Russian Children's Literature Before and After Perestroika

Abstract

Russian Children's Literature Before and After Perestroika Maria Nikolajeva (bio) Several years ago Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, declared flatly that Russian cultural issues are not a high priority compared to the more urgent question of the Russian economy. Such a statement would be a catastrophe for any civilized nation; but it is especially disturbing that at a time of great changes in post-Soviet Russia, an enormously important field is being totally ignored, namely children's culture. This circumstance is all the more remarkable given that during the seventy years of the Soviet regime, one of the official slogans was "All the best for our children." Children were declared the only privileged class in the classless socialist society.1 During the last ten years, since Mikhail Gorbachov's proclamation of reconstruction ("perestroika") and openness ("glasnost"), one has been able to learn from the Russian media, among many other hideous disclosures, about hundreds of thousands of children in orphanages and at least as many homeless runaways, about children who contract HIV in hospitals, about children damaged in the wake of Chernobyl, about physically and mentally disabled children living under abominable conditions, and most recently about children affected by the war in Chechnya. It is altogether too easy to forget that even children who lead a relatively protected life with both parents, enjoying a fairly decent living standard and regular schooling, are beginning to suffer from rapidly deteriorating cultural facilities. It is impossible to understand the political situation in Russia today without looking back into Soviet as well as earlier Russian history, sometimes as far back as the eighteenth century. It is equally impossible to understand the cultural situation and the drastic changes that perestroika brought to children's culture unless we set them in a broader context. The history of Soviet children's literature is as artificial and misshapen as the Soviet state itself.2 Russian children's literature has always been privileged to number great authors among its practitioners. Indeed, Russia's most famous writers, such as Alexander Pushkin or Leo Tolstoy, have contributed to children's literature, often finding inspiration in folklore.3 In the years immediately preceding 1917, however, children's literature in Russia was dominated by sentimental and moralistic stories and verses, often written by authors of little talent. The views on children and education during that time dictated the norms of writing for children: the world of children's literature was restricted to the nursery, and the characters were sugar-sweet, well-behaved children in starched clothes. Turn-of-the-century writers were far from folk poetry and thus also from the classical heritage. Thus it was not until the 1920s that children's literature in Russia stood on the threshold of renewal. The reason was the general change in artistic norms brought about by the process of building up the new "socialist" culture in the new Soviet state. The primary principle for this transformed society was to repudiate every old, "bourgeois" form in art. The Russian working class was to create its own "socially pure" culture. This is probably one of the most obvious cases in the history of human culture of how artistic norms may be directly guided by social and political circumstances.4 As there were no available models for the new forms in art, the 1920s in Russia became a period of ardent experiments in every creative field. Education and propaganda were the two most important missions. Many Russians were illiterate or semiliterate; it was essential that art should be comprehensible by the masses and therefore primarily visual. As a direct result of this new concept of art, it was during the 1920s that the first Russian picture books were produced. Early Soviet picture books, such as The Ice Cream Man (1925), written by Samuil Marshak and illustrated by Vladimir Lebedev, were strikingly similar to contemporary political posters. Such stylistic resemblances do not occur merely because many poster artists, Lebedev among them, also produced picture books for children. More important still is the general orientation of postrevolutionary art toward the concrete. Because the aim was to increase art's accessibility by making both text and illustration concise and loud...