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 Megan Swift (bio) The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children. Edited by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine. University of Toronto Press, 2021. The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children is a major new contribution to the field of children's literature. The volume is edited by two leading figures in Russian and Soviet children's literature, Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine, and includes sixteen chapters by contributors from Russia, Europe, and North America. It is lavishly illustrated with over 250 beautifully-reproduced color illustrations from Princeton University's collection of Soviet illustrated children's literature at the Cotsen Children's Library. Thomas Keenan, one of the Slavic librarians at the Cotsen, is a contributor to the volume. Keenan and another contributor, Katherine Reischl, co-created an accompanying digital humanities project based on the same rare books, "Playing Soviet: The Visual Language of Early Soviet Children's Books" (https://commons.princeton.edu/soviet/books/). While this website features the full texts of over 50 Soviet illustrated children's books from the 1920s and 1930s, researchers will want to turn to The Pedagogy of Images for comprehensive analyses of these and other works. The first innovation of the volume is its thematic approach, with divisions into three sections dedicated to Mediation, Technology, and Power. As the editors explain in their introduction, they wanted to focus beyond the "institutions of power" towards "various practices of expression and narration" (5). The first part, Mediation, looks at how the Soviet picture book helped mediate between traditional print practices and new visual practices coming from film, photography, and "how to" books. Chapters examine the negotiation between the figuration of the past and the avantgarde geometry of the future (Helena Goscilo); the so-called "cine-book," a picture book influenced by contemporary film techniques (Yuri Leving); the use of children as active co-creators in their role as photo-correspondents and worker-correspondents for early Soviet journals (Erika Wolf); the concept and inspiration behind the unrealized "book-toy" (Aleksandar Bošković); and the material implications of the Soviets' "paper regime" on children's books (Birgitte Beck Pristed). This section will beckon readers interested in hybrid book forms, in the influence of avant-garde techniques on book-making, and in the material and sociological circumstances that led to the early Soviet focus on do-ityourself and make-it-yourself books. The second part of the book, which focuses on Technology, is the longest section. This part is dedicated to the "representational capacity" of the [End Page 348] new Soviet book to capture categories crucial to the Soviet state such as industrialization, technology, and modernity (207). Larissa Rudova's chapter explores how, in order to represent the Soviet theme of struggle with nature, children's books "used anthropomorphism and animation to blur the distinction between nature and culture" (208). Sara Pankenier Weld investigates depictions of hybrid human-machines as harbingers of the biomechanical future. Kirill Chunikhin's chapter looks at how to represent the largely-invisible technological advancement of electricity and its treatment as a hybrid of materialism and magic; Maria Litovskaya examines "Do It All Yourself!" (Delai vse sam), a do-it-yourself magazine that encouraged technological literacy among children; Michael Kunichika explores how modernity was envisioned in a Stalin-era picture book about the construction of the Turkestan-Siberia railroad; and Katherine M. H. Reischl looks at the category of Soviet transportation and the theme of hyper-mobility. Part three is dedicated to the theme of Power. Kevin M. F. Platt explores the "representations of temporality in spatial forms" during Stalin's infamous 5-Year plans for rapid industrialization. Daniil Leiderman and Marina Sokolovskaia's chapter looks at images of Lenin's death and its representation in children's books as the end of time and the passage to immortality. Stephen M. Norris examines how images of Red Army soldiers taught child readers how to "see in Soviet"; and Alexei Golubev's chapter explores images of the laboring body and its association with economic class. In the final chapter of the volume, Thomas Keenan discusses how—counterintuitively—the...