2006_07_01_archive

Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era

Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era McGill University Library

(Montreal, Canada) Rare Books and Special Collections Division has a

collection of over 350 childrens books from 1920s and 1930s Soviet

Era. The university has provided a virtual version of the books, to

provide a taste of that time in the Soviet Union. The virtual version

was developed by Tatiana Bedjanian and Vlad Nabok, under the

supervision of David McKnight, Mcgill University Digital Collections

Librarian.

Among the many radical changes in the Soviet Union after the 1917

Revolution, the transformation of children's books offers one of

the most vivid reminders of the vast ambitions of the new social

order. Building simultaneously upon the progressive legacy of the

19th century Russian literature and upon the dazzling tradition of

Russian Futurism, a linguistic, literary and artistic movement that

galvanized Russian intellectuals in the early decades of this

century, post-Revolutionary publishing for children introduced a

vast array of new measures that transmogrified this previously

undistinguished genre. In addition to the powerful visual impact of

the boldly designed books, there were marked increases in the

number of titles published annually, a skyrocketing in the size of

individual editions and the creation of an entire branch of the

publishing industry dedicated solely to children's literature.

In the first decade after the Revolution, general book production

climbed from 26,000 to 44,000 titles a year; the number of copies

published rose from 133 million to 190 million. Children's books

naturally followed the mass trend and a first printing of 100,000

and up was common. State publishing houses such I as Detgiz,

Molodaia Gvardiia, Detskaia Literatura or, in the Ukraine, the

Molodyi Bil'shevik were exclusively concerned with publishing for

children. Other significant factors included, on the one hand, an

often blatantly propagandistic service to the demands of Communist

education but, on the other, the possibility of creative refuge for

major authors and artists unwilling or unable to participate in the

standard celebratory odes to Soviet leaders.

The present exhibition in the Rare Books and Special Collections

Division of the McGill University Libraries draws on an important

collection of more than 350 Soviet children's books published in

the 1920s and 30s and which are remarkable for their original

aesthetic quality, linguistic variety and thematic diversity.

Dynamic constructivist typography utilized the expressive quality

of the stocky, 'architectural' azbuka, the Russian alphabet.

Diagonal layouts introduced a simultaneous representation of

contents and often used photomontage as a succinct expression of

the narrative text. The emblematic use of red and black as dominant

colours linked the children's material closely to the publishing

output at large. Since more than 100 nationalities live within the

fifteen former republics of the USSR, the variety of languages in

which children's books were published is nothing short of

astonishing. While Russian was the official language of the Union,

children's books published in Ukrainian, Uzbek, Tartar, Kazakh,

Azerbaidzhani, Armenian, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian,

lakutian, Nanaian and other languages are well represented in the

McGill collection.

As a side note, It is interesting to observe the changed attitudes in

Russia today towards the use of the Russian language and native

tongues in the former Soviet Republics. The should be the topic for

another posting.

Some might call these children's books masterful propaganda.

Certainly, agit-prop - "promot(ing) appropriate social class values

among the masses" was part of the message for the youngest members to

the new nation. The Soviet Union was attempting to establish a new

world order. However, I would encourage readers to browse these images