Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading Under Lenin and Stalin by Megan Swift

Abstract

Reviewed by: Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading Under Lenin and Stalin by Megan Swift James H. McGavran III (bio) Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading Under Lenin and Stalin. By Megan Swift. University of Toronto Press, 2020. Megan Swift’s study examines the ways in which illustrated editions produced in the early to mid-Soviet period (during Lenin’s and then Stalin’s rule, 1917–1953) reinterpreted and recontextualized verbal texts of the past for new audiences of children and young people. Illustrations themselves functioned, in Swift’s formulation, “as the visual articulation of new book art, but also as an important agent in repurposing the works of the past, reorienting them towards the child reader, mediating the past to signal and connect with political and cultural themes of the day” (5). Accordingly, Swift is interested less in the relationship between word and image in the abstract, or even in any particular illustrated edition— ”Picturing the Page” may in fact be a misleading title—and more in the way that relationship changed over time and in response to political and ideological pressure from the Soviet authorities. This somewhat narrow and unusual focus on illustrations as mediators between old material and young readers is simultaneously the source of the book’s greatest strengths and, at times, a disappointing limitation. The end result, however, is an absorbing, well-researched, and beautifully illustrated cultural history of a handful of texts that also addresses readers’ changing reactions to them, educators’ approaches to teaching them, and the Soviet leadership’s often fickle attitude toward them. The book features high-quality grayscale reproductions throughout (83 in 176 pages of text) and sixteen color plates grouped together in the middle of the book. Many of these images, unearthed by Swift in various rare books collections and archives, are reprinted here for the first time since the 1920s or 1930s; it is heartening and by no means to be taken for granted that a study centered on illustration has so successfully and intuitively incorporated its visual material. Again, one might quibble that the vast majority of the book’s images concern the “picture” more than the “page,” and that the vital question of the interaction of verbal text and graphics (at the level of layout, that is) is sidelined, but this was clearly Swift’s choice as a scholar. [End Page 348] A more serious criticism concerns her claim, in the introduction, that she offers “close readings of texts, analysis of book art, and commentary on cultural history” and shows “how each illuminates and complicates the other” (5). In fact, the book provides nothing that can properly be called close reading, and Swift’s engagement with the verbal texts she considers is generally limited to plot summary and brief discussion of prominent themes and critical interpretations. Obviously, to comment meaningfully and specifically on the texts of fairytales, Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” and the gargantuan Anna Karenina (to name just three of her case studies) would have greatly complicated Swift’s task and expanded her manuscript, but the scope of her study might have been more accurately defined in the introduction; there are, moreover, a few chapters where more information on the text of the work under consideration would have been welcome. Swift’s subtitle points to another distinction that plays a central role in defining the scope of her research and argument: the distinction between “illustrated children’s literature” and “illustrated children’s reading.” The former Swift defines as being “designed for and consumed by the child reader,” while the latter includes literature originally written and published for adults that was illustrated and reprinted for a younger audience during the Soviet era (8). On this definition, two of the book’s three parts address “illustrated children’s reading”: Part I looks at fairytales by Pushkin and Petr Ershov (Ershov’s tale “The Little Humpbacked Horse” could certainly be called children’s literature, but both these works were conscious stylizations—literary emulations of the oral tradition of folklore), and Part II concerns illustrated Soviet editions of emphatically adult-oriented nineteenth-century classics by Pushkin and Tolstoy. Part III examines picture books...