Read more
Based on sources from rare book libraries in Russia and around the world,
Picturing the Page offers a vivid exploration of illustrated children’s literature and reading under Lenin and Stalin - a period when mass publishing for children and universal public education became available for the first time in Russia. By analysing the illustrations in fairy tales, classic "adult" literature reformatted for children, and war-time picture books, Megan Swift elucidates the vital and multifaceted function of illustrated children’s literature in repurposing the past.
Picturing the Page demonstrates that while the texts of the past remained fixed, illustrations could slip between the pages to mediate and annotate that past, as well as connect with anti-religious, patriotic, and other campaigns that were central to Soviet children’s culture after the 1917 Revolution.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Picturing a New Childhood
Part I: Fairy-Tale Nation
1. The Poet, the Priest, and the Peasant
2. Up, Up, and Away on the Little Humpbacked Horse
Part II: The Afterlife of Russian Classics
3. The Bronze Horseman Rides Again
4. Anna Karenina and the Mother-and-Child Reunion
Part III: War-Time Picture Books
5. Mayakovsky Is Marching with Us
6.
Pochta: Circulation, Delivery, Return
Conclusion: Yesterday and Today
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Colour Plates
About the author
Megan Swift is an associate professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria.
Summary
This is the first work to examine illustrated children’s literature under Lenin and Stalin and to make use of rarely-explored Soviet children’s books from libraries around the world.
