1st Edition
Russian Children's Literature and Culture
Soviet literature in general and Soviet children’s literature in particular have often been labeled by Western and post-Soviet Russian scholars and critics as propaganda. Below the surface, however, Soviet children’s literature and culture allowed its creators greater experimental and creative freedom than did the socialist realist culture for adults. This volume explores the importance of children’s culture, from literature to comics to theater to film, in the formation of Soviet social identity and in connection with broader Russian culture, history, and society.
Series Editor’s Foreword
Preface
INTRODUCTION: Reading Soviet and Post-Soviet Children’s Culture: Contexts and Challenges
1. Creativity through Restraint: The Beginnings of Soviet Children’s Literature
Marina Balina
2. From Character Building to Criminal Pursuits: Russian Children’s Literature in Transition
PART I Ideology, Literature, and Culture: Genres, Themes, and Issues
3. The Whole Real Children’s World: School Novella and "Our Happy Childhood"
Evgeny Dobrenko
4. Between Sputnik and Gagarin: Space Flight, Children’s Periodicals, and the Circle of Imagination
Anindita Banerjee
5. Crafting the Self: Narratives of Pre-Revolutionary Childhood in Soviet Literature
Marina Balina
6. Literature and Cultural Institutions By and For Soviet and Post-Soviet Youth
Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya
PART II Popular Children’s Entertainment
7. Arresting Development: A Brief History of Soviet Cinema for Children and Adolescents
Alexandr Prokhorov (College of William and Mary)
8. Comforting Creatures in Children’s Cartoons
Birgit Beumers (U of Bristol)
9. Juggernaut in Drag: Theater for Stalin’s Children
Boris Wolfson (USC)
10. ‘Nice, Instructive Stories Their Psychology Can Grasp’: How to Read Post-Soviet Russian Children’s Comics
Jose Alaniz (U of Washington)
PART III: Authors and Texts
11. Samuil Marshak—Yesterday and Today
Ben Hellman (University of Helsinki)
12. Lev Kassil’: Childhood as Religion and Ideology
Inessa Medzhibovskaya (Eugene Lang College, The New School)
13. Pavel Bazhov’s Skazy: Discovering the Soviet Uncanny
Mark Lipovetsky (U of Colorado)
14. A Traditionalist in the Land of Innovators: the Paradoxes of Sergei Mikhalkov
Elena Prokhorova (University of Richmond)
15. Evgenii Shvarts’s Fairy Tale Dramas: Theater, Power, and the Naked Truth
Anja Tippner (University of Salzburg)
16. Invitation to a Subversion: The Playful Literature of Grigorii Oster
Larissa Rudova (Pomona College)
Contributors
Index
Biography
Marian Balina is Professor Russian at Illinois Wesleyan University. She has co-edited a number of collections, including Politiciing Magic: Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (2005), Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers Since 1980 (2003), and Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Empire Style (2000).
Larissa Rudova is Associate Professor of Russian at Pomona College. She is author of Pasternak's Early Fiction and the Cultural Vanguard (1994) and Understanding Boris Pasternak (1997).
"This volume is the first book-length study of Russian children's literature in English, and as such it is particularly welcome."
-- Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 2009
