she meets a group of happy, independent children who live in a Soviet children’s home, and they invite her to live with them. She joyously accepts the offer and embarks on a brave new life, with toy planes and trains to play with and plenty of pencils and paper to learn with.   

 

[4 Illustrations: Class Monitors (Nobat’clar, 1931) in Turkmen; Evreiskii kolkhoz (Jewish Collective Farm, 1931) A. Petrova’s Ot Moskvy do Bukhary, (From Moscow to Bukhara, 1931); Khuriat (1931)
Sidebar 5d: Internationalism

While the 1917 Revolution was confined to the Russian Empire, leaders such as Vladimir Lenin anticipated that socialism would ultimately spread to the rest of the world. The Soviet Union was to set an example of a successful Communist state and rally for international worker’s rights. Many Soviet children’s books of the 1920s and 1930s reflect this notion, while others seek simply to educate Soviet children about cultures around the world.

N. Pospelova’s Deti narodnostei (Children of Nationalities, 1930) is a matching game in book form. Each page consists of four pictures of boys and girls of various “nationalities,” using stereotypes as a shorthand to make their national origin clear.  Children have to find out “where the nationalities live, what the adults of that nationality do, and how their children help them.” The attention to modes of production points to an overarching concern for the international working class.

Agniia Barto’s Bratishki (Little Brothers, 1931) describes children from Russia, Africa, East Asia, and South Asia in terms of skin color, eye shape, caricatures of language, and the family’s work. The Indian child’s father works in the fields under the watchful eye of a harsh overseer; the East Asian boy’s mother works long hours in a textile factory. Only the Russian boy’s father works “for himself.” The book concludes with the Russian mother’s lullaby:

Don’t forget your brothers, away in a far-off land 
Maybe, someday,
In fire and in smoke
You will be victorious with them!
Lullaby, lullaby.

Mongoliia by F. Fedotov (Mongolia, 1932) tells the story of a little boy named Sain-Tsak and his sister Batu. Sain-Tsak suffers under the tutelage of a monk (lama) until he witnesses a parade of young Communists (i.e., Young Pioneers) in the city streets. Batu and Sain-Tsak begin going to school and attending the Pioneers' club, where Sain-Tsak and Batu learn about Lenin. The narrator says that Sain-Tsak and his sister will help to found a new Mongolia, building “not yurts, but apartment buildings, factories, and railroads.” 

Oleg Shvarts’s Slet (Jamboree, 1930) is a photo-essay about an international Young Pioneers’ conference held in Moscow. Children from places as far-flung as China, England, Switzerland, and the United States battle all kinds of obstacles to attend the conference.  The Chinese children have to come secretly. Two children from America attend the conference. One is Elmar MacDonald, the young son of an imprisoned Irish strike leader; the other is an African-American boy named Shelly Strickland who suffers under segregation and has left the Boy Scouts to join the American branch of the Young Pioneers. 

 

Pioner i Politsiia (The Pioneer and the Police, 1932) purports to have been written by a “young German worker” named G. Al’ker, a member of the German Young Pioneers movement. A disclaimer on the back cover of the book says that the book was published despite its “schematic and stylized” illustrations, which did not correspond to Soviet standards. This suggests that by the mid-1930s international modernist style could no longer serve as an appropriate idiom for the international socialist movement.

 [4 Illustrations: N. Pospelova’s Deti narodnostei (Children of Nationalities); Bratishki (Little Brothers, ), by A. Barto Mongolia by F. Fedotov (1932) Slet (The Convention, 1930); G. Al’ker, Pioner i Politsiia (The Pioneer and the Police, 1932)

 

6. The Children’s Book in the Soviet Media System

In their frequent representations of media, the Soviet children’s books promote the notion of their society (and of the entire world) as a vast, continuous superstructure of information that makes sense of and helps to transform the material world. In this way Soviet children’s books prepared children to become able consumers of media, encouraged children to take an active role in shaping their media environment and in the process transformed the very medium of the children’s book.

 

Modern mass media feature frequently as the main conduit of information about the wonders of the world – and as wonders in themselves. In Lev Kassil’’s Tseppelin (1931) the young Peika hears of the arrival of a German Zeppelin from his father, a typesetter at a newspaper printing plant. Peika equates the two wondrous technologies, imagining the Linozep, as he calls it (by analogy with his father’s linotype typesetting machines), as a grotesque aircraft that paints the sky with its exhaust, creating a huge celestial newspaper.

 

M. Gershenzon’s Vysoko vverkh, gluboko vniz (High Up, Deep Down, 1932) shows a young protagonist learning about a new aerial technology (among other things) directly from the newspaper:

In the newspaper are letters from around the whole world. Here it is written how many tractors have been produced at the Stalingrad factory during the last five year plan. And here it says that miners have gone on strike in the American city of Pittsburgh. And here is about how rice has been sown from airplanes in the Kuban’ region. / And yesterday I read in the newspaper how two scientists flew way high up on a hot-air balloon. (p.2)

 

Elizaveta Tarakhovskaia’s Radio-brigada urges young children to join expeditions to install radio receivers in villages so that everyone can hear what Moscow is saying:

Moscow speaks for the Octoberites

about how to raise chicks,

about how to plant radish in the garden,

about how to play at the playground.

 

Moscow speaks to the pioneer detachments

about how to do gymnastics,

about how Berlin’s factories have struck,

about fascist atrocities in the south of Italy.

 

Moscow speaks about grain and sowing,

Moscow speaks to everyone, everyone, everyone! (15)

 

[3 illustrations: Lev Kassil’’s Tseppelin (1931); M. Gershenzon’s Vysoko vverkh, gluboko vniz (High Up, Deep Down, 1932); Elizaveta Tarakhovskaia Radio-brigada ]
Sidebar 6a: Playing with Photography

Photography provided new ways of seeing and documenting an entirely changed political and social reality. Avant-garde artists experimented with the capabilities of the photographic medium, defamiliarizing the everyday with extreme close-ups, and cutting and reassembling photographs into new collaged and montaged worlds. In particular, the artistic group Oktiabr’ (October), which included Aleksandr Rodchenko, stressed a formal approach to photography: the striking close-up, diagonal composition, or shooting from sharp angles above or below the subject.

 

Chto eto takoe? (What Is This? 1932) by V. Griuntal’, a member of the October group, transforms defamiliarization into a game for the child reader. In the first half of the work, “snapshot-puzzles” (“snimki-zagadki”) require the reader to guess at what is being pictured in black-and-white photographs and to solve a seemingly unrelated arithmetic problem. The answers to these visual and arithmetic puzzles are revealed in the latter half of the book, where the photographed object and the solution to the mathematical problem are re-familiarized as a complete picture of a recognizable object from everyday life.

 

I. Rein’s Kak ustroen traktor (How a Tractor is Built, 1931) utilizes close-ups of machine parts while answering practical questions such as “How does a tractor move through difficult places?” and “Where is the heart of the tractor?”, leading the young reader through all of the powerful workings of the tractor. Close-ups of tractor parts are employed practically as a way to teach about the inner workings of a machine, while also adding visual dynamism to a utilitarian subject.

 

A different style of photomontage is presented on the cover of Magnitogorsk (1931) by N. Mislavskii, where the sparks of metalworking and a man in red tones overlay the steel mill in the background. By mixing documentary and hand-drawn elements, the montage opens the imagination of the child. The subsequent narrative and its accompanying documentary photography ground the reader’s progression through the construction of the new industrial center Magnitogorsk. Increasingly the focus of Socialist Realism was not objects but the people who wield them.

 

[3 illustrations: Chto eto takoe? (What is this? 1932) by V. Griuntal’; I. Rein’s Kak ustroen traktor (How a Tractor is Built, 1931) Magnitogorsk (1931) by N. Mislavskii

Sidebar 6b:

The Soviet children’s book was intended to become an active participant in the public consciousness.

 

In E. Mikini’s Dom gde zhivut knigi (The House Where Books Live) books grow legs, characters come to life, films speak of their own free will, and children transform themselves in a “cupboard of metamorphoses.” At the end of the book children are encouraged to cut out pictures of favorite books and play a game in which they collect all the cards for various thematic divisions.

 

N. Sakonskaia’s book Kukly i knigi (Dolls and Books) publicizes a new “theater of the children’s book” in Moscow, which uses the traditional puppet theater to bring children’s books to life. 

 

Oleg Shvarts’s Slet (Jamboree, 1930) places the book at the heart of a new children’s collective.

 

D. Mitrokhin’s drawings to Samuil Marshak’s Knizhka pro knizhki (A Book about Books, 1935) feature specific editions such as N. Denisovskii’s Tovarishch Artem and Dneprostroi.

 

[4 Illustrations: E. Mikini’s Dom gde zhivut knigi (The House Where Books Live); Kukly i knigi (Dolls and Books) ; Oleg Shvarts’s Slet (Jamboree, 1930) Samuil Marshak’s Knizhka pro knizhki (A Book about Books, )

 

For further reading (in English):

Balina, Marina, and Larissa Rudova, eds. Russian Children’s Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2008.

The Firebird and the Factory: Modern Russian Children’s Books. [S.l.]: University of Virginia Library, 2007.

O’Dell, Felicity Ann.  Socialisation through Children’s Literature: The Soviet Example.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Kelly, Catriona.  Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero.  London: Granta Books, 2005.

Kelly, Catriona.  Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Steiner, Evgeny. Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children’s Books, trans. Jane Anne Miller Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1999.

 

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