The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children ed. by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children ed. by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine Vita Yakovlyeva The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children. Edited by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. xx + 568 pp. Cloth $95.00, e-book $95.00. In The Pedagogy of Images, the editors present sixteen chapters, conceptually divided into three parts—"mediation," "technology," and "power"—each focusing on a unique aspect of the social performance of children's books. "Mediation" envisions the book as an "institutional framework" for the transition to the new publishing reality (51), "technology" looks at the children's book as a medium for Soviet modernity (207), and "power" contrasts institutionalized modes of power and its everyday "tangible implications" (387), such as experiences of time (chapter 12). The collection illustrates representations of Soviet doctrine to children on gender roles, aesthetics, and other relations that the state constructed with children through publications. Media, technology, and modernization of natural environments are explored, using humor and satire, as sites of children's engagement with early Soviet realities. All contributions are examples of scrupulous research of textual and visual representations, supplemented by a rich selection of high-quality illustrations, many of which are unique and not readily available to either researchers or students, so the volume is visually stunning and entertaining to engage with. All contributions come together in a carefully [End Page 166] crafted selection somewhat favoring the mastery of aesthetic representation—particularly the avant-garde of Soviet modernism of the 1920–40s—and its manifestation in children's publications. The anthology develops an in-depth inquiry into the visual language cultivated by the artistic representations of Soviet modernism, aiming to move "beyond reductionist approaches to studying ideological phenomena" (41). To tackle this goal, the majority of scholars in the anthology seek to convey the sincerity of innovation and quality of its depiction in early Soviet visual art, arguing in favor of its complexity and artistic value. Works of Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Alisa Poret, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Vladimir Tatlin, and others are evoked among the examples and influences of an idiosyncratic visual language of Communist discourse cultivated through the era's publications for children, alongside other media such as cinema (chapter 2), photography (chapter 3), and even paper (chapter 5). Although children are present throughout the book—and come forward as actors in the circle of production of Soviet everyday life through their engagement with its materiality (through paper, for example, or do-it-yourself play)—the "pedagogy" that the book analyzes is somewhat relationally reduced. It is a literacy-centered, not a child-centered, pedagogy. It is not reciprocal; it is authoritative and not dialogical. At times, children dissolve into the whirlpools of mechanistic ornamentation within the vast sea of visualizations of Soviet modernistic discourse, of which the child was an instrument (chapter 7). The book makes a contribution to the history of arts and exploration of publications for children as the ground for artistic representation. As such it would be especially interesting to researchers of early Soviet doctrine and its artistic visualization. However, a researcher of childhood studies may find themselves a little disappointed, attempting to grasp the actuality of children's life in the epoch under consideration. The book does not reveal much about the conditions of their lives or their experiences of Communism, or even their positionality within the Soviet "pedagogy." The book does not expand to cover Communist representations of the entire fifteen Soviet republics, either, with a small exception in chapter 5, which includes some data from Ukraine, and chapter 10, which forefronts the colonial "unevenness" of the Soviet Central Asian modernization. The rest of the book is focused on centralized, Russian-language, largely Moscow-based publications—an understandable and yet unacknowledged reality of the Soviet infrastructure, both material and symbolic. [End Page 167] Vita Yakovlyeva University of Alberta Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press