| After the October Revolution of 1917, the impetus to control authorship, the potential of children's literature as a creative medium, and the desire to communicate their visions to child-readers drew many ideologues to children's literature. Pedagogues, political figures, bureaucrats, authors, and book illustrators entered into a public debate about what form a Soviet children's literature should assume. This interdisciplinary dissertation integrates original Russian archival research, recent work in Soviet cultural and social history, and theoretical studies of children's literature to show how the process of creating Soviet children's literature was a contested one.;Chapter One, "Children's Literature in Russia: An Overview," provides a history of children's literature in Russia before 1917. Chapter Two, "An Ambiguous Foundation: Russian Children's Literature, 1918--1924," explores how the growing commercialization of children's literature complicated the Party's early efforts to establish controls over the creation and publication of children's books. Chapter Three, "Kornei Chukovskii: Skazka, Invisible Ideologies, and Cultural Inheritance," looks at the preschool skazka, a genre that incorporated anthropomorphic stories, animal and nature tales, rural themes and Western fairy tales. Chapter Four, "Rush to Adulthood: Precepts for Russian Children's Literature, 1924--1928," considers the efforts of Party supporters to author and promote children's books that reinforced mom "Soviet" versions of reality, society, and the future. Chapter Five, "A First Five-Year Plan for Children's Books?: Children's Literature, 1927--1933," discusses how the Party labored to reformulate Soviet children's literature just as it undertook other major construction or engineering projects. Chapter Six, "Cultural Compromise: Soviet Children's Literature, 1932--1935," reveals how children's literature reflected the Party's shift to a more conciliatory cultural policy.;Through the lens of children's literature, cultural revolution in Soviet Russia emerges as an ambitious civilizing or modernizing project rooted in the prevolutionary past, expressed in the defining 1920s, and not just a phenomenon restricted to 1928--29. Ultimately, this dissertation draws on children's literature to view how and why powerful actors attempted to establish cultural uniformity, how the process was contested, and how it failed. |
