Soviet Children's Picture Books, Etc.

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Soviet Children's Picture Books from the Twenties and Thirties:
<http://www.iisg.nl/collections/sovietchildren/>

Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era:
<http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/russian/>

*****   Stories for Little Comrades
Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children's Books
Evgeny Steiner

In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the most prominent avant-garde
artists were eager children's book illustrators. Reaching a mass
audience of unformed, malleable young people appealed to their
commitment to an art manifesto based on the creation of a new kind of
person for the revolutionary age. At the same time, the opportunity
to work for good pay along with a low risk of censorship were
practical attractions.

The Constructivist artists drew considerable attention in the West
for their brilliant creativity in using geometric designs,
machine-age forms, and an architectural sense of space in their
approach to the visual arts. Rejecting easel painting as a passé
bourgeois preoccupation, they turned to designing and mythologizing
objects of everyday use. In a major reassessment of their work,
Evgeny Steiner forcefully demonstrates that the Constructivists were
as committed to implementing Utopia -- regardless of the human cost
-- as their establishment counterparts.

Basing his work almost completely on primary sources -- Russian
picture books from the Russian State Library, private collections,
and publishers' archives -- Evgeny Steiner tells his story in deft
prose with a wry sense of humor. The solidness of his sources, the
range of his interests, and the depth of his understanding of Russian
life combine to make this an unusually perceptive book on a
fascinating cultural issue that combines the visual arts, literature,
and politics.

Read Sample Chapter(s):
<http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/chapters/STESTC.pdf>

<http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/STESTC.html>   *****

Evgeny Steiner: <http://www.scps.nyu.edu/faculty/index.jsp?insId=3515&let=S>

Children's Literature:
<http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/children/index.htm>

*****   The Lion and the Unicorn 21.1 (1997) 59-85
Communist in a Coonskin Cap?
Meridel Le Sueur's Books for Children and the Reformulation of
America's Cold War Frontier Epic
Julia Mickenberg

It might come as a surprise to learn that in the early years of the
Cold War, at the height of McCarthyism, left-wing authors in the
United States wrote and published radical books for children. These
writers, many of them blacklisted from other publishing venues,
rejected the Cold War's "victory culture"--the violent and
exclusionary rhetoric of American superiority--and instead attempted
in their children's books to recover the egalitarian, diverse, and
cooperative elements of American history and folklore. 1 In
particular, I want to bring attention to Meridel Le Sueur, an author
who wrote books for children during the 1940s and 1950s, a period in
children's literature which has been neglected in scholarship,
perhaps on the assumption that children's literature produced in this
"conformist" era merely served the status quo. In Le Sueur's
children's books on Abe Lincoln, Nancy Hanks (Lincoln's mother), Davy
Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, and an adopted son of Black Hawk, Sparrow
Hawk, Le Sueur paid tribute to America's democratic folk heritage and
to heroes of the working class. Her celebration of the nation's past
took place at a time when she herself was under intense public
scrutiny for her political involvements and was unable to publish
most of her writings. Infused with hope and a fundamental belief in
American "promise," Le Sueur's children's books reutilize American
national folk heritage in an attempt to discredit capitalism. The
books therefore indicate cracks in the so-called capitalist consensus
of the postwar period, and for this and many other reasons, they are
worth remembering. . . .

[The full text is available at
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lion_and_the_unicorn/v021/21.1mickenberg.html>
if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.]
*****

Julia Mickenberg: <http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/ams/about/mickenberg.htm>
--
Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>