Between Summer and Winter: Late Soviet Children’s Literature and Unofficial Poetry

Abstract

This paper examines the work of two poets of the late Soviet period, Oleg Grigor’ev and Vsevolod Nekrasov, who were both employed in some capacity in official Soviet children’s literature while writing “adult” poetry that remained unpublished. As unofficial writers nevertheless employed in the Soviet literary system, Grigor’ev and Nekrasov negotiated a complicated relationship with Soviet literature both contemporary and historical, both children’s and “adult”. This circumstance is reflected in the presence of a childlike aesthetic, evident in elements like alogism, naiveté, nonsense and other inventive wordplay, in their work. To some extent, Grigor’ev and Nekrasov were drawing on the experience of predecessors like the OBERIU poets and the legacy of early Soviet children’s literature. In their unofficial work, they were also making creative use of the conventional features of children’s poetry in obviously non-childlike contexts. Indeed, the childlike aesthetic could be more evident in their adult poetry than children’s, blurring and calling into question these generic divisions. I demonstrate this deliberate ambiguity through a comparison of their adult and children’s work, and suggest that the evocation of the childlike in adult work, as well as the blurring of boundaries between genres, functioned as a rhetorical gesture marking texts as implicitly oppositional to official Soviet aesthetics.