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.
The present article draws attention to “post‐Soviet commodity tales,” a subgenre of adolescent girl fiction that provides a narrative of personal success for girls willing to learn the tricks of ...managed beauty, fashion, consumer literacy, and other lessons of femininity. Since these tales are written almost exclusively by women authors for the consumption by young girls, they vividly demonstrate a gender ideology that the older female generation passes on to the new one. I trace the history of the relationship between beauty and gender construction in Soviet children's literature and analyze how new economic and cultural realities affected it in post‐Soviet time. My analysis focuses on two representative popular tales, Ludmila Matveeva's Beauty Contest in Sixth Grade (2001) and Svetlana Lubenets’ A Heart for the Invisible Man (2007).
Первая повесть для детей Эриха Кестнера «Эмиль и сыщики» (1929) принесла молодому писателю бурный успех. Она была переведена на многие языки мира, несколько раз экранизирована и послужила для ...молодого писателя началом продуктивной карьеры в детской литературе. Кестнер был четыре раза номинирован на Нобелевскую премию, а в 1960 г. он получил престижную премию имени Х.-К. Андерсена за вклад в детскую литературу. Несмотря на широкое международное признание, его детские произведения не были известны советскому читателю до конца 1960 гг., а повесть «Эмиль и сыщики» впервые вышла в свет только в 1971 г. в переводе Л. Лунгиной. Почему же советские издатели так долго обходили вниманием знаменитого во всем мире детского писателя? В статье обсуждаются возможные причины этого пробела, a также закономерности появления «Эмиля и сыщиков» в советской детской культуре брежневского застоя. Особое внимание уделяется внутренним изменениям в советской культуре 1960–70 гг., которые способствовали созданию новых форм и героев, выходящих за пределы традиционных норм. Ключевые слова: Э. Кестнер, А. Гайдар, «Эмиль и сыщики», политика переводов детской литературы, детская книга периода застоя, трикстеры, детский детектив.
In a 1931 letter to Maxim Gorky, the celebrated author-naturalist Mikhail Prishvin complained: “Only yesterday my children’s stories, ‘Hedgehog,’ ‘Little Willow Tits,’ ‘Rooks,’ and others were ...considered classics, but now nobody would publish a story like this because my animals do not act according to the general line . . . I myself have begun to think about the insignificance of hares and birds in the context of the grand construction.”¹ Prishvin, who started his career before the October Revolution, held a “Romantic belief in the child’s union with nature.”² He portrayed animals “like people,” with recognizable features of human
This article focuses on the representation of childhood in Fridrikh Gorenshtein’s (1932-2002) autobiographical story The House with a Turret (1964) that epitomizes the collective experience of his ...generation of Soviet children growing up during WWII. Much of Gorenshtein’s fiction could be described as autofiction, a term coined by the French writer and critical theorist Serge Dubrovsky, a narrative form that undermines the generic borders between autobiography and fiction. This article examines how in his autofiction, Gorenshtein redefines the boundaries of childhood by calling attention to two narrative perspectives: the child’s perception of the surrounding uncanny world and the adult narrator’s perception of the states of abjection, trauma, and neglect to which his young hero is subjected.
The word "glamour" came into use in Russia only a few years ago to describe the emerging culture of western-style glossy journals, celebrity media, high fashion, the beauty industry, consumption of ...luxury goods, and the hedonistic lifestyles of the New Russians, or Russia's nouveaux riches. Here, Rudova outlines key aspects of contemporary Russian glamour culture, its opulence, gloss, and seduction as well as its social and political underpinnings. She uses Oksana Robski's glamour fiction as an illustration of the glamour phenomenon in Russia and argue that her novels go beyond propagating consumerism and leisure as they establish precarious links with the Soviet novel and inadvertently expose the patriarchal nature of Russia's controlled democracy.
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