Russian Children's Literature and Culture

Marina Balina, Larissa Rudova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135865566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1

Ideology, Literature, and Culture: Genres, Themes, and Issues

3

THE SCHOOL TALE IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE OF SOCIALIST REALISM

Evgeny Dobrenko

I dreamed of people I had killed as a child ...

From the diary of Arkady Gaidar

The birth of Soviet children's literature (i.e., Socialist Realist literature for children) is inextricably linked with the name Arkady Gaidar. Before him Soviet children's literature was more children's than Soviet. It is no accident that founder status was conferred upon him by Soviet criticism: “In children's literature Arkady Gaidar played the same role as that of Mayakovsky in poetry for adults” (Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo A. P. Gaidara 1951, p. 18). Gaidar was primarily a prose writer—the Vladimir Mayakovsky and Maxim Gorky of Soviet children's literature rolled into one.

The fate of the literature that he founded seemed to be encoded in the very evolution of Gaidar himself. A member of the party from the age of fifteen and commander of a regiment at sixteen, Gaidar experienced the purgatory of the civil war, taking part both in battles against the Whites and in the suppression of peasant rebellions in the Tambov province and Siberia. In Siberia, where he was already a commander in the Special Forces (ChON), he was brought up on charges of official malfeasance expressed in unauthorized shootings. He was acquitted but was expelled from the party for two years for harsh treatment of prisoners. About this critical turning point in the fate of the future icon, his official biographies remain silent. But it is here that Gaidar's biography as a writer begins. His childhood trauma haunted him throughout his life.

Gaidar suffered from an incurable neuropsychological disorder (i.e., traumatic neurosis), which manifested itself in constant insomnia, a decrease in intellectual capacity, irritability, and a tendency toward cruelty. Attacks of this disorder would begin with unprovoked mood swings, followed by drinking bouts. At the onset of an attack Gaidar would inflict sharp physical pain on himself by cutting himself with a knife, sometimes in the presence of others. Usually such attacks ended up putting him in the hospital.

He was constantly tormented by nightmares, the notes about which in his diary are indecipherable. He used a special code, writing that he was tormented by recurring dreams “of schema No. 1” or “schema No. 2,” but then suddenly he would write something openly, as in the outcry: “I dreamed of people I had killed in childhood” (Kamov 1990, p. 12).

But that was in his diary. On the other hand, his publications in the 1930s contained the stories that remain imprinted on the minds of every child of the Soviet era: the highly autobiographical tales of the civil war, R.V.S. (1926) and Shkola (School, 1930), the heroic Skazka o voennoi taine (Tale of the military secret, 1935); the joyful Dal'nie strany (Distant lands, 1932), and Chuk i Gek (Chuk and Gek, 1939, about the expectation of a miracle and the fact that “everything lies ahead”); the courageous Sud'ba barabanshchika (Drummer's fate, 1939, about a homeless boy who almost becomes a “plaything in the hands of the saboteurs”); the mysterious-romantic Golubaia chashka (Blue cup, 1939, about the fact that “life, comrades, is very good”); the philosophical parable (filosofskaia pritcha) Goriachii kamen’ (The hot stone, 1941); and, finally, the culmination, the archetypal text of Soviet children's literature (comparable to Gorky's Mother for adults), Timur i ego komanda (Timur and his team, 1940).

One is tempted to approach this key figure in Soviet children's literature from a psychoanalytical standpoint. But it is even more important to understand this literature in connection with the transformation of the violence out of which the Soviet world itself was born, which is in a way a case of social traumatic neurosis. The changes that occurred were crystallized very clearly in Gaidar's fate (both literary and personal)—a blending of violence into literature.

For Gaidar the civil war never ended, but neither did it end in the country itself. On the contrary, Joseph Stalin's great turning point in 1929 in fact constituted a new phase of the war, with much more profound results: It marked the beginning of the end of the village, and with it the end of a thousand-year Russian patriarchal society. A new steel was being forged in the furnaces of industrialization. The epoch of the birth of the Soviet Nation had arrived. The air was saturated with violence. Art attempted to shape this process discursively and to package it in books like Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Kanal imeni Stalina: Istoriia stroitel'stva (The Belomor-Baltic Canal: a history of its construction), in plays like Aristokraty (The aristocrats, 1934) by Nikolai Pogodin, and in films like Zakliuchënnye (The prisoners, 1936) by Evgeny Cherviakov. Here the discourse of violence was openly rational, socially valid, and morally legitimate.

The theme of homeless children, or street urchins (besprizorniki), was reminiscent of the civil war. Nikolai Ekk's 1931 cult film Putëvka v zhizn’ (Road to life) told of the perekovka (reforging) of these street urchins. Children's communes, where yesterday's youthful criminals turned into honest people, became a sort of metaphor for the camps where yesterday's kulaks and saboteurs were reformed into socially useful citizens.

This new literature bore little resemblance to one of the most popular children's books of the 1920s about homeless children: Leonid Panteleev and Grigory Belykh's Respublika Shkid (The Shkid Republic, 1926), which went through annual printings of thousands of copies. This tale of the Dostoevsky School (ShKID) for homeless and criminal youth, which existed from 1919 to 1924, told of the transformation of the Empire of Hooligans into a republic.

But in the mid 1930s Respublika Shkid was replaced by Anton Makarenko's Pedagogicheskaia poema (Road to life), which told of the establishment of the Dzherzinsky Commune.¹ Though this book did enter the Socialist Realist canon, it never became a children's book, for Makarenko's pedagogical views were too apparent here. Although he transformed violence through a magical “reforging via the collective,” he was unable to conceal his pedagogical views as a fervent adherent of “pedagogical violence” (Makarenko 1964, p. 127). Makarenko made no secret of the fact that he “doubted the validity of the generally accepted views of the time, which maintained that punishment produces slaves, that one must give free rein to children's creativity and rely on their self-organization and self-discipline. I permitted myself to advance my firmly held belief that as long as the collective and the organs of the collective had not yet been created, as long as there were no traditions and the first skills of work and life had not yet been instilled, the teacher has the right and the obligation not to refrain from coercion” (ibid.).

The problem with Makarenko's Pedagogicheskaia poema was that it was too pedagogical. The pedagogical machinery in it had been turned inside out (Dobrenko 2001, p. 4). Therefore, it suited the tastes of pedagogues but turned out to be unsuitable for children. Critics praised Makarenko's pedagogue and vilified the pedagogues from Panteleev's tale. The problem was that Panteleev's youthful offenders were crowded into an established school institution—even if transformed into a republic. Although they do not have the right to create a political organization, they nonetheless strive toward greater socialization. In their prison-like children's home they organize an underground Pioneer organization. It is completely different with Makarenko: At the center of his system stands a pedagogue who organizes the children's world (collective). Perhaps the only thing that united Ekk the director, Makarenko the Chekist, and Pantaleev the former street urchin was their belief in the idea that children—street urchins—were always victims.

In the course of fulfilling the task of pedagogy and upbringing, the child falls into the area of distsiplinizatsiia (disciplinization), where he is corrupted and passed through the bureaucratic system that suppresses his urge to independence. As Arkady Nedel’ (2000) noted, “The basic efforts of the established system of disciplinary rules and institutions, where children were housed by the State, were specifically aimed at making the children dependent, at appropriating their independence” (p. 43). The Octobrist circles, the Pioneer groups, and the Komsomol cells were all merely forms of disciplinary organizations for children. In Stalinism, “the child cannot and must not be identified as a child, he possesses no inherent value, he only has excess value that he receives as a result of numerous symbolic additions” (ibid., p. 45).

Along with this there was unprecedented criticism of the prerevolutionary school: It was cold and soulless with a barracks-like environment that was unbearable for children; instruction was lifeless and pedantic; there was violence at every step; and the teachers fought against any expression of independence and self-reliance, and many of them were virtually spies for the secret police. This image of the prerevolutionary school was perpetuated in both the official literature and in the prerevolutionary literature that was being popularized, as well as in cinema, such as the 1939 film version of Anton Chekhov's Chelovek v futliare (The man in a case) by Igor Anninsky. It was common knowledge from Stalin's official biography that the seminary from which he was expelled was ruled by a iezuitskii rezhim (Jesuitical regimen) (Stalin 1947, p. 8), that Vladimir Lenin called the Ministry of National Enlightenment the Ministry of narodnogo zatemneniia (national darkening), and that the departments at Kazan University, where he had studied, were filled with “professorami-reaktzionerami [reactionary professors], that students were locked up in cells, and that there were politseiskie spiki [police detectives] everywhere” (ibid., pp. 7–8). The same thing was known about the schools where other leaders had studied. The tradition of this sort of depiction of the prerevolutionary school goes back to raznochinets literature and continued to develop right up to the early twentieth century. In Detstvo Temy (Tema's childhood, late 1890s), Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovskii (1936) described the Russian school thus: “In its current form the gymnasia reminds me of a courtroom with a judge, a prosecutor, and a perpetual defendant. All that's missing is a lawyer to defend this little defendant, who, precisely because he is little, is in particular need of defense” (p. 155). The school also appeared like this in the recollections of memoir writers and old Bolsheviks about the dark times of tsarist rule.

Thus, before the revolution the child was confronted with the school—the primary disciplinary institution—as a lifeless, formalized police institution. On the other hand, the free child of the Shkid Republic was lacking the consciousness demanded by Socialist Realism. Pedagogicheskaia poema was much closer to the Socialist Realist ideal, but the element of pedagogical violence in it was too openly revealed. Makarenko had written a book for parents, when a book for children was needed.

The call for its creation became the leitmotif of the first meeting on children's literature, which took place in January 1936 in the Central Committee of the VLKSM (All-Union Lenin Communist Youth Union). Samuil Marshak, one of the most popular children's poets of the Soviet Union, began his speech at this meeting by pointing out that children's literature needed to create “children's stories for children” (Marshak XXXX, p. xx). In defining this needed genre Marshak called it the shkol'naia povest’ (school tale), that is, a tale telling Soviet children about the contemporary school (ibid., 22–23):

In essence, there are still no stories about a moral, healthy, and happy school, the way it should be here and the way it is developing before our very eyes. There are only books about the difficult transition period. But the time has come for the birth of a new and different book. And its heroes should not be those who in the first years of their lives experienced so many drastic changes in their everyday lives, in their families, and in their schools, but rather today's children, who are much happier and have the right and the opportunity to live according to the rightful interests of their age.

And children's literature of the 1920s and 1930s did indeed tell of history: of the civil war and its heroes (including child heroes), of technology (the subway, stratostats, steamships and icebreakers, trains and factories), of fascinating journeys and remarkable explorers and heroic expeditions (to the most exotic places, from the Amazon to the Arctic Circle), of animals, and of adventures. There was a blossoming for children of so-called nauchno-fantasticheskaia (science fiction), nauchno-populiarnaia (popular science), and nauchno-tekhnicheskaia (scientific-technical literature), which explained how a car was built or how to make your own model glider, model ship, mechanical toy, homemade telegraph, or musical instrument.

However, by the mid 1930s it had become clear that not only was pre-revolutionary children's literature the “handiwork of high-born ladies and idiotic sermonizers” but that children's literature of the 1920s had also picked up its “vulgar traditions”: a “sticky wave of pre-revolutionary literary rubbish” had risen up in Soviet times, having been “snatched up and revived by shifty operators and hucksters, who in the first years after the revolution adapted themselves to the business of producing books for Soviet children” (Babushkina 1936, p. 10). It turned out that the Soviet “historical book for children” had not yet found its way “out from under the heap of historical prejudices of the past” (Lysiakov 1935, p. 10), that popular children's books of the 1920s about the civil war had “debased and vulgarized life,” that their “vulgar adventurism” put them on par with prerevolutionary “adventure literature” and “pulp detective novels of the pre-revolutionary years” (Babushkina 1936, p. 10), and that popular science literature was not at all scientific and not in the least popular, whereas technical literature was too technical and, above all, did not adequately show the connection of science and technology with social life and socialist construction (Grigor'ev XXXX, p. 15).

By the mid 1930s children's literature found itself at a crossroads, as did Soviet pedagogy—in connection with the suppression of pedological distortions in 1936. It is impossible to understand the evolution of Soviet children's literature outside the context of the evolution of Soviet pedagogy, and in particular outside of the connection of Soviet pedagogy with violence and the strategies of discipline being developed in the Soviet Union. Soviet children do not just go to school, go on excursions, play war games and sing war songs, sit around the Pioneer campfire, make model airplanes and ships, play with gliders, and join the Young Naturalists, thus becoming part of the collective body. In reading books about heroes and about the everyday life of the school, they also enter into the collective spirit. Through this reading children find themselves in a network of signs and meanings from which there is no escape. In this network they can easily be revealed, identified, and, ultimately, controlled and normalized.

And it is here where we encounter Gaidar. No one was better able to blend the violence that saturated the very air of the 1930s into infantile discourse, into play, into children's self-initiated activities. Soviet aesthetics understood that the “task of the creation of the image of the adolescent, who is growing and maturing in the fight for socialism, naturally requires above all a solution to the problem of the combined presence in him of the characteristics of childhood with the emerging characteristics of adulthood” (Ebin 1951, p. 110) or, in the terms of the Socialist Realist master narrative, the combination of stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel'nost’ (consciousness) (Clark 1985, p. 24).

Gaidar's chief discovery was the self-generation (samozarozhdenie) of the organization of children through play. Only now children played very proper games. Gaidar's friend, popular childr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Children’s Literature and Culture
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reading Soviet and Post-Soviet Children's Culture—Contexts and Challenges
• Part 1 Ideology, Literature, and Culture: Genres, Themes, and Issues
• Part 2 Popular Children's Entertainment
• Part 3 Authors and Texts
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index