438 chapter eight

The most frequent ideal figure was the leader of the country, Joseph
Stalin. The years following the Second World War were Stalin’s heyday.
Portraits of Stalin and servile poems and stories in honour of the dictator
became an inescapable element in children’s literature. The list of writers
who supported the personality cult was a long one; it includes some major
names, such as Marshak, Barto, Mikhalkov, Zinaida Aleksandrova and
Valentina Oseeva, as well as new young writers, such as Anatoly Mosh-
kovsky and Sergey Baruzdin. The proportion of non-Russian writers is
high; the much-talked-of multinational element in Soviet culture seems to
have consisted in these years of an unanimous song of praise to Stalin.
Where literature about Lenin mainly drew on documented biographi-
cal episodes from his childhood to the early years of the Soviet state, the
object of the Stalin cult was much more unreal and abstract. The few
biographically-based works were filled with examples of historical falsifi-
cation, as they sought to bring out Stalin’s leading role in the key events
of the October Revolution. In books about Lenin, the protagonist is an
active person, moving around among the people, as one of them. Lenin
provides an example to children, both as a private individual and as a
revolutionary. Stalin, on the other hand, assumed divine dimensions. He
does not act; he simply exists, remote and inaccessible, but at the same
time paradoxically close. Stalin is the perfect secure father-figure; he is the
promise of a happy life and a great future. “Stalin Is Thinking About Us”
(“Stalin dumaet o nas”, 1952) is the title of a poem by Sergey Mikhalkov,
typical for the period.
In the children’s literature of the Stalin cult, the largest group of works
is made up of poems expressing praise and gratitude. ‘Thank you for your
genius’, wrote Platon Voronko (1913–88), one of the most enthusiastic
Stalinists in children’s writing. Voronko wrote in Ukrainian, but an illus-
trious team—Elena Blaginina, Vadim Shefner (1914/1915–2012), Vsevolod
Rozhdestvensky (1895–1977), Yaroslav Smelyakov (1912/1913–72) and Alek-
sandr Prokofev (1900–71)—ensured that his poems were also accessible
to Russian children. In the collection The World Is Glorious (Slaven mir,
1951), there is a section called “Our Happiness” (“Nashe shchaste”) entirely
dedicated to Stalin. It was poems like “Glory to Stalin” (“Slava Stalinu”)
that won Voronko a literary prize that year:
To the sun of the people—
to Stalin
be glory
from generation to generation
from age to age!
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 439

Hail! Thank you

for winged happiness!
We will grow up
and create an immortal story
about you
for all eternity.
Dear Stalin!
You are our honour and our conscience,
You are our happiness
and our Spring.
Stalin is omniscient and omnipresent, and not just with the help of the
secret police. He is even aware of what is happening in the most distant
kolkhoz village. In Aleksey Musatov’s (1911–76) The House on the Hill
(Dom na gore, 1951), the village schoolteacher gathers his dispirited pupils
around him. Their agricultural experiments in the school’s own garden
have not produced the desired results. In this situation, only one thought
can console them:
“I envy you children and I am happy for you.” The teacher let his gaze pass
over the schoolchildren’s faces.
“You are living in a very special time. Any clouds that appear in the sky
are soon dispersed, the sun comes out and everything is again bright and
good. And your friendship will never end; your happiness will never be
extinguished. And this is because there is someone thinking day and night
about your happiness, about your whole life, a great man, the person we
love most of all in the world . . .”
“Stalin!” whispered Varya excitedly, raising her head.
“That’s right, my friends. He knows everything and thinks of everything . . .
He even knows that you were unlucky with the millet.”
“Have . . . have you seen Stalin?” Varya took hold of the teacher’s hand.
“Have you talked to him?”
“No, Varyusha, I have not been granted that joy. But Stalin knows about
your failure with the millet, I am sure of that.”
The theme of the epic stories and poems about Stalin is children striving
to come close to the father of the country. The portrait of Stalin, with his
warm smile as its most prominent feature, plays an active role in many
works. From the walls of the kindergarten and the school, Stalin looks
down with satisfaction on the children playing or busily reading. His por-
trait hangs above children’s beds, and the evening ‘prayer’ includes a con-
fession of the little sins of the day, followed by absolution.
The more active children wrote letters to Stalin, recounting happenings
in school and promising to become good Soviet citizens, worthy of their
leader. In other stories and poems, children meet Stalin in dreams or in
440 chapter eight

their imagination. The October children in Elena Blaginina’s “An Intimate

Conversation” (“Zadushevny razgovor”, 1950) pretend that Stalin comes
to visit them. They drink tea together and offer their pipe-smoking guest
a pirog, a Russian pie. As the winter twilight descends outside, the chil-
dren discuss with Stalin the Chinese revolution and the chances of world
peace. It is an idyllic scene, full of intimacy and warmth.
There were also children who had seen Stalin with their own eyes.
The May Day and October Revolution parades in Red Square formed the
climax of many children’s books of the Stalin period. The little hero is
often taking part in the ceremony for the first time. Although thousands
of people are parading past the Lenin Mausoleum, an intimate contact
is established between Stalin and the children. Each of them knows that
Stalin’s eyes and his smile are directed just at him or her. It is a euphoric
moment, in which the little ones forget everything else. Little Petya in
Barto’s poem “At the May Day Parade” (“Na mayskom parade”, 1949) is so
excited that he no longer knows “whether he is quiet or singing”. Petya
also witnesses the climax of the whole ritual, when some hand-picked
children run forward to the mausoleum to hand over flowers to Stalin and
to report on the work of their school class.
Children who had been lucky enough to meet and touch Stalin recalled
the great moment afterwards. These were not only parading school pupils,
but also members of delegations and congresses in the Kremlin. The con-
versations in themselves lacked interest, with Stalin’s replies mostly lim-
ited to “What’s your name?”, “How are things at school?”, “Good!” and “See
you again”. But the important thing was that the miracle had taken place;
the deity had assumed human form. “At first I was nervous”, reported one
Pioneer girl, “but then when I was standing there in front of Comrade
Stalin and saw how simple and friendly he was, I became quite calm and
started to talk.”20

In Praise of Labour

A popular topic in post-war children’s literature was the educational func-

tion of labour. The devastated industry and agriculture had to be restored,
and this, too, required the efforts of young people. What had been called
for at the children’s literature conference in 1941 was now being realised

20 Nina Zdrogova, “Buket ot pionerov,” in Deti o Staline (M.-L, 1939), 18.

 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 441

on a grand scale. There is no lack of socially useful labour in any book

from this period about Young Pioneers and their lives. The heroes of these
works are worthy heirs to Gaydar’s Timur. Like him, they are drawn into
the adult world and mature into responsible citizens by taking part in
‘the great life’. But one significant difference should be noted: the playful,
romantic elements that were so important for Gaydar are usually lacking
in these works. Children are not encouraged to use their own initiative;
all activity is meant to happen under adult supervision. Even Aleksandr
Fadeev, president of the Writers’ Union, had to rework his war novel The
Young Guard (Molodaya gvardiya), because the role of the Party in orga-
nising the partisan movement among young people was not sufficiently
emphasised.
In 1950, a Stalin Prize went to the story The Cog Wheel (Zvyozdochka,
1948) by Ivan Vasilenko (1895–1966). The pupils in a vocational school
compete in groups to see who can display the best discipline and the
greatest progress in their studies. They perform good deeds, such as mak-
ing a wheelchair for a disabled worker. But the most important thing is
their work experience in the metal industry. Every morning, the young-
sters march to the factory singing (“We are the country’s labour reserve, /
we are the hope for years to come. / The best worker is the one / who is
skilful, learned and clever”), in order to manufacture cog wheels for a new
type of combine-harvester.
The same theme, but set in the country, crops up in Aleksey Musa-
tov’s prize-winning novel Stozhary (1948). Musatov was a village school-
teacher who had published his first work as early as 1930, when he was
only eighteen years old. On that occasion, the subject was class struggle in
the countryside and the opposition of the kulaks to collectivisation. In the
new novel, adults and children in the village of Stozhary are working to
put their kolkhoz back on its feet. The War is over, but military jargon is
still current. Agriculture and land reclamation are the new front line, and
the enemies are the capricious forces of nature and verminous animals.
The dramatic climax is a haymaking contest in the fields. Working for the
common good gives rise to a sense of the collective, while all personal
conflicts are overcome.
The main protagonist, Sanya Konshakov, is known as a hothead and a
leader of the village youth. But when his father dies in the War, the boy
has to shoulder part of the responsibility for the kolkhoz. Now he takes
his father’s scythe and goes out to work with the other boys and girls.
By the last page of the book, Sanya has been elected as the leader of the
442 chapter eight

youth brigade and accepted into the Komsomol. Just as Timur brigades
had sprung up during the War to help families in distress, Konshakov bri-
gades were born out of Musatov’s novel, to help the adults in their work
on the farm.
There is a strong dose of homespun rustic romance in Stozhary. The
same emotional relationship to one’s own kolkhoz is found in Lyubov
Voronkova’s The Village of Gorodishche (Selo Gorodishche, 1947). The chil-
dren refuse to accept the idea of their kolkhoz being wound up after the
War. The houses have burnt down, the livestock has gone and the grain
stores are empty, but the children join with the returning soldiers to start
the rebuilding work. The theme of the book is the heroism of labour. The
children are urged on by the decorated war veteran, Viktor:
Viktor’s brown eyes were suddenly filled with warmth.
“Children, children”, he said. “You don’t yet know yourselves what heroes
you are!”
Raisa just snorted: “Heroes! With rakes and spades!”
Viktor looked at her reproachfully: “Do you think heroes have to have
rifles and machine-guns?”
In the post-war years, city children, too, were to be taught to love nature
and kolkhoz life. Writers sent their heroes out into the country, into an
environment where they could not excel with their own skills and knowl-
edge. The encounter is a shock, but the children soon learn to respect the
work of the peasants and fishermen and to make their own contribution.
Work has an educational function, and at the end of the summer, the
children return home to the city as better Soviet citizens and more mature
human beings.
Lyalya in Susanna Georgievskaya’s (1916–74) story The Granny’s Sea
(Babushkino more, 1949) is only seven years old. Her enriching experi-
ences from a summer spent in a fishing kolkhoz are recounted in a lyrical
tone. Lyalya lives with her aunt, who is no apple-cheeked storyteller but
an energetic brigade leader with the Order of Lenin on her chest. The
book is a good example of the negative consequences of the no-conflict
theory. Georgievskaya describes a prosperous idyll that the Soviet people
unfortunately could only enjoy in books.
The boy in Pyotr Pavlenko’s (1899–51) The Sun on the Steppe (Stepnoe
solntse, 1949) is three years older than Lyalya. Pavlenko was one of the
emphatically communist writers whose main interests were the Party
programme, patriotism and the international labour movement. He wrote
chiefly for adults, but The Sun on the Steppe was his contribution to pro-
duction literature for young readers. The city boy, who helps with the
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 443

harvest and learns about the grandiose plans to transform the steppe into
a flourishing garden, comes into contact with real life, ‘as endless as the
steppe’.
A more subtle skill in characterisation was shown by Nikolay Dubov
(1910–83). Born into a working-class family in Omsk, he was soon work-
ing for a living. Dubov worked both as a journalist and as a dramatist
for adults before finding his way into children’s literature. His first work
in the genre was At the End of the Earth (Na krayu zemli, 1951), a novel
about a group of schoolchildren in the remote Altay. They dream of great
exploits, but suspect deep down that most things have already been done
and that they will have to settle for dull everyday life. For them, real life
is somewhere else. When a mystical stranger turns up in the village, hopes
are raised that a spy has come into their midst. The man proves to be a
geologist, but their encounter with him helps the children to correct their
false dreams and learn the true romance of labour.
Kostya, in Dubov’s artistically more successful Lights Over the River
(Ogni na reke, 1952), also learns from the experience of meeting a hero
of labour: “Only later would Kostya understand that where he had once
done everything for his own sake, he now did it for others, and that only
work that is necessary and useful for other people brings true happiness.”
Spoilt and insolent, Kostya comes to the country to spend the summer
with his uncle. Here, a new world full of work opens up for him. The vil-
lage schoolchildren line up voluntarily when the kolkhoz needs them,
in between working diligently on their own plots of land. The uncle is
responsible for the buoys on the Dnieper River, a job that does not ini-
tially inspire Kostya’s respect. But after a perilous night, during which he
helps his uncle to save a ship from running aground, he looks at his out-
wardly unassuming relative with fresh eyes. Lights Over the River was also
made into a film.
Behind the lyrical treatment of work on the kolkhoz, there was also
anxiety about the process of urbanisation. The aim was to popularise life
in the country. Trained workers were needed in agriculture, but, given the
chance, many young people preferred to move to the city after ten years
at school, while those who stayed lacked the necessary farming skills. One
of the first to demand closer collaboration between school and working
life was Aleksey Musatov, who dealt with the subject by literary means
in his above-mentioned novel The House on the Hill (Dom na gore, 1951).
Inspired by the work of the officially approved biologist Trofim Lysenko,
the schoolchildren set up a ‘kolkhoz academy’, where their biology teacher
supervises them in experiments to increase the millet harvest.
444 chapter eight

The School Novel

Another major genre in the post-war years was the school novel. Here
again, we find clichés that recur in one book after another. The first Soviet
children’s novels about the world of school had presented the teachers
as ideologically backward or downright reactionary, while the progressive
forces were to be found among the pupils. But in the 1930s, a formula
was drawn up that was to prove its staying power for decades to come. In
poetry we encounter it as early as 1930 in “Kolya Kochin” by the Oberiu
poet Aleksandr Vvedensky. Kolya is the laziest in his class. He thinks that
the Urals are in North America and that the Donbas is a river in Italy. He
adds 5+10+14 to make 350 pigs. But Kolya learns to be self-critical and his
classmates line up to help him with his lessons in the evening.
There is a strong didactic tendency in the school stories of the 1940s and
early 1950s. One or more weak pupils prevent the class from becoming the
pride of the school, but by a collective effort, they manage to improve
their poor grades and build a good class spirit into the bargain. With hind-
sight, this kind of solution, typical of the Stalin period, was also criticised
as unsustainable by historians of Soviet children’s literature. The struggle
for good behaviour and high grades, too often became an end in itself and
ultimately the only conflict was that between good and better.
These words could well apply to Nikolay Nosov’s (1908–76) prize-win-
ning and popular novel Vitya Maleev at School and at Home (Vitya Maleev
v shkole i doma, 1951), although there is an element of humour here.
The inspiration for the novel was a quotation from a teacher: “He who
lags behind will lag behind, however much you try to help him. He just
gets used to you helping him.” In the novel, we meet two lazy and weak-
willed pupils, Vitya Maleev and his friend Kostya, whose lack of progress
at school threatens the reputation of the class. The class teacher and the
other pupils have to put all their energy into helping the two friends, but
the transformation only comes when Vitya forces himself, by an effort of
will, to get to grips with his hated mathematics exercises and overcome
his difficulties on his own.
An important side motif in the novel is comradeship. Fear of a dictation
test in Russian, Vitya’s friend Kostya plays truant from school. Vitya finds
himself caught in a moral dilemma when he protects Kostya by telling the
school about a fictitious illness. His lies are exposed and the moral of the
story comes out in a succinct line: “Real friendship is not excusing your
friends’ weaknesses, but being demanding towards your friends.”
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 445

For a long time, Vitya Maleev at School and at Home was cited as a
model school novel, but although some critics felt that Nosov had broken
the didactic mould, the novel is still a child of its time. The chief endeavour
of the schoolchildren is to raise the average marks for the class, in a spirit
of socialist competition, and the happy ending consists in the fact that
even problem pupils can boast the highest marks in every subject. Still,
Vitya Maleev at School and at Home is also flooded with humour, and the
psychological insights prevent the portraits of the schoolboys from turn-
ing into stereotypes. Vitya Maleev, who tells his own story, is an expert at
finding excuses and stilling his conscience, in order to devote himself to
football, white mice and the pleasures of the circus instead of doing his
homework. There is a profound discrepancy between the school novel of
the Stalin era and Nosov’s particular style of writing, a discrepancy that
the author had problems bridging in his book.
Vitya’s problem is his laziness, but in school novels we also encounter
another type of anti-hero, the individualist. The reputation of the class
is threatened not by poor grades, but by the self-indulgent behaviour of
a few—often gifted—pupils. By means of meetings and criticism in the
class wall-newspaper, the collective manages to rescue the rebels. The
moral is succinctly expressed in Mariya Prilezhaeva’s (1903–89) novel
Your Comrades Are With You (S toboy tovarishchi, 1949):
In our motherland, people always do everything together—making war,
studying, building. If anyone isolates himself, that person is always deeply
unhappy. He finds it tedious and difficult without his comrades, and he
never achieves anything.
From a later perspective, the causes of conflict in school classes in such
works seem astoundingly shallow, and even Soviet critics used the term
‘pseudo-individualists’ when discussing the school novels of the Stalin
years. Sasha’s crime in Your Comrades Are With You is that he wants to
be the one to give the teacher a present that he has made with his own
hands. The class has broken a voltmeter and takes a collective decision to
make a new one. Sasha is the one who constructs the meter, but instead
of letting his classmates decide who should hand it over, he holds onto his
own handiwork. This is seen as ‘individualism’, and the school Komsomol
group discusses whether Sasha is any longer worthy to be accepted as a
member. But the tone of Your Comrades Are With You is still conciliatory;
the collective decides not to condemn a classmate for a single error, see-
ing the importance of trusting people and supporting them when they go
wrong.
446 chapter eight

In Vasyok Trubachov and His Comrades (Vasyok Trubachov i ego tova-

rishchi. 1947) by Valentina Oseeva (1902–69), the conflict concerns a lost
piece of chalk. The teacher looks in vain for chalk at the blackboard, and
the caretaker is unjustly accused of neglecting his duties. It takes a visit to
Red Square, that most holy of places, to resolve the situation. The oppres-
sive feeling that Stalin is watching him reproachfully from the Kremlin
arouses feelings of shame in Vasyok Trubachov, the leader of the class
Pioneer group, and he hastens to restore class discipline.
Vasyok Trubachov and His Comrades grew progressively into a trilogy,
which was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1952, the year in which the last
part came out. Oseeva’s series summarises all the central motifs of the
period. The first part is a school story, written in the spirit of the time,
even though the action takes place before the outbreak of the Second
World War. The second part is about the fate of the children in the War.
The class is doing summer work on a kolkhoz in the Ukraine when war
breaks out. The enemy occupies the village, and the schoolchildren’s cour-
age and patriotism are put to the test. In the final part, Vasyok and his
friends return to their home town and help the adults at the hospital and
evacuation centers. But the most important goal is to repair the school
and continue their education despite the War. The initiative comes from
the children, and it is their own efforts that prove decisive in the rebuild-
ing work.
Mariya Prilezhaeva remained faithful to the school setting, even where
the action in her novels was shifted to the War years. In The Seventh-Grade
Girls (Semiklassnitsy, 1944), there is an attempt—as in the third part of
Oseeva’s trilogy—to make children tone down their dreams of dying a
hero’s death in the war and to concentrate on their schoolwork instead.
By doing their lessons and assisting the household, they are helping their
country—that is Prilezhaeva’s message. But the children do have their
own front line in school, also. Just as the adults have striven to exceed
production targets, the schoolgirls make a vow to improve their grades in
maths and so outshine the boys: “From now on, anyone who gets a 2 is a
deserter.” (5 was the highest grade in the Soviet Union.)
The schoolchildren are urged on by their enthusiastic young teacher
Darya Leonidovna, who represents the ‘ideal personality’, in the unani-
mous view of the class. The overriding goal of schoolwork is naturally to
turn all the pupils into true communists. With pointer in hand, the girls’
geography teacher explains: “There are Soviet people everywhere. Our
thoughts are the same, our feelings are the same, our goals are the same.
That is what the Motherland is. It begins here.”
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 447

The main character in Prilezhaeva’s novel Masha Strogovaya’s Youth

(Yunost Mashi Strogovoy, 1948) finds it hard to accept that her main task
in the War is to study. Prilezhaeva follows Masha’s college studies and
her first steps as a teacher of Russian. There is conflict with bureaucrats,
when Masha does not strictly adhere to the teaching plan, but follows
the inspiration of the moment. The novel has an educational value that
extends beyond its own time and was clearly aimed not only at teenag-
ers but also at teachers. Prilezhaeva also stresses the conflicts in Masha’s
private life; an unusual topos for the literature of the time was a woman
torn between two men.
Prilezhaeva was a teacher herself and could fall back on her own expe-
riences of the school environment. The same was true of Frida Vigdorova
(1915–65), whose book My Class (Moy klass, 1949) has a marked documen-
tary character. A teacher talks about her work, about lessons, discussion
meetings, excursions and home visits. Her setbacks and victories engen-
der a deep love for her work and her pupils. With The Road to Life (Doroga
v zhizn, 1954), Vigdorova began a trilogy about an orphanage and its day-
to-day problems. In the sixties, we encounter the author in a new and
unexpected role: it was thanks to Vigdorova’s private record of the trial
of Joseph Brodsky in 1964 that this shameful affair was publicised all over
the world.
There were school stories for small children, too. Evgeny Schwartz wrote
an unpretentious little story, The Girl in the First Grade (Pervoklassnitsa,
1949), about seven-year-old Marusha, who loves her teacher and Lenin
and tries hard to be a good pupil and future Pioneer. Even the begin-
ners at kindergarten were expected to involve themselves in the events
of the adult world. In Our Factory (Nash zavod, 1949), by the same writer,
the little ones look forward to the great day when the town’s steam loco-
motive works will celebrate its centenary. A tour of the factory gives the
author an opportunity to present the various stages that its work goes
through.
Traces of the old Schwartz, the poet from the days of The Hedgehog
and The Siskin, can still be found in the ever-popular The Tale of Lost Time
(Skazka o poteryannom vremeni). Originally a stage play dating from 1940,
it came out in prose form in 1948. In an imaginative and humorous way, it
illustrates the maxim, “Whoever wastes time unnecessarily does not notice
himself getting older”. The schoolboy who always misses his lessons turns
into an old man overnight. Together with his fellow-sufferers, he has to
call upon all his cunning to overcome the wizards who are rejuvenating
themselves with the time they receive from the idlers.
448 chapter eight

Towards the end of the 1940s, the Cold War between the superpow-
ers began to leave its mark on Soviet children’s literature. International
themes became synonymous with outspoken criticism of the USA and
its allies. The major propaganda targets were American racism and the
Korean War. Fascism lives on in the USA, says the teacher in Mariya
Prilezhaeva’s Your Comrades Are With You. Feelings run high in the class
when she describes how the ‘Mister Twister’ types of the day are lynching
black people. On the other hand, the children are proud to hear how black
Americans tell their children about the Soviet Union, the land of dreams
where the law is the same for all.
A writer who specialised in international subjects was N. Kalma (1908–
88), the pseudonym of Anna Kalmanok. Kalma had already written before
the War about racial discrimination in America and about the conditions
under which children lived in Spain, Greece, Italy and Iran. Her interest
was focussed not only on poverty, exploitation and police brutality, but
also on the growth of resistance. Children help adults in the struggle for
peace and justice; they stick up posters at night and sign their names to
Soviet calls for peace.
The Cold War gave Kalma the opportunity to expand her particular
range of topics. According to a Soviet critic in 1969, The Kids of the Mus-
tard Paradise (Deti Gorchichnogo raya, 1950) tears away “all the masks
from the vaunted ‘American way of life’”.21 The “inhuman customs” of
American schools are exposed when a new pupil, the son of a planta-
tion owner from the South, joins the class, and the ruthless persecution
of a coloured classmate ensues. Kalma’s intention was to show that the
conflict is not just an internal school matter, but reflects the real state of
American democracy.
An author who flourished in the atmosphere of the Cold War was Lazar
Lagin. He could not follow the success of Old Man Khottabych; instead,
he started to cultivate national self-righteousness and simple black-and-
white contrasts in fantastical novels and stories. In The Island of Disap-
pointment (Ostrov razocharovaniya, 1951), two characters are set against
each other. They are, to quote a Soviet historian, “a brave, resourceful
and tough officer in the Soviet Navy” and “a powerful American capitalist,
detestable for his cant and hypocrisy”.22

21 Lupanova, Polveka, 470.

22 Boris Begak, “Khottabych i drugie,” Detskaia literatura 3 (1986): 26.
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 449

The Pioneer leader in Nikolay Dubov’s Light on the River (Ogni na reke)
tells of the activities of the ‘fascists’ in Korea. With bombs and napalm,
the opponents of Communism, “people more terrible than any mon-
ster”, have destroyed Korea’s towns and villages. No wonder little Petya
in Agniya Barto’s poem “Petya Draws” (“Petya risuet”, 1951) reaches for
the black chalk to illustrate life in America, that is exploitation, murder
and aggressive militarism. In response to his sister’s question about whom
has he portrayed, Petya says: “No humans here! / It’s Truman that I’ve
drawn.” But when he wants to represent Soviet reality with its hard-work-
ing peace-loving people, he turns to happy, bright colours. Barto herself
would have liked to see more angry poems and descriptions of “menda-
cious American freedom, and the criminal activities of the Americans in
Korea”. People should not be afraid to tell children about “the awful world
where everything is permeated with a spirit of violence and death”, she
wrote in 1952.23 A later poem, “The Black Newcomer” (“Chorny novichok”,
1963), also painted a critical picture of the USA: black boys on the other
side of the Atlantic are not allowed to go to the same school as their white
contemporaries.
The theatre of the time also sought to teach Soviet youngsters the ABC
of international politics. The fact that it was not only in America that such
an inhuman spirit prevailed was stressed by Sergey Mikhalkov in his play I
Want to Go Home! (Ya khochu domoy!, 1949). Some Russian children who
have been taken to Germany by the Nazis are kept locked up in a chil-
dren’s home by the British after the war. Their captors try to brainwash
them into forgetting their language and their Soviet motherland, but one
boy manages to escape the claws of the ‘fascists’ and make his way to the
Soviet zone. The play also features friendly Germans who share the Soviet
children’s dreams of crossing the border to the East. I Want to Go Home!
won a Stalin Prize for Mikhalkov in 1950.
Another Stalin Prize went to Valentina Lyubimova (1895–1968) for The
Snowball (Snezhok, 1948). A conflict arises in an American school when
a millionaire from the South tries to use his money to remove a coloured
boy from his daughter’s class. The class splits into two groups. Together
with a radical teacher, the positive heroes of the play dream of the Soviet
Union, where equality reigns. They read aloud Fadeev’s The Young Guard

23 Agniia Barto, “Smeshnoe i ser’eznoe: Zametki o detskoi literature,” Sobranie sochinenii

v 4 tomakh. Vol. 4 (M., 1984), 230. (First publ.: Literaturnaia gazeta 54 / 1952: 3.)
450 chapter eight

and are inspired by the example of Oleg Koshevoy to dare to resist the
racists.
The subject of Forward, Valiant Ones! (Vperyod, otvazhnye!, 1952), a
play written by Avenir Zak (1919–74) and Isay Kuznetsov (1916–2010), was
the political struggle in France. In the play, French schoolchildren fight to
stop their school becoming a barracks for American soldiers. A commu-
nist teacher is sacked, while a pupil who asserts that the Russians saved
France in the War is expelled. The pupils listen to Radio Moscow and
dream of life becoming as good in France as it is in the Soviet Union.
Zak and Kuznetsov fanned Soviet hopes of an imminent revolution by
describing a strike among French dockers, who refuse to unload cargoes
of American weapons. There is great rejoicing in the class when they hear
that the soldiers sent to crush the strike have gone over to the side of the
rebels.
The foremost plays about school life from this period are two debut
works: Viktor Rozov’s (1913–2004) Her Friends (Eyo druzya, 1949) and Liya
Geraskina’s (1910–2010) The School-Leaving Certificate (Attestat zrelosti,
1951). Rozov, who was to develop into one of the Soviet Union’s leading
adult playwrights, wrote a tear-drenched text about a schoolgirl who goes
blind but still passes her final exam with the help of her classmates. Her
happiness is complete when a skilful Soviet eye surgeon restores her sight
in the last act. Geraskina’s contribution included yet another warning
against individualism. An artistically gifted boy regards the school wall
newspaper as altogether too modest a forum for him, and when he also
neglects his cultural work in his Komsomol group, he is excluded from
the community. But as the literary tradition demanded, Geraskina’s play
also contained an appeal for support for the outcast. The young artist—
helped by the others—comes to understand his mistake, apologises, and
is accepted back into the Komsomol organisation.
A prominent place in drama was occupied by Sergey Mikhalkov. His
output from this period covers not only the bluntly propagandistic I
Want to Go Home! but also an entertaining fairy-tale play based on Carlo
Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges, entitled The Happy Dream (Vesyoloe
snovidenie, 1947), and a popular Pioneer play, The Red Scarf (Krasny gal-
stuk, 1947). In the latter, Mikhalkov portrays the son of a factory manager
as spoilt, rude and selfish. When he does not want to take part in the
shared work, he is excluded from the Pioneer organisation. His friend,
an orphaned working-class boy, is honourable and strong-principled and
is able to help the individualist to become a steadfast comrade, worthy
of the red scarf of the Pioneers. His father is the one who delivers the
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 451

message: “Anyone who does not value the red scarf as a child will not
respect the Party membership card, either!” The similarity between The
Red Scarf and The School-Leaving Certificate is striking, but Mikhalkov and
Geraskina were by no means the only children’s authors of this period
who sought out individualists to use as salutary examples to impress the
ideas of collectivism on children’s consciousness.

Names of Importance

During the Khrushchev thaw, there was a tendency to view the 1940s and
early 1950s as a gloomy interlude in the history of Soviet children’s litera-
ture. All the worthwhile literature came out before the War, while, after
1945, propagandists and mediocrities took centre stage. Later on, this view
was softened somewhat, and it was rightly stressed that the last years of
Stalin’s rule also saw Lyubov Voronkova, Anatoly Aleksin, Anatoly Ryba-
kov, Nikolay Nosov and Yury Sotnik coming to maturity as writers.
We have already met Lyubov Voronkova as the author of The Girl from
the City and the kolkhoz novel The Village of Gorodishche, but she also
wrote books that had nothing to do with the political situation or cur-
rent social issues. From her debut in 1940 she had dreamt of writing a
book about an untroubled, happy childhood. This idea was realised in
A Sunny Day (Solnechny denyok, 1948), a story about a day in the life of
six-year-old Tanya. The plot is thin and undramatic; Tanya potters about
with her dolls, listens to her grandfather’s stories, helps her mother with
the cleaning, plays out in the courtyard with a friend, and goes to visit
the cowshed. She lives in a wonderful, charmed world, remote from adult
worries, and Voronkova conveys the child’s feelings, thoughts and fanta-
sies. Criticism of its idyllic and sentimental tone did not stop her from
writing a whole series of stories about Tanya. The cycle ran to five books,
finishing with The Leader of the Group (Komandir zvyozdochki, 1959). In
time, the series covers only a year and a half, but it is an important period
in the little girl’s life, as Tanya starts school and becomes an October child
and a group leader.
Sergey Baruzdin wrote about the development of another girl, Svet-
lana. In his stories about Svetlana (1951–62), Baruzdin, unlike Voronkova,
came across as a genuine Party author. The series changed suddenly from
a lively portrait of childhood to an undisguised paean to Soviet society.
The two high points in Svetlana’s young life are taking the Pioneer oath in
Red Square and becoming friends with an old Bolshevik. But children took
452 chapter eight

Svetlana to their hearts and followed her progress from kindergarten to

nursing in Kirghizia with interest. In 1963, Baruzdin collected the stories
under the title The Big Svetlana (Bolshaya Svetlana).
How conventional material can come to life in the hands of a skilful
writer was shown by Anatoly Aleksin (born 1924) in his first novel Thirty-
One Days (Tridtsat odin den, 1950). In the summer of 1945, a group of
Moscow children travel to a Pioneer camp on the Black Sea. Their leader
thinks that their main purpose is to rest; but the children thirst for activ-
ity and excitement. They set up a secret society, which secretly helps the
adults to clear up the war-torn city and to find out new facts about the
local partisan movement during the war. Initiative by children was not
encouraged at that time, and there was also a fear of any form of secrecy.
In Aleksin’s novel, the children are seen as right in their wish to take part
in ‘the great life’ and to insist on doing it on their own terms. Not surpris-
ingly, Timur and his Gang is the young heroes’ favourite book, alongside
Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was Hardened and Fadeev’s The Young
Guard.
Thirty-One Days was sub-titled ‘The Diary of Pioneer Sasha Vasilkov’.
Diary-based and epistolary novels are also to found in Aleksin’s later
output. Practically all his books use a first-person narrator, usually 12–13
years old. Aleksin’s main characters are not always positive heroes. For
example, Sasha Vasilkov’s weakness is a lack of staying power; he is easily
fired with enthusiasm, but is prone to overestimate his own abilities. In
the Pioneer camp, he learns that there is no room for individualists, either
on the football field or in the collective.
Aleksin achieved great renown for Thirty-One Days, but criticism gradu-
ally intensified as the author’s attitude to the children’s sense of initiative
and secretiveness was found to be too positive. The young author even felt
compelled to revise parts of the book in 1954.
A fatal concession to the official taste of the Stalin era was The Detach-
ment Marches in Step (Otryad shagaet v nogu, 1952), a novel that the author
himself later wanted to forget. The election of a chairman for the Pioneer
camp provokes a split among the seventh-grade pupils at the school, but
the problem turns out to be based on a misunderstanding and peace soon
reigns again among the friends. Aleksin was unlucky with The Detachment
Marches in Step in that it came out at a time when dissatisfaction with
the standards of Stalinist children’s literature was beginning to be aired.
In Novy mir, Aleksin was confronted with a review filled with sarcastic
remarks; the victory of the collective at the end of the novel no longer
satisfied the critic and fellow-writer Evgeny Gerasimov:
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 453

Now we really can say that ‘the detachment is marching in step’. All these
Vanyas, Petyas, Levs, Seryozhas, Genyas, Zhoras and Tolyas are now so well-
groomed, well-combed and uniformed that children who were quite dis-
similar and truly alive at the beginning of the novel can no longer be told
apart; they are like mannequins made from the same mould. In school, you
no longer hear the babble of many voices; now they are speaking with the
same voice and about the same thing. Instead of hullabaloo, boyish tricks
and discussions, we see smiles, embraces and boys kissing one another as a
sign of reconciliation.24
In the 1940s, the no-conflict theory presented an obstacle to adven-
ture stories. Anyone who wanted to create excitement had to go back
in time or move the action abroad. In this situation, science fiction, too,
had become impossible in the Soviet Union. Writers were supposed to
keep to plausible predictions and popularise research that was actually
being carried out. Going several centuries into the future or anticipating
the conquest of space could easily be branded as a flight from reality or
‘cosmopolitanism’.
Anatoly Rybakov (1911–98) chose the early twenties as the background
to the dramatic events in his novels The Cutlass (Kortik, 1948) and The
Bronze Bird (Bronzovaya ptitsa, 1956). Rybakov was a trained transport
engineer, but, before he found his way into literature, he had also expe-
rienced exile in Siberia and the upheavals of the War. In Cutlass and The
Bronze Bird, which are linked by the same hero, there is an abundance
of everything that contemporary Soviet children’s writing in general was
lacking: resourceful youngsters overcoming dangerous villains, an exciting
plot where the chapters are cleverly interlinked, mysteries solved with the
help of codes, treasure maps in secret compartments, night-time searches,
and suspicious strangers to be shadowed. The villains are the enemies of
the Soviet state—White Guards, former landowners and kulaks, ignomini-
ously beaten by a handful of energetic kids. The treasure, which is what
the fight is ultimately about, is claimed by society.
The Komsomol leader in The Bronze Bird quotes Lenin: “Children, who
are the proletarians of the future, should help the Revolution.” Rybakov’s
young heroes follow Lenin’s exhortation not only in overcoming the oppo-
nents of the October revolution, but also in setting up Pioneer groups
and work communes for homeless children in the country. But it was the
smooth combination of ideological material with the grip of the classical

24 Evgenii Gerasimov, “Otchego geroi stanoviatsia skuchnymi?,” Novyi mir 2 (1953): 229.
454 chapter eight

adventure story that brought lasting success to The Cutlass and The Bronze
Bird. If we look for sources of inspiration, one must mention Blyakhin’s
The Little Red Devils and Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold Bug”.
Vladimir Belyaev’s (1909–90) prize-winning trilogy The Old Fortress
(Staraya krepost, 1937–51) also takes its place among the adventure nov-
els. This heavily autobiographical suite of novels portrays—once again—
“how the steel was hardened” in the battles of the Civil War, the labour
fronts of the 1920s and 1930s, and the German blockade of Leningrad dur-
ing the War. In a romanticising spirit, Belyaev follows the path of three
working-class Ukrainian youths towards political maturity. Nor does he
neglect to show how the socialist collective exercises a beneficial influ-
ence on individualistic characters. One idea behind the trilogy was to cre-
ate an epic of a whole generation, the generation that was carried along
on the revolutionary wave and chose the Bolshevik side in the battles that
ensued. The film version, premiered in 1954, was entitled Restless Youth
(Trevozhnaya molodost).
Much less eventful is Vasily Smirnov’s (1904/1905–79) The Discovery of
the World (Otkrytie mira, 1947–77). The setting is the pre-revolutionary
Russian village as seen by a peasant boy Shurka. Like Belyaev, Smirnov
was a Party member and kept strictly to the official truths. But the poetic
depiction of the child’s experiences gave the first part of the novel in par-
ticular a lasting place among Soviet children’s books. The Discovery of the
World was not intended for young people, but it came to be published
mainly for teenagers.

An unexpected turn to writing fantasy and fairy tales was made by Vitaly
Gubarev in the postwar period. After his opportunistic celebration of
Pavlik Morozov, the young informer, Gubarev had published sparsely,
working mainly as a journalist. In 1947 he started to work on a fantasy
novel, The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (Korolevstvo krivykh zerkal), even-
tually to be published in 1951 in a print run of 30,000 copies. Seen against
the prevailing political and cultural climate, both the birth and the publi-
cation of Gubarev’s magnum opus are quite unlikely events.
The novel tells the story of Olya, who goes through a mirror into a second-
ary world, the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors. Here she meets her inverted
double, Aylo, who is the personification of all Olya’s weaknesses and
vices. The negative example of Aylo helps Olya to attain self-understand-
ing and free herself from the flaws of selfishness, capriciousness, insolence
and laziness. Courage and empathy are needed as the two girls become
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 455

involved in the struggle for liberty of the oppressed people in the King-
dom of Crooked Mirrors.
The kingdom is governed by a narrow-minded tyrant named Topsed,
with a gargantuan appetite, and his cruel ministers. In the rice fields
Olya sees skinny, sick people slaving for the good of their evil rulers. The
true picture of their situation is distorted by a system of crooked mirrors,
showing a rosy picture of wealth and happiness. Olya has no problem
orientating herself in this fantasy world, as one has only to read all the
names backward to find out the true nature of its bearer, a game in which
the reader is invited to join. In the name of Truth (Pravda), Olya and Aylo
lead the revolt, crushing the lying mirrors and establishing something of
a people’s democracy.
Gubarev mixes humorous scenes, which allow Olya to demonstrate her
cleverness, with exciting adventures in subterranean passages and prison
towers. The motive of a world behind the mirror brings to mind Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, while mirrors in the service of evil are
an allusion to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” (“Sneedron-
ningen”), the Danish writer’s most popular tale in the Soviet Union. The
Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors has something of the pathos of early Soviet
science fiction, where the Soviet man (here a Pioneer girl) helps to spread
the revolutionary message beyond his home planet. There are also distinct
echoes of Yury Olesha’s Three Fat Men, the main political tale in Soviet
children’s literature.
Is The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors actually a daring, subversive alle-
gory? On one level, it alludes to a fascist dictatorship, where the will of
the working people is violently suprepressed. Then again, the crooked
mirrors, which present a blatantly false image of the people’s life, can be
seen as a comment on the Soviet system of propaganda. “Life has become
better, life has become happier”, said Stalin on the threshold of the Great
Terror. Gubarev seems to have decided to evade all such suspicions, as he
ends his novel with a eulogy to the Soviet Union. Aunt Ssendnik (‘kind-
ness’ backwards) presents their liberator Olya to the mirror people: “This
girl comes from a wonderful country, where all the people have a noble
and courageous heart!” Olya, too, holds up her native country as a model
worth following: “I cannot stay with you, dear friends, as there is no coun-
try in the whole wide world more wonderful and better than my country.”
Thus, towards the end of his book, after having Olya fearlessly fight for
the Truth, Gubarev held up yet another crooked mirror to Soviet children,
meekly participating in the official propaganda campaign.
456 chapter eight

The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors was turned into a play, a film, a ballet
and an opera, but for a number of years the book was not republished. In
histories of Soviet children’s literature the novel was always passed over in
silence, a sign of uncertainty concerning its potential message.
Gubarev’s other fantasy books are of less interest. Three on an Island
(Troe na ostrove, 1959) is openly didactic. A magic handkerchief brings
the hero to an island inhabited by pirates, but all the adventurous turns
of the plot only lead up to a simple maxim—“Now I know that the big-
gest wizard on earth is work”. In Journey to the Morning Star (Puteshest-
vie na utrennyuyu zvezdu, 1961), greedy capitalism is contrasted with
communism, all located on faraway foreign planets. The thin storyline
is repeatedly interrupted by authorial comments and explanations. The
idea behind Clock of the Centuries (Chasy vekov, 1965) was to tell readers
about mankind’s early history, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, by let-
ting a little girl travel in time, but the result is uninspiring and bleak. The
same goes for A Legend from the Historical Past (Predanie strany glubokoy,
1970), where a time machine takes the readers to Novgorod in the 8th
century and the emergence of the concept of Rus. The exclamation—“A
great, wonderful country, where people for the first time in history truly
became brothers”—was clearly intended also to be applied to the Soviet
Union.
Gubarev’s last children’s book, In a Faraway Kingdom (V tridtsat devya-
tom tsarstve, 1994), published posthumously, was an attempt to repeat
the magic formula of The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors. It is a drama of
switched identities in the style of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper,
where a Soviet girl athlete is mistaken for a princess in a fictitious Western
European country. Before being exposed, she tries to help the workers in
their struggles against their exploiters, reveals ugly turns in the political
life and the rottenness of colonial politics. The Soviet heroine returns to
her native country and her own life without actually having achieved any-
thing lasting, perhaps a sign of the times.

Humour and Laughter

It was not only the fantasy and the adventure novel that felt the pinch
in the decade after the War. There was also little room for humour in a
literary culture whose main function was to keep alive the memory of the
Great Patriotic War and to inspire children to sterling efforts in school,
factory and kolkhoz. But there were exceptions. At the 1954 Writers’
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 457

Congress, Marshak dubbed Nikolay Nosov and Yury Sotnik the two most
important names in contemporary children’s literature and characterised
them thus: while Nosov combined “humour, lyricism and the powers of
memory and observation of the everyday prose writer”, Sotnik was first
and foremost an author of short, rounded and well-plotted stories. “He
speaks not so much of individuals as of certain typical traits of children”,
said Marshak, praising Sotnik’s knowledge of children.25
Nikolay Nosov had made his debut in 1938, when the short story “The
Pranksters” (“Zateyniki”) appeared in the magazine Murzilka. Nosov came
from an artistic family in Kiev. In 1929, after studying for a short time at
an art institute in his home town, he joined the Institute of Cinematog-
raphy in Moscow. He worked in the film industry for over twenty years,
specialising in educational and animated films, and continued to make
occasional ‘guest appearances’ in the field, in connection with the later
filming of his own children’s books.
In a 1972 article Nosov himself described how he became a children’s
author:
I had always dreamed of doing something really important, and I always
regarded writing as something important—important for people and for
society. But I could not achieve my ambition because I had not yet found
my theme (this is something I understand now, but at that time I didn’t).
My theme decided itself when I found myself, to put it figuratively, in the
Enchanted Land of Childhood. This happened when I became a father and
saw childhood not through the mists of a distant past (from which I thought
I had departed once and for all), but in my immediate presence. I must con-
fess that this enchanted land took me by surprise, and, as a very wise artist
once said, surprise is at the root of creative work. In the child, I saw things
which I had not noticed before and which, it seemed to me, nobody else
had noticed, either. That’s when I wanted to show others what I had seen. I
wanted to write about children and for children.26
Then the War intervened, and it was not until 1945 that Nosov had the
opportunity to collect his early work into one volume. The book Tap,
Tap, Tap (Tuk-tuk-tuk, 1945) already included many of the stories upon
which his reputation as a writer is based. Apart from the title story, they
comprised “The Market Gardeners” (“Ogorodniki”), “Mishka’s Porridge”

25 “Rech’ S.Ia. Marshaka,” Vtoroi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 15–26 dekabria 1954
goda: Stenograficheskii otchet (M., 1956), 157.
26 Nikolai Nosov, “O sebe i o svoei rabote,” in Laureaty Rossii: Avtobiografii rossiiskikh
pisatelei (M., 1973), 277.
458 chapter eight

(“Mishkina kasha”) and “The Dreamers” (“Fantazyory”). Tap, Tap, Tap was
soon followed by a number of other collections: The Steps (Stupenki, 1946),
Happy Stories (Vesyolye rasskazy, 1947) and On the Hill (Na gorke, 1953).
From the very beginning, it was the humorous aspect, with heroes in
the early school years that Nosov made his own. Two recurring characters
in these little stories are the friends Mishka and Kolya. Their irrepressible
energy and lively imagination constantly land them in comical situations.
Nosov stays within the limits of everyday events, but the inquisitiveness
of the boys makes the simplest event into a great adventure, whether it
is cooking porridge, transporting a puppy or laying out a garden. In their
desire to manage on their own and to distinguish themselves, the boys
overestimate their own abilities and take on demanding tasks in an omi-
nously blithe spirit.
A key part of the humour in Nosov’s stories lies in the way the chil-
dren themselves innocently recount their pranks or mishaps. It is Kolya
who acts as narrator; he lacks Mishka’s self-confidence and imagination
and wants to appear the more sensible of the two, but he lets himself be
led into one unfortunate episode after another. The children in the sto-
ries are not negative figures. Nosov writes about Mishka and Kolya with
good-natured humour and a deep sympathy for their initiative and vital-
ity. Without being openly didactic, his stories urge self-reliance, courage
and honesty. The plots are dynamic, full of sudden twists and turns. The
dialogue and the use of children’s own language are generally admired.
The late 1940s saw the start of a new phase in Nosov’s writing, as he
tried his hand at longer stories, but without stinting on the humour.
Both The Happy Family (Vesyolaya semeyka, 1949) and The Diary of Kolya
Sinitsyn (Dnevnik Koli Sinitsyna, 1950) reflect the general tendency at
that time to prepare children to choose a career and enter working life.
Children’s games have been replaced by useful and enriching occupations.
In The Happy Family, Mishka and Kolya construct an incubator, in which
they manage to hatch hens’ eggs, and in The Diary of Kolya Sinitsyn, the
children spend their summer holidays bee-keeping.
After reading these stories, one could keep hens or bees oneself (and
many children were tempted to do so), but the factual material is not
the key feature. Rather, Nosov stresses the joy of creation and discov-
ery, and an emotional attitude to work. While working, children learn to
show tenacity and strength of will, and also to work together as a collec-
tive. The acquisition of knowledge always happens of the children’s own
volition. The young narrator constructs his own (often absurd) theories
on the basis of his own observations, and he is sensitively corrected by
the adults.
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 459

The introduction to The Diary of Kolya Sinitsyn is brilliant:

28 May
Today was a good day for me. School finished, and I was moved up to the
next class with the highest grades in every subject. Tomorrow, the summer
holidays begin. I intend to start a diary during the holidays. Mama says she
will give me a ball-point if I manage to write a diary. I have bought a thick
white notebook and I have decided to write down everything interesting
that happens. As soon as something interesting happens, I will note it down.
I will also write down my thoughts. Whenever I hit on some good idea, I will
write it down. Nothing interesting has happened so far today. There are no
ideas to note down either.

29 May
Nothing interesting happened today either. And no good ideas came up
either. This is probably because I played football all day with the boys in
the yard, and there was no time to think. But that doesn’t matter. I will wait
until tomorrow. Maybe something interesting will happen tomorrow.

30 May
Nothing interesting happened today either. For some reason, there are no
good ideas to note down either. I don’t know what to write about. Maybe
I should just imagine something and write it down? But that wouldn’t
be right—to make up something for a diary. If it’s a diary, it should all be
true.
In 1951, Vitya Maleev at School and at Home secured Nosov’s position as
one of the foremost Soviet children’s authors. The novel was a great suc-
cess with readers and also won a Stalin Prize in 1952. This was also the
point at which Nosov finally left the film industry to concentrate entirely
on writing.
Yury Sotnik (1914–97) undeservedly found himself overshadowed by
Nosov. The critic Benedikt Sarnov (born 1927) writes of him: “For Sotnik,
childhood is a precious gift. In his stories, he asserts, persistently, warmly
and persuasively, children’s right to be children, to be as they are—noisy,
unrestrained, incredibly energetic, always ready for the most unexpected
exploits. With easy humour, Sotnik shows that this thirst for boyish pranks
is justified, that this huge store of energy is natural and normal.”27
Sotnik’s first book appeared in 1946. The subject of the story About
Our Affairs (Pro nashi dela) was typical of its time: some children help
to rebuild their school, which has been destroyed in the War. The open-
ing, however, revealed a desire to see things through the children’s eyes.

27 B. Sarnov, “Pisatel’ Iurii Sotnik,” Pioner 6 (1964): 50.

460 chapter eight

The call to work comes not as a decree from on high, but in the form of a
mysterious message to assemble immediately.
In later stories, Sotnik showed that his sympathies were not so much
with the collective as with imaginative eccentrics, young inventors and
reckless little adventurers. Like Nosov’s heroes, these are lively children,
full of initiative, who easily misjudge their knowledge and abilities and so
get themselves into trouble. This is true, for example, of Vovka Grushin,
who builds a submarine but forgets that it is not enough to get to the
bottom of the sea, you have to be able to come up to the surface again
(“‘Arkhimed’ Vovki Grushina”, 1947); of Vasya, who fires his shotgun at
an ‘unknown bird’ that he mistakes for a condor, but which turns out
to be a glider (“Nevidannaya ptitsa”, 1950); of Lodya, who lets everyone
know that he is “a man who never suffers from nerves” and is suddenly
confronted with an untethered, vicious bull (“Chelovek bez nervov”, 1950);
or of Sergey, who has to learn to swim in ten days, if he wants to join his
friends on a Pioneer outing (“Uchitel plavaniya”, 1953). These are humor-
ous stories, without a trace of moralising.

A prominent name in nature writing was Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov (1892–

1975). He was not a newcomer to literature: he had made his debut before
the Revolution, and in the 1920s he had published a number of books for
children, both stories of his own and adaptations of Russian folk-tales.
Sokolov-Mikitov was a hunter and naturalist and had taken part in expe-
ditions in northern Russia and the Asian parts of the country.
However, it was mainly after the Second World War that he began to
publish nature sketches for children and teenagers. Some were adapta-
tions of his adult books, others were written directly for a young audi-
ence. Tales of a Hunter (Rasskazy okhotnika, 1950), Spring in the Forest
(Vesna v lesu, 1952), From Spring to Spring (Ot vesny do vesny, 1952) and
Winter in the Forest (Zima v lesu, 1955) are permeated with a great love of
life in nature. Sokolov-Mitikov’s genre is the plotless sketch. He does not
anthropomorphise the animals, but always communicates facts in a lyri-
cal tone and mellifluous language. Notable among Sokolov-Mitikov’s last
works is A Year in the Forest (God v lesu, 1972), based on his observations
of animals’ lives in different seasons.
In 1945, the Ministry of Education ran a competition for the best chil-
dren’s book. The first prize went to Mikhail Prishvin for his story The Sun’s
Larder (Kladovaya solntsa, 1945). Prishvin had taken up an old idea and
written a modern fairy tale with the action moved to the present time
and a realistically drawn background setting. Two orphaned children are
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 461

picking berries in the forest, when they come to the marshlands where
a dreaded wolf has his lair. Courage, resourcefulness and steadfastness
are the qualities that enable the children to save themselves from danger.
Prishvin uses an adult narrator, a hunter, who also expresses the deeper
meaning of the story: “The highest truth is people’s fierce centuries-old
fight for love.”

Fairy tales for the smallest children found a new forum in the annual
Fairy-Tale Films (Filmy-skazki). Behind the book, which came out for the
first time in 1950, was the state film organisation Goskino. Cartoon films
for children had experienced a renaissance in the Soviet Union after the
War and also achieved success at international festivals. Fairy-Tale Films
was intended as an anthology of film scripts, but it also benefited chil-
dren’s literature by giving many talented writers and artists the opportu-
nity to realise their ideas. After the austere black-and-white illustrations
of the Stalin years, dominated by the strictly realistic drawings of Aleksey
Pakhomov, the coloured pictures in the anthology seemed positively
extravagant.
The most important name in Fairy-Tale Films was Vladimir Suteev
(1903–64). He had been involved as early as the 1920s, when the first
Soviet cartoon films were released. After the War, Suteev started to
make his own cartoons for children, which formed the basis for a series
of much-loved picture books. Various Wheels (Raznye kolesa, 1953), Who
Said Miaow? (Kto skazal miau?, 1955) and What Kind of Bird Is That? (Ėto
chto za ptitsa?, 1956) are entertaining animal stories, while “The Snow-
man Postman” (“Snegovik-pochtovik”, 1956) is a Christmas—or rather,
New Year—story about how some children get a tree from Father Frost
in the forest, helped by the snowman and Bobik the dog.
Another artist who addressed himself to small children was Aleksey
Laptev (1905–65). His Jolly Pictures (Vesyolye kartinki, 1948) is a picture
book with poems, in which animals in human form appear in absurd situ-
ations, arranging masquerades and swapping roles among themselves.

In the Field of Poetry

Poetry did not develop in isolation during the War and the post-war years,
but also did its best to serve the objectives of the day. In some newly-
written stanzas, Sergey Mikhalkov had his Uncle Styopa called up into the
Navy to take part in the defence of Leningrad. Elizaveta Tarakhovskaya
portrayed the heroes of the War, soldiers who only yesterday were sitting
462 chapter eight

on school benches and were now risking their lives for their country. In
“The Horse” (“Kon”, 1943), she illustrated the cruel fate of animals in the
War. Zinaida Aleksandrova glorified child partisans, from the famous
Zoya to a nameless boy who joins the civil resistance movement after his
mother is deported to Germany (“Partizany”, 1944). In Elena Blaginina’s
poems, children play at war, rejoice at victories over the enemy and vow
to defend their country in the future.
The War was still present long after 1945. The long poem Zvenigorod
(1948) by Agniya Barto describes life in a children’s camp outside Moscow.
Children who have lost their parents in the War have found a new home
here. Barto portrays the war-ravaged children, whose dreams are still
haunted by bombers and ruined buildings. But the tone of Zvenigorod is
optimistic; the camp resounds with happy voices (the name Zvenigorod
means a “city of ringing sounds”). Barto also sets out to show that the chil-
dren are not forgotten, but have been lovingly taken in hand by an older
generation that can guarantee them a happy upbringing and a bright
future. There are always fresh flowers beneath the photograph of their
benefactor, Stalin. Vera Inber wrote about the will to rebuild the coun-
try in allegorical form in “Homeward, Homeward!” (“Domoy, domoy! . .”,
1945). The starlings fly away during the War, but are overcome with long-
ing to return to their Russian homeland. The poem won first prize in a
competition for the best children’s book.
In 1941, Sergey Mikhalkov began an ambitious epic poem, A True Story
for Children (Byl dlya detey), in which he set out to explain the meaning
and course of the War to the youngest readers. The first edition came out
in 1944, but Mikhalkov continued to work on his ‘true story’ for several
decades to come. Hitler wanted to “turn free men / into hungry slaves”,
but the whole country rose against the invaders and the Russians refused
to call their Russian bread ‘Brot’. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers avenged the
destruction of Stalingrad before returning as heroes to their homelands.
Mikhalkov’s A True Story for Children closes with a call to children to hon-
our war veterans and take part in the reconstruction of the country.
Mikhalkov’s development during this period makes sad reading. Traces
of his ‘happy 1930s’ can certainly be found in poems like “My Puppy”
(“Moy shchenok”), “My Street” (“Moya ulitsa”), “The Telephone” (“Telefon”)
and “Important Things” (“Vazhnye dela”), but Mikhalkov largely squan-
dered his talent on blatantly ideological and propagandistic works. He
took a prominent place in the choir singing Stalin’s praises. In 1943,
Mikhalkov wrote the words for the Soviet national anthem, and after the
War came another ‘official’ lyric—“The Song of Soviet Young Pioneers”
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 463

(“Pesnya pionerov Sovetskogo Soyuza”). His poems for children were also
increasingly filled with Party membership books and Pioneer scarves. The
patriotic Orlov family was set up as an ideal in “I Serve the Soviet Union”
(“Sluzhu Sovetskomu Soyuzu”).
It is surprising to see how blithely Mikhalkov disregarded the need to
tailor his political poems to the readership. The heavy and propagandistic
‘history lesson’ A Conversation with My Son (Razgovor s synom, 1949) com-
pletely ignores children’s experience and language. The lofty introduction—
“My son! Listen to my story / about our country and about us”—is most
reminiscent of the rhetorical writing of the 18th century. In his famous
epic poem “In the Lenin Museum” (“V muzee Lenina”, 1949), two children
take a tour of the great brick building on Red Square, but the attempt to
see the museum through children’s eyes and to convey children’s voices
is not convincing. Mikhalkov tells of Lenin’s life in abstract language, and
it is the adult author rather than the children who is duly moved by the
sight of the items on display: “How dear is every object / preserved behind
glass! / Objects that were warmed / by his warm hand.” Stalin is glorified
as the defender of Lenin’s legacy in lines that abruptly disappeared after
Khrushchev’s showdown with Stalinism in 1956.
After the War, Samuil Marshak mainly wrote poetry for adults and
worked on translations. He only wrote sporadically for children, mostly
favouring larger formats—epic poems and lyrical verse cycles. The two
epic poems A True Story-Fantasy (Byl-nebylitsa, 1947) and The Ice Island
(Ledyanoy ostrov, 1947) represent socialist realism for older children. In
the first, an elderly man tells an astonished crowd of children about Mos-
cow’s capitalist past. His life story, which includes starvation, humiliation,
hard work and lack of educational possibilities, is a perfect model of the
Soviet mythology of a pre-revolutionary Russian anti-childhood. Before
1917, the house on Arbat Street, where these Soviet citizens seek tempo-
rary shelter from the rain, was the property of one single person, Adelaida
Khitrovo (the last name means ‘cunning’ in English). The October Revolu-
tion swept away not only Madame Khitrovo, but also all social injustice,
including the maltreatment of children. In Marshak’s works the roles have
now changed. While the American capitalist in Who Is He? failed to under-
stand that a house could be collectively owned, now, fifteen years later,
the Soviet children have trouble in coping with the fact that one person
alone could be the owner of a big house. Where Mr Smith asked who
Mr Komsomol was, the Soviet children of 1947 take the name Khitrovo for
an institution. The reality of yesterday seems like a fantasy, a nightmare,
which is now being dispersed, just like the heavy storm that passes over
464 chapter eight

Moscow. The old man’s recollections bring about catharsis in the chil-
dren, strengthening in them the feeling of the finality of their reality.
In The Ice Island Marshak added to his earlier heroic figures, the post-
man, the fireman and the worker, another peace-time ideal, that is, the
doctor. The postulate behind the epic poem is that, while in past times
people had to confine themselves to fairy tales and legends, Soviet reality
produces factual stories of astonishing quality. To save an injured scientist
at a polar station, a doctor performs a risky trick, when, in a heavy storm,
he is dropped from a helicopter using a parachute. As he struggles for his
life in the icy ocean, he cannot let go of his parachute, as it is State prop-
erty (a grim, probably unintentional reminder of the primacy of the Soviet
state to its citizens). The young doctor triumphs over the elements and
rescues his patient from death, but he is not given the ultimate honour.
In 1947 it was obligatory to depict Stalin as the driving force behind every
action, and Marshak stuck to the rule:
For this it was worth jumping from high above
Into the gray ocean, on the jagged ice,
On the snow between the dark thawed patches,
To where you are sent to help a comrade,
In the name of the fatherland, by Stalin.
The poems in A Book of Many Colours (Raznotsvetnaya kniga, 1947) are
based around the six primary colours. Green is the colour of summer,
blue of the sea, yellow of the sand and white of the snow. Thus far, Mar-
shak presents the beauty of nature, but the cycle concludes with a Soviet
creed. Red is symbolised by Red Square, while black—the colour of night
and of reaction—is lit up by the red ruby in the Kremlin tower. Marshak
employed the same form of composition in All the Year Round (Krugly
god, 1948), where the twelve months do not just inspire a ‘nature diary’,
but also poems that point up Soviet holidays and underline Moscow’s
status as the absolute centre.
Marshak’s last significant work for children was A Happy Journey from
A to Z (Vesyoloe puteshestvie ot A do Ya, 1953). Like Boris Zhitkov’s What
I Saw, this describes a train journey, with the letters representing the sta-
tions. On his journey through the alphabet, the young traveller picks up
the basics of working life and technology, geography, the world of animals,
life in the city and the country, and Russian grammar. Marshak speaks in
the name of children, using a first-person-plural point of view, but, in spite
of its title, the trip provides little if any childlike humour and fantasies.
The symbolic dimension of the work is that the ability to read opens up a
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 465

world of learning and brings the child a step closer to the world of adults.
At the end of the journey the innocent little traveller is exposed to the
true meaning of the process of learning: “Then Lenin and Stalin will talk to
you as to a friend.” When this line was cut in the ensuing editions with no
new political direction given, it put Soviet children in the same position as
the absent-minded fellow in Marshak’s famous, early poem, forever stuck
in his forgotten, immobile train carriage.
Patriotism occupies a central position in Agniya Barto’s poems for
children from the post-war years. The 800th anniversary of Moscow was
the occasion for the narrative poem I Live in Moscow (Ya zhivu v Moskve,
1947). Nine-year-old Petya comes to know his hometown, his school, the
telegraph office, the metro, the sports ground and so on. He learns useful
things, like the fact that it is Mossoviet (the city authority) that looks after
construction work, sanitation and electricity in Moscow. At the same time,
there is an emphasis on the legacy of the War, with all its obligations. The
heroic ideal is embodied by Petya’s brother, who is a soldier; at an exhibi-
tion of trophies of war, Petya proudly points out the German tank that his
brother blew up at Stalingrad. Even the boys’ games are militaristic; Petya
dramatises his route to school by pretending to be a partisan charged with
defying the snowstorm to bring important documents to the school build-
ing. The book ends with a euphoric May Day parade. To the tones of the
Spassky Bell, the children hand flowers to Stalin: “And everywhere / all
over the world / you can hear / the sound of the Kremlin bells.”
Young Lyonya’s problem in “He is 14 Years Old” (“Emu 14 let”, 1949) is
that he has not had the opportunity to die a hero’s death of the kind the
War veterans tell of at school. The poem shows that it is still possible to
achieve great feats in small everyday things. Lyonya makes his contribu-
tion to the mother country by overcoming his fear, protecting his little
brother and standing loyally at his classmates’ side.
Barto’s poetic programme can be inferred from the speeches she gave
to Soviet Writers’ Congresses, from the first in 1934 to the seventh in 1976.
Towards the end of her life, this once contentious writer could easily be
seen as just another self-righteous Soviet cultural bureaucrat, conscien-
tiously stressing how children’s literature should be an ideological weapon
for socialist education. Even so, Barto never abandoned her high literary
standards. In 1952, she gave her views on the question of what features
were specific to children’s literature:
Above all, the thoughts and imagery in children’s books must be particularly
clear and concrete, and the language must be crystal-clear and precise. One
466 chapter eight

of the most important features is the need to take account of the children’s
age. You cannot get away from this! If the author does not properly under-
stand the different periods of childhood, the book will miss its target. But
“the child grows every day. The book he or she read today and the same
book read a few days later will find a fundamentally different reader and dif-
ferent ways of reading”, as Makarenko says. He considers that books should
not slavishly follow the demands of a given age, but constitute a step for-
ward, leading the child to heights it has not reached before. Makarenko said
that a book that is only interesting to a specific, precise age is always a weak
book. This view is shared by many authors and teachers.28
Elena Blaginina’s best-known poem from the post-war years is “Alyo-
nushka” (1953), a kind of lullaby, painting a tender picture of the little
child’s world. In the last verse, the socialisation process starts, as Alyo-
nushka takes part in the May Day demonstration, sitting on her father’s
arm with a red flag in her hand. The verbal playfulness of the poem bears
witness to the influence of Russian folklore and Chukovsky’s verse tales.
This period also saw the birth of many rhyming riddles, counting songs,
teasing lyrics and tongue-twisters.
Zinaida Aleksandrova also remained faithful to the world of children.
Her collection In Our Flat (U nas v kvartire, 1949) contains poems about
children in a communal flat. They run down the corridor, play school, feed
birds and celebrate their birthdays. The high point of their year is the New
Year party with a shared tree. Aleksandrova also dealt with the subject of
work. In the poem “The Sarafan” (“Sarafanchik”, 1948), she describes the
labour that has gone into little Tania’s skirt. The whole process is there,
from growing the cotton on a kolkhoz in Uzbekistan to designing the pat-
tern in Moscow.
“Who Built This House?” asked Sergey Baruzdin in his first book (Kto
postroil ėtot dom?, 1950). In realistic and matter-of-fact poems, he fol-
lowed the building work from the architect’s drawing board to the last
stroke of the painter’s brush. Baruzdin celebrated their professional skill,
while giving children their first insight into different jobs.
The ‘wonders’ created by work also interested Elizaveta Tarakhovskaya.
In The Tale of the Living Water (Skazka pro zhivuyu vodu), people man-
age to plant a forest in the steppe, a harvester moves across the field, an
excavator digs a reservoir in the middle of a dry plain. Children who have
lived in a world of fairy tales come to understand the power of the Soviet

28 Agniia Barto, “Smeshnoe i ser’eznoe: Zametki o detskoi literature,” Sobranie sochinenii

v 4 tomakh. Vol. 4 (M., 1984), 225–226.
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 467

worker and the five-year plan. The refrain sounds a victorious note: “What
was once just a fairy tale / that could only be seen in dreams, / we have
achieved by our labour / in our Stalin country!” Let’s Look at the Exhibition
(Posmotrim vystavku, 1957) contains humorous poems about the experi-
ences of some children at the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in
Moscow.

There was no innovation to speak of in the poetry of the post-war years.

The period was dominated by older, well-known names, authors who had
started out in the 1920s and 1930s. The most significant new names were
Evgeniya Trutneva, Natalya Konchalovskaya and Rakhil Baumvol.
Evgeniya Trutneva (1884–1959) started late. Before writing poems of
her own, she had worked as a librarian and produced plays for a puppet
theatre. Her first collection, The Gift (Podarok, 1940), introduced a new
setting into Russian poetry for children, namely the Urals and their natu-
ral environment. Trutneva remained true to her home district: most of
her fifty and more little books were published in either Perm or Sverd-
lovsk. During the War, many children were evacuated to these areas, and
several of Trutneva’s poems describe the warm reception they received.
The whole country was home to Soviet children at that time. Other key
themes for Trutneva are children’s joie-de-vivre, the seasons and nature,
professional skills and Soviet patriotism.
Natalya Konchalovskaya (1903–88) came from artistic stock on both
sides. Her father, Pyotr Konchalovsky, was a famous sculptor, and her
maternal grandfather, Vasily Surikov, was one of the foremost painters
of the 19th century. Konchalovskaya herself was married to Sergey
Mikhalkov. She began her literary career by translating English poetry in
the late 1930s, and in the war years she published a number of books of
poetry that reflected the influence of Russian folk traditions.
Konchalovskaya achieved fame with the trilogy Our Ancient Capital
(Nasha drevnyaya stolitsa, 1947–53). In 1947, Moscow celebrated 800 years
of its existence, an event that also made its mark on children’s literature.
Konchalovskaya’s long narrative poem was an overview of Moscow’s his-
tory, from the foundation of the city in 1147 to the execution of the rebel
Stenka Razin in Red Square in 1671. Our Ancient Capital is regarded as the
first successful attempt to treat historical material in verse form for the
youngest schoolchildren.
In Our Ancient Capital, Konchalovskaya combines a militant patrio-
tism with a cry for peace. The last stanza opens up a dizzying view of the
future:
468 chapter eight

All the people of the world,

those who do not want war,
look towards Moscow,
the bulwark of peace among men.
Here is the hope of the whole universe.
Hope for those who live in slavery,
for a united, indestructible world,
for brotherhood on Earth.
Another welcome contribution to Russian poetry for children came from
Rakhil Baumvol (Rokhl Boymvol, 1914–2000). In the 1930s, she had pub-
lished poems for adults in Yiddish, but after the War she turned to writ-
ing stories and poems for children in Russian. The obvious reason was
that literature written in Yiddish no longer was to be published in the
Soviet Union. The focus of Baumvol’s writing is clear from titles like A
Doll Takes a Ride (Kukla edet, 1948). Her most popular book was the prose
tale The Blue Mitten (Sinyaya varezhka, 1955), based on the folk heritage,
while Face Towards the Sun (Litsom k solntsu, 1969), a volume of fairy
tales, included in the series My First Little Book (Moya pervaya knizhka),
even reached an edition of 1.75 million copies.

The Conference of 1952

In April 1952, 350 Soviet children’s authors and critics assembled for an
All-Union Conference on Children’s Literature in Moscow. On the surface
a feeling of self-satisfaction dominated proceedings: “We have the best
children’s theatre in the world”, said Valentin Kataev, hastily adding that
it could become even better with the help of the Party and the whole of
society.29 In his survey of poetry for small children, the writer Nikolay
Gribachov (1910–92) stated that the success of Soviet children’s literature
was beyond dispute and that the reason was that it had followed the path
staked out by the Party and had honestly served the people.30
The statistics presented at the conference gave occasion for pride. Since
the October Revolution, about 40,000 books for children and young peo-
ple had been published, totalling one billion and six million copies. The
number of titles published in the year before the conference (1951) was

29 Vl. Kataev, “O dramaturgii dlia detei,” in Sovetskaia detskaia literatura: Sbornik statei
(М.-L, 1953), 139.
30 Nikolai Gribachev, “O stikhakh dlia detei,” Oktiabr’ 7 (1952): 173.
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 469

1,822. To these could be added ten or more magazines and regular anthol-
ogies. The main magazines were Murzilka for the little ones, and Pioneer,
United Kids (Druzhnye rebyata) and The Entertainer (Zateynik, 1946–53)
for school-age children, along with the anthologies For Children (Detyam)
and Friendship (Druzhba). Altogether, there were around 250 professional
children’s writers, of whom about 100 lived in Moscow.
In the years after the Second World War, the principles of socialist real-
ism had been successfully implemented in children’s literature, with all
that meant for the triumph of mediocrity and the obligatory idealisation
and optimism. So when people at the congress—in the name of social-
ist realism—expressed their dissatisfaction with certain phenomena in
contemporary literature, this had an inevitable tinge of pseudo-criticism.
Literary critics were urged to combat any kind of concealment, any kind
of syropy descriptions of life. Children should be shown the diversity of
life and not be raised like exotic plants. In an article in Pravda on the eve
of the conference, Stalin was eulogised as the ultimate champion of truth:
“Write the truth, Stalin teaches our writer.”31 What did not need to need
to be said was that the ‘truth’ and ‘true reality’ were, of course, the truth
and the reality that the Party acknowledged as such.
Aleksey Surkov (1899–1983), the First Secretary of the Writers’ Union,
also delivered what seemed like stern criticism. In the keynote speech to
the conference, he urged writers to give up any kind of formula and “to
go out into real life”.32 They too often restricted themselves to the kinder-
garten, the school or the college, and isolated their heroes from life outside
these establishments. Again and again, school novels gave their readers
the ‘conflict’ between the gifted boy or girl—the ‘individualist’—and the
sensible but dull and faceless collective, with the inevitable re-education
of the ‘individualist’ in the last chapter.
The criticism was most often directed at drama. Kataev, who had the
task of surveying drama for children, observed that, although almost all
the good plays had come out since the War, the genre was still in crisis.
One reason was writers’ fear of painting negative portraits, because they
could easily be criticised as not ‘typical’.33 Kataev seemed luckily unaware
that this was an inevitable result of the dictatorship of socialist realism.

31 “Preodolet’ otstavanie dramaturgii,” Pravda. April 7, 1952, 2.

32 А. Surkov, “Za bol’shuiu literaturu dlia detei i iunoshestva,” Literaturnaia gazeta 46
(1952): 2.
33 Valentin Kataev, “O detskoi dramaturgii,” Literaturnaia gazeta 47 (1952): 2.
470 chapter eight

Another consequence was cited by Sergey Mikhalkov in his speech about

literature for small children: an editor had felt that “The Black Sea” was too
sombre a title for a children’s book and wanted to change it to “The Blue
Sea”.34 In such conditions, the need for humorous books was bound to
remain unsatisfied—despite the shining exception of Nikolay Nosov and
Yury Sotnik. Authors did not want to risk coming across as light-hearted
entertainers in a country that claimed to realise mankind’s profoundest
dreams.
It was not only humorous books that the conference wanted to see.
People also called for plays about working class and kolkhoz children,
more interesting history and geography textbooks written by writers’ col-
lectives, novels that did not just show Young Pioneers relaxing and going
on trips, but also described how the children’s organisation shaped young
people ideologically. “Millions of Pioneers and schoolchildren expect lit-
erature to portray the Pioneer as a positive hero, a keen patriot and a
true young Leninist, and to give a broad and clear picture of all the teem-
ing activity of the Pioneer organization”, said Natalya Ilina from Pioneer
magazine.35 Many speakers, including Samuil Marshak, criticised the lack
of good biographies of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. However, the situ-
ation was not entirely bleak, commented Mikhalkov, who was pleased to
note that an anthology of poems for children about Lenin and Stalin had
come out in 1951.36
The summary of the discussion showed that it was still too early to
expect more profound changes: the task facing Soviet children’s litera-
ture was to celebrate the heroism of Soviet man and the beauty of labour
and to reflect the struggle for ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’ going on out in the
world under Soviet guidance.

One major name was absent from the 1952 conference, the poet Lev Kvitko.
His last Russian poetry book, To My Friends (Moim druzyam, 1948), had
shown that, at his best, he could still combine a firm communist convic-
tion with high literary standards. Another volume from the same year,
The Fiddle (Skripochka), with poems for pre-school children, covered the
whole repertoire from exuberant joie-de-vivre to Soviet patriotism. The
poem ‘The Harvest’ (‘Urozhay’), translated into Russian by Marshak,

34 S. Mikhalkov, “Literatura dlia malenkikh”, Literaturnaia gazeta 48 (1952): 2.

35 N. Il’ina, “Bol’she khoroshikh knig o pionerakh,” Literaturnaia gazeta 47 (1952): 2.
36 S. Mikhalkov, Literaturnaia gazeta 48 (1952): 2.
 wise leadership and the fatherly care of comrade stalin 471

supported the myth of the socialist Soviet surplus. It contains lines like
“People load onto trucks / and drive from district to district / a record
harvest / for free people.”
Kvitko was absent from the conference because he had been arrested
a year earlier. The Soviet campaign against those ‘rootless cosmopolitans’,
the Jews, had begun, and in August 1952, Kvitko was executed, along with
26 other Jewish writers and artists. This was the same writer of whom a
later Soviet commentator said, “The people and labour, the motherland
and the Party were sacred ideas for the poet. All his writing was perme-
ated with faith in the victory of Communism, and whatever he wrote
about, his eyes were turned to the future.”37 Kvitko himself, at a writers’
meeting in 1937, stated that “only the Great October revolution liberated
me and gave me the possibility to become a writer”.38
Nobody asked after Kvitko at the conference. Instead, they applauded
Marshak’s proposal that the Politburo, with Stalin at its head, should be
elected to the honorary presidency of the conference. Surkov urged his
colleagues to express their gratitude: “Our children’s literature owes all
its success to the wise leadership of our great Bolshevik Party and the
fatherly care and trust shown by the brilliant architect of Communism,
the best friend of Soviet literature, Comrade Stalin.”39

37 S. Mikhalkov, “Lev Kvitko (1890–1952),” in L. Kvitko, Moim druz’iam: Stikhi (M., 1987), 4.
38 “Pisatel’ o sebe: Lev Moiseevich Kvitko,” Detskaia literatura 21 (1937): 67.
39 A. Surkov, “Za bol’shuiu literaturu dlia detei i iunoshestva,” Literaturnaia gazeta 46
(1952): 2.
 chapter nine

Thaw in the World of Children (1954–1968)

In April 1953 Stalin died. All over the Soviet Union, people mourned their
departed leader, and children’s authors filled the pages of newspapers and
magazines with eulogies. “In the whole world, children had not / such a
close and dear friend”, wrote Anatoly Moshkovsky in his poem “The immor-
tal name” (“Bessmertnoe imya”, 1953),1 and Valentina Oseeva, the author
of the Vasyok Trubachov trilogy, affirmed in her obituary for “The Great
Friend of Children” that children had returned Stalin’s feelings “with a
warm and genuine love”.2
Three years later, in 1956, the new Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev,
made a speech to the Twentieth Party Congress that contained the first
public disclosures on the millions of innocent victims of the Stalin years.
No Soviet citizen could have been ignorant of the arrests, the executions,
and the existence of a huge system of prison camps, but these horrors
were now unambiguously linked to yesterday’s deity, Stalin. It was a new
page in the history of the Soviet Union.
In cultural life this was the start of a period of revaluation and fresh
thinking, which took its name from a significant novel by Ilya Ehrenburg,
The Thaw (Ottepel, 1954–56). There was a break from the rigid inter-
pretation of socialist realism that had characterised the Stalin era, and
greater scope for individual characterization and social criticism. In some
respects, the period was reminiscent of the 1920s: there was something
of the same enthusiasm and optimism, the same feeling of transforming
everything from the ground up.
One can also speak of a ‘thaw’ in Soviet children’s literature, although it
was expressed in much less spectacular ways than in adult literature. There
were no sensational works to compare with Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by
Bread Alone (Ne khlebom edinym, 1956) or Boris Pasternak’s banned Dok-
tor Zhivago (1957). The coming to terms with the lawlessness and injus-
tices of the Stalin era left children’s literature practically untouched; there
was no Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for younger readers. The closest was Nina

1 Druzhnye rebiata 4 (1953): 6.

2 Druzhnye rebiata 4 (1953): 11.
 thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 473

Kosterina’s Diary (Dnevnik Niny Kosterinoy, 1962), an authentic teenage

diary covering the years 1936–41, in which Nina (1921–41) writes about
school and leisure time, first love and life with her friends in Moscow.
Everything changes when the wave of terror touches her own family, and
her father’s arrest makes her the ‘child of an enemy of the people’, a pariah
class in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The diary could have been important read-
ing for young people, but it was originally published in the adult magazine
Novy mir and subsequently ‘forgotten’ in the Brezhnev era.
The Thaw years saw the emergence of a new generation of writers with
their own aesthetic vision and literary programme. Children’s literature
opened out in terms of subject matter and style. In prose, there was a
break with well-tried models and conventions, allowing writers to give a
psychologically sharper portrayal and a darker but often more plausible
picture of the conditions in which Soviet children grew up. Poetry, mean-
while, offered unique opportunities for experimentation, as it had in the
1920s. It was again opened up to children’s experience of the world, their
fantasies and word games.

Windows Opened Up

After decades of enforced but self-satisfied isolation, a window was slightly

opened to the outside world. Some new foreign writers were introduced,
while some long-since forgotten names of importance were ‘rehabilitated’
through new translations. The best qualities for a foreign writer hoping
for an introduction to the Soviet book market were to have a revolution-
ary background and to be a Communist and a friend of the Soviet Union.
The Italian Gianni Rodari was the perfect case, as he had joined the Ital-
ian Communist Party in 1944, participated in the Italian resistance move-
ment and fulfilled his long-cherished dream of a visit to the USSR in 1952.
Rodari’s poems, both nonsense and agitational verse, were swiftly trans-
lated into Russian by Marshak. In an essay, the Soviet maestro explained
his fondness for his Italian colleague: “Only those who live close to the
people and speak its language can write poems which are worthy of being
placed side by side with folk songs and counting-out rhymes. To my mind,
Gianni Rodari is such a poet. In his poems I can hear the ringing voices of
children playing in the streets of Rome, Bologna and Naples.”3

3 Samuil Marshak, “Stikhi Dzhanni Rodari,” Literaturnaia gazeta 141 (1952): 1.

474 chapter nine

The favourite among Russian children was Rodari’s fairy-tale novel Le

avventure di Cipollini (1951, Priklyucheniya Chipollino), translated under
the editorial supervision of Marshak in 1953. By the end of the century the
book had reached around sixty editions in Russia, with the total number
of copies reaching several million. To this astonishing number must be
added all the performances of the many stage versions, the cartoon (1961),
the ballet (1973), and the musical film (1973). Part of the initial success
belongs to the illustrations by the children’s writer and artist Vladimir
Suteev.
Chipollino is an ever cheerful little onion, who leads the struggle for free-
dom against Prince Lemon, Lord Tomato and their crew. In the fairytale
world of vegetables, fruits, insects and animals, injustice reigns: honest
‘people’ are detained, while the degenerate upper classes live on the work
of the poor. A successful revolution drives the aristocrats away, or forces
them to taste the life conditions of the underprivileged. Baron Orange’s
fate is to grow “thin as a whip”, аn improbable but fanciful image. The uto-
pia presented to the child-reader at the end of the book is the Countess
Cherry’s family castle being turned into a Children’s Palace with a cinema,
a puppet theatre, and rooms for drawing and sports. The main attraction
is, however, the founding of a school, as learning is needed for future con-
flicts and struggles against all the cheats, oppressors and scoundrels that
still thrive all over the world.
Another communist pro-Soviet writer was Julian Tuwim, a Jewish-
Polish poet. Tuwim’s best poems for children, such as “O panu Tralalińskim”
(“Pro pana Trulyalinskogo”), “Słoń Trąbalski” (“Slon Khobotovsky”), “Ptasie
radio” (“Ptiche radio”) and “Lokomotywa” (“Parovoz”), were all written in
the 1930s, but they only found their way into Soviet literature during the
Thaw. Mayakovsky, during his visit to Warsaw in 1927, is said to have urged
Tuwim, his Polish translator, to write children’s poetry.4 Almost all the
big names in contemporary Russian poetry were involved in translating
the Pole’s folk poetry-inspired, joyful verses with their neologisms, catch-
phrases and word play. The list of Tuwim’s translators includes Marshak,
Mikhalkov, Blaginina, Tarakhovskaya, Boris Zakhoder and Ėmma Mosh­
kovskaya. Thanks to them and Tuwim, the theme of eccentricity was
again introduced into Soviet Russian poetry.

4 “Stikhi detiam: Detskie klassiki: Iulian Tuvim,” accessed March 15, 2013, http//:stihide
tyam.ru/child_classics/tuvim_y.php.
 thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 475

As a result of the Thaw, even children’s books devoid of any ‘progres-

sive tendency’ were now published in Russian translation. Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince (1943), with its satirical attitude toward
the adult world, appeared in 1958. Other new acquaintances for young
Russian readers were A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926; Vinni-Pukh i vse
ostalnye) and Pamela L. Travers’ Mary Poppins (1934), both translated by
the eminent poet Boris Zakhoder in 1960 and 1968, respectively. 1968 also
saw Nina Demurova’s (born 1930) new translation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter
Pan. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland had been translated by Aleksandr
Olenich-Gnenenko (1893–1963) as Alisa v strane chudes in 1940 and pub-
lished only in the translator’s hometown Rostov-on-Don (since Moscow
publishers would never have accepted Carroll’s absurdism then), but now
two new translations saw the light of day—one by Demurova in 1967, and
another, rather a retelling of Carroll’s book, by Zakhoder in 1972. Vladi-
mir Nabokov’s 1923 translation could not yet be published in the USSR,
as most Russian émigré literature was still banned. It finally came out in
1989, sanctioned by Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost.
The reception of Astrid Lindgren’s work in the Soviet Union affords
some surprises. Of all the Swede’s works—and many of them were trans-
lated into Russian in the 1960s—the two most popular, beyond all com-
parison, were the trilogy Karlson på taket (1955–68; Malysh i Karlsson,
kotory zhivyot na kryshe), the first volume of which was translated, or,
rather, adapted, in 1957, only two years after the original, and Pippi Lång-
strump (1945; Peppi Dlinnyychulok, 1968). The bizarre character of Karls-
son-on-the-Roof was, in the apt words of the Moscow critic Olga Myaėots,
“the first positive hero in [Soviet] children’s literature with a complete set
of negative traits”.5 More suitable for children to identify with was Lille-
bror (Malysh), the loner who flees into a fantasy world, where he meets
a magic make-believe friend. Still, Karlsson with his total, unabashed
egotism must have been a fascinating figure for those living in a strictly
regimented world with lofty official ideals. The same goes for the fiercely
independent Pippi Longstocking, another unlikely Soviet favourite. Pro-
fessor Maria Nikolajeva finds the explanation for the tremendous Soviet
success of Pippi Långstrump in its subversive questioning of power. In
the Soviet context, Pippi was a dissident, living out all that children (and

5 Ol’ga Miaėots, “Astrid Lindgren v strane bol’shevikov,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 1

(2002), accessed March 15, 2013, http://magazines.russ.ru:81/nz/2002/21/miae.html.
476 chapter nine

grown-ups, too, for that matter) only dared to dream about.6 Pippi also
came to life in numerous plays, musicals and cartoons. Astrid Lindgren’s
collected works were published in Russian translation in 1994 and 1998.
The renowned Finnish children’s writer Tove Jansson was a more dif-
ficult case. The translation of her Mumintrollet och kometen (1951, Mumi-
Troll i kometa), written in Swedish, came out in 1967 in 75,000 copies, but
the next book to be translated, Trollkarlens hatt (1949, Shlyapa volsheb-
nika), appeared only in 1976. Included in an anthology of Scandinavian
children’s literature, this translation was not easy to obtain. Rumour has it
that prospective buyers had to hand in twenty kilos of waste paper to get
a coupon that gave them the right to buy the book. Eventually, glasnost
and perestroika were required before Jansson and her Mumi-Trolls could
finally conquer the Russian bookstores.

During the Thaw, contact was re-established with the splendours of Rus-
sian culture from the first three decades of the century. For readers of
children’s literature, as well as for the new generation of writers, the renais-
sance of authors from the 1920s was a major event. Korney Chukovsky
found fresh recognition as the great figure of Russian children’s poetry.
There were also the beginnings of a cautious rehabilitation of the Oberiuts
and their friends. A central role in this return was played by Chukovsky’s
daughter, Lidiya Chukovskaya (1907–96), who in the 1930s had worked in
Marshak’s editorial team at Detgiz in Leningrad. In her book In the Labo-
ratory of an Editor (V laboratorii redaktora, 1960) she recalled that difficult
period, bringing to life many by then forcibly forgotten names. Chukov-
skaya was also responsible for the first individual editions of Vvedensky
and Kharms after the untimely deaths of these authors: When I Grow Up
(Kogda ya vyrastu bolshoy, 1960) and The Game (Igra, 1962), respectively.
A more comprehensive volume with texts by Kharms came out in 1967,
entitled What Was That? (Chto ėto bylo?). Isay Rakhtanov (1907–79),
a children’s writer from the 1930s, told the story of the two magazines,
The Hedgehog and The Siskin and their writers in 1962,7 and two years
later Igor Bakhterev (1908–66), one of the initial Oberiuts, and Aleksandr
Razumovsky published a critical article on Nikolay Oleynikov.8 Taken

6 Maria Nikolajeva, Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic (New
York and London: Garland, 1996), 40–41.
7 I. Rakhtanov, “‘Ezh’ i ‘Chizh’,” in Detskaia literatura 1962 g. Vyp. 2 (M., 1962), 128–159.
8 I. Bakhterev and A.V. Razumovskii, “O Nikolae Oleinikove,” in Den’ poezii (L., 1964),
154–160.
 thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 477

together, these were the beginning of a revival of the humour and play-
fulness that Chukovsky had always regarded as key features of children’s
literature.
It was not just the genuine avant-garde that had fallen into an artifi-
cially induced oblivion during the Stalin years. Lidiya Chukovskaya was
also instrumental in returning Boris Zhitkov to the prominent place that
he deserved within children’s prose-writing. Lev Kvitko’s good name was
also restored; five years after his execution, a substantial collection of
poems appeared under the title I Myself (Ya sam, 1957).

The small but influential volume The Game by Daniil Kharms was pub-
lished in Moscow by Detsky mir (Children’s World). During a five-year
period following its foundation, this publishing house stood for the
publication of practically all the important names in the new poetry for
children. Detsky mir employed a number of gifted artists as illustrators,
including Vitaly Pivovarov and Ilya Kabakov, who also harked back to
the interrupted tradition of the 1920s. Detsky mir also produced puzzle
books, painting books, pop-up books and books with added gramophone
records. The firm’s director and inspiration, Yury Timofeev (1923–82), was
to make an impact on children’s literature that can only be compared
with Marshak’s activities between the wars. Like Marshak, Timofeev was
an outstanding talent-spotter.
People had long been aware that the Detgiz publishing house alone
could not meet the demand for literature for children and young people.
It was therefore noted with pleasure that, along with Detsky mir, a large
‘adult publisher’, Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia), was starting to take
an interest in the genre and had set up a children’s section. Among the
magazines, Murzilka and Pioneer still held their own, but United Children
(Druzhnye rebyata) and Entertainer (Zateynik) closed down in 1953. The
youngest children were given a new and entertaining magazine in 1956
called Jolly Pictures (Vesyolye kartinki). As the title suggests, the magazine
gave pride of place to pictures, and the artist and children’s-book illustra-
tor Ivan Semyonov (1906–82) was chosen as editor-in-chief. At the begin-
ning of the 1980s the circulation was 9.5 million copies. Afterwards, the
editorial board of Jolly Pictures took pride in having been the only Soviet
publication that evaded censorship and refrained from publishing infor-
mation about changes at the top of the Communist Party. The editorial
board also refrained from publishing Brezhnev’s portrait upon his death.9

9 “Brezhnev i ‘Veselye kartinki’,” (May 5, 2010), accessed March 15, 2013, http://yaxon-
toviy.livejournal.com/6349.html.
478 chapter nine

Another magazine that started to appear again after a ten-year break

was The Bonfire (Kostyor, 1956– ), aimed at younger juveniles. In 1962 the
magazine opened its pages to Joseph Brodsky (1940–96). His debut poem
“The Ballad of the Little Tug” (“Ballada o malenkom buksire”) has an alle-
gorical connotation, as the little boat tells of its meeting with ships from
faraway countries. Its job is to care for them during their stay on the Neva
River, but it cannot follow them as they leave. Beyond its range there is a
big world, but the tug must content itself with the thought that Leningrad
is the place where it is needed. The Bonfire also published other samizdat
writers, like the renowned Sergey Dovlatov (1941–90). The poet Lev Loseff
(1937–2009) was a member of the editorial board of the magazine, right
up to his emigration in 1976.
Adolescents also received their own literary magazine, Youth (Yunost,
1955– ). It was originally intended for readers aged 15 to 20, but in the
1960s it lost some of its specifically teenage character, becoming one of
the main strongholds of liberal writing. The first editor-in-chief of Youth
was Valentin Kataev, succeeded in 1962 by Boris Polevoy, and for many
years the editorial board included Marshak, Nosov and Prilezhaeva. Apart
from Youth, other magazines such as New World (Novy mir), The Banner
(Znamya) and The Star (Zvezda) also opened their pages to writing for
young readers on an occasional basis.
Conditions also improved for the theoretical study of children’s liter-
ature. An important event had taken place in 1950, when the Moscow
publishers Detgiz launched a research institute, the House of Children’s
Books (Dom detskoy knigi), with a branch in Leningrad. The aims of the
institute included promoting research into children’s literature, running
reader surveys, organising seminars and maintaining a specialised library.
For a long time, every book published by Detgiz, later Detskaya literatura,
contained a call to children to send in their views to the House of Chil-
dren’s Books, commenting on what they had read. The number of readers’
letters ran to several thousand a year. One of the visible events in which
the House of Children’s Books took an active role was the annual Chil-
dren’s Book Week.
The House of Children’s Books also started publishing annual antholo-
gies of articles on literary history, criticism and theory: Questions of Chil-
dren’s Literature (Voprosy detskoy literatury, 1952–58), later renamed
Children’s Literature (Detskaya literatura, 1958–90), in Moscow and About
Literature for Children (O literature dlya detey, 1955–91) in Leningrad.
These were complemented by the theoretical magazine Children’s Litera-
ture (Detskaya literatura), which reappeared in 1966 after a twenty-five
year break.
 thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 479

Writers’ Congresses

In December 1954, the Writers’ Union held its second congress. Two decades
had passed since Soviet writers, led by Gorky, had assembled for their pre-
vious congress, another indicator of how the most elementary forms of
democracy had lapsed under Stalin. The congresses now became a regular
feature of literary life, although their significance as a forum for debate
remained small. More important than criticism and self-examination
was the emphasis on loyalty to the Party and Communist ideals, and a glo-
rification of their own achievements, preferably contrasted with the situa-
tion in capitalist countries. The choice of speakers in itself left little scope
for controversy; it was faithful servants such as Marshak, Barto, Kassil and
Mikhalkov who were allowed to take the microphone, when it came to
commenting on children’s literature.
A broad overview of children’s literature was presented at the 1954
Congress by Boris Polevoy, chosen in his capacity as a member of the
editorial board of Detgiz. According to Polevoy, the “great and glorious
traditions” of Soviet children’s literature had been well looked after since
1934.10 Literature had become more profound, wiser and more interesting,
although its central purpose was still to raise new generations of commu-
nists. Through their works, authors strove to “awaken a love of the mother
country and of their own people, to foster brotherly feelings towards
people in other countries, to prepare children for peaceful, creative work
and to support the best features of socialist humanism, embodied in the
ideas of the Communist Party”.11
Rather surprisingly, Polevoy maintained that the international impor-
tance of Soviet children’s literature had grown since 1934: “The heroes of
these books—the Soviet people—stride across national frontiers, moun-
tains, continents and oceans; all over the planet, they spread the mighty
ideas of socialist humanism and tell the world the truth about our Soviet
life.”12 One explanation for Polevoy’s assertion was that the incorporation
of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union in 1940 and the communist sei-
zure of power in Eastern Europe after the Second World War had created
a large new market for Soviet literature. As these nations broke with their
bourgeois past, it was natural for them to look for new cultural models

10 B. Polevoi, “Sovetskaia literatura dlia detei i iunoshestva,” Vtoroi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd

sovetskikh pisatelei 1954 g. (M., 1956), 39.
11 Ibid., 45.
12 Ibid., 40.
480 chapter nine

in the world’s first socialist state. In the West, on the other hand, where
such force-feeding was not possible and where there was a general lack
of knowledgeable proponents of Soviet children’s literature, contempo-
rary Soviet Russian children’s literature could no longer point to many
successes.
Polevoy devoted much attention to statistics. While approximately one
thousand books for children and young people had come out in 1934, the
figure for 1953 was twice that. The greatest increase was in the total num-
ber of copies published: 19 million in 1934, rising to 110 million in 1953.
Detgiz alone accounted for 500 titles and 71 million copies. In the whole
twenty-year period, 1,500 Soviet writers, teachers, academics and critics
had between them published 20,000 titles, totalling 911 million copies.
“Almost a billion books!” exclaimed Polevoy. “Just think of it, comrades—
that is five books for every Soviet citizen, babies and old people included.”13
Even so, this substantial growth still did not mean that they could satisfy
demand.
Polevoy’s speech included a ‘top eleven’ list, showing which prose works
had been the most popular with Soviet youth in the years 1934–1954. The
yardstick was the number of editions, which obviously favoured the old-
est titles:

1. Nikolay Ostrovsky: How the Steel was Hardened (Kak zakalyalas stal;
248 editions)
2. Valentin Kataev: Son of the Regiment (Syn polka; 78)
3. Arkady Gaydar: Timur and His Gang (Timur i ego komanda; 72)
4. Aleksandr Fadeev: The Young Guard (Molodaya gvardiya; 72)
5. Veniamin Kaverin: Two Captains (Dva kapitana; 60)
6. Aleksey Musatov: Stozhary (40)
7. Iosif Likstanov: The Nipper (Malyshok; 35)
8. Nikolay Nosov: Vitya Maleev at School and at Home (Vitya Maleev v
shkole i doma; 30)
9. Elena Ilina: The Fourth Height (Chetvyortaya vysota; 29)
10. Lev Kassil and Maks Polyanovsky: The Street of the Youngest Son (Ulitsa
mladshego syna; 25)
11. Boris Zhitkov: What I Saw (Chto ya videl; 24)

13 Ibid., 39.
 thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 481

According to Polevoy, these statistics showed that the originality of Soviet

children’s writing lay in the fact that its heroes were taken from real life.
They were “normal Soviet people, inspired by the ideas of Communism”.14
Polevoy saw the popularity of these works as a sign that Soviet reality
in itself was more interesting than anything that the imagination could
create. In fact, this impression could equally well be an illusion, because
editions were not driven by demand, but by plans from above. That is
why Aleksandr Belyaev’s science fiction novels, Aleksey Tolstoy’s tale of
the wooden figure Buratino and Aleksandr Volkov’s Russian version of the
Wizard of Oz were missing.
Poetry for children was dominated by an inevitable quartet of authors
(listed with the number of editions in brackets): Samuil Marshak (661),
Korney Chukovsky (450), Agniya Barto (435) and Sergey Mikhalkov (435).
In Polevoy’s view, these were writers who had shown that one could cre-
ate living portraits and deal with big issues even in children’s poetry. As
examples of this, Polevoy cited Marshak’s Mister Twister, with its criticism
of racism, Mikhalkov’s Uncle Styopa, which illustrated ‘socialist human-
ism’, and satirical poems by Barto and Chukovsky.
Polevoy aimed his criticism mainly at the school novel. The weaknesses
of the genre had already been noted on many occasions, most recently by
Evgeny Gerasimov in Novy Mir in 1953. “Why do the heroes turn out to be
boring?” Gerasimov wondered after reading all the previous year’s school
novels, including Mariya Prilezhaeva’s disappointing Over the Volga (Nad
Volgoy, 1952). When writers tried to portray school life, they created “grey,
faceless heroes without any of the qualities that go with youth: imagina-
tion, enthusiasm, keenness, impetuosity”.15 Writers glorified the faceless
collective and condemned anything that could be interpreted as individu-
alism. “We can only wonder that nobody has accused pupils of individual-
ism, if they manage their difficult mathematic homework on their own”,
wrote Gerasimov.16 But the solution he proposed did not inspire confi-
dence: writers should learn from the late President of the Soviet Union,
Mikhail Kalinin, and speak as “honestly and openly” to children as he
had done.17
Polevoy’s recipe for renewal was for authors to write from life and not
from literary stereotypes. School was by no means the only factor mould-

14 Ibid., 44.
15 Evgenii Gerasimov, “Otchego geroi stanoviatsia skuchnymi?,” Novyi mir 2 (1953): 232.
16 Ibid., 229.
17 Ibid., 232.
482 chapter nine

ing children’s awareness, but literature should also reflect ‘the teeming
life’ beyond the walls of the school, recounting incidents from factories,
mines and collective farms, “where the workers are creating the power of
our socialist motherland, its wealth and honour”.18
Another problem that Polevoy addressed concerned ‘revolutionary
romanticism’. The concept was one of the cornerstones of socialist realism,
but in practice it proved difficult to pin down. Writers who used fantasy
elements and adventure-filled plots to make their work more lively and
attractive ran the constant risk of being accused of ‘pseudo-romanticism’
or dismissed as ‘too exclusive’. What Polevoy sought was greater flexibility
on the part of the critics.19
In poetry, Polevoy had too often encountered a didactic tone that was
not an organic part of the poem, but floated like “a spot of fat on top of
soup”.20 Another weakness that Polevoy drew attention to was a deadly
uniformity of subject-matter, artistic method and even titles. He gave a
number of recent titles as examples: “On the Sunny Beach”, “The Sunny
Beach”, “The Sunny Place”, “A Sunny Morning”, “On the Sunny Earth”,
“The Reflection of the Sun”, “The Sun of Home”, “Sun in the Garden”, “Dear
Little Sun”. “Isn’t that rather a lot of sun, comrade children’s poets?” Pole-
voy asked rhetorically.21
In her talk on the new poetry, Agniya Barto worried about the lack of
“a Gaydar-style intonation”.22 The Young Pioneers wanted to be of service
to their motherland, but instead of poems inspiring courage and love of
work, they were often presented with “introverted and sometimes even
mawkish poems”. “Subjects such as happiness, gaiety and parties are nec-
essary and important elements of poetry for our children, but haven’t we
published too many poems that are jolly on the outside but devoid of
content, which talk mainly about leisure, summer holidays and an endless
series of diversions?”23 To lend weight to her demands, Barto told a story
about a lazy boy. Asked by his mother what he wanted to do when he
grew up, “the little philosopher” answered: “I expect Communism to have
been attained, and nobody will need to work any more.”24

18 Polevoi, Vtoroi vsesoiuznyi s’’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 46.

19 Ibid., 47.
20 Ibid., 50.
21 Ibid.
22 “Rech’ A. Barto”, ibid., 554.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
 thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 483

Sergey Mikhalkov talked about children’s theatre. The Central Chil-

dren’s Theatre (Tsentralny detsky teatr) in Moscow could boast of many
successes, but apart from this the situation was far from satisfactory. There
had been seventy children’s theatres across the country before the Second
World War, but by 1954 the number had dropped to thirty.

Five years later, in 1959, the Third Soviet Writers’ Congress paid little
attention to children’s literature. Aleksey Surkov, who had succeeded
Aleksandr Fadeev as First Secretary of the Writers’ Union in 1954, only
touched on the genre in passing. His speech was prompted by Khrush-
chev’s observation that the young people of the day did not have the same
experience of life behind them as older people. Writers should therefore
step in to help the Party by giving young people “essential knowledge”
of the country’s history. Khrushchev had also defined what this knowl-
edge should be, namely “the struggle of the working people for liberation
[before 1917], and the heroic history of the Communist Party”.25
Surkov started off with praise of the “great, talented” literature for Soviet
children and youth, but he also brought up some pressing problems. Too
many works were grey and boring, leaving the readers cold. In their criti-
cism of the Stalin cult some writers had gone too far. Surkov had also
detected a dangerous tendency to produce pure adventure stories, anti-
artistic works, which could only spoil their readers taste. The main task
now was to portray the modern hero, “the hero of the seven-year plan, the
new construction and the new agriculture”.26 Humorous literature in the
style of Chukovsky’s, Marshak’s and Mikhalkov’s poems and Yury Sotnik’s
short stories was also needed, because the Soviet Union wanted to raise
young people “full of optimism and joie de vivre”.27
Lev Kassil seconded Surkov’s call for “hymns to creative work”, and in
his turn called upon writers to follow in the footsteps of M. Ilin, Boris
Zhitkov and I. Likstanov. One literary critic had observed that the theme
of work had also thrown up its own master plot, in which a spoilt child of
the intelligentsia enters working life and there finds his true self. However,
Kassil urged his colleagues not to attach too much weight to this criticism,
as precisely this pattern was typical of Soviet society.28

25 “Doklad A. Surkova,” Tretii s’’ezd pisatelei SSSR 18–23 maia 1959 g.: Stenograficheskii
otchet (M., 1959), 20.
26 Ibid., 20.
27 Ibid., 21.
28 “Rech’ L. Kassilia,” ibid., 87–90.
484 chapter nine

Sergey Mikhalkov took up a subject that he felt the Writers’ Union had
not tackled decisively enough. On a visit to Kiev’s ancient monastery, the
Kiev Pechersk Lavra, he had witnessed children kissing the icons and
listening to the monks’ ‘fantasies’. “What have we done to ensure that
these children can live a healthy Soviet life and not flounder in the web
of religious obscurity?” asked Mikhalkov.29 “Our state practises tolerance
towards all religions and churches, but we must not forget that as Soviet
writers, we should actively assist the Party in bringing up children in a
communist spirit, which means an atheist spirit.” Incidentally, in 2000,
when Mikhalkov, for the second time, rewrote his text for the Russian,
formerly Soviet, national anthem, he emphasised Russian Orthodoxy, as
the basis of the nation. “I am a believer”, he declared in an interview.
“I have always been a believer.”30
Atheism was very much a current issue, as evidenced by the campaign
against the church that had started a few years earlier under Khrushchev’s
leadership and that forced the monastery in Kiev to close, along with tens
of thousands of other churches. Mikhalkov was by no means alone on the
barricades; among children’s writers, Lev Kassil was a militant atheist, and
the period prior to the Third Writers’ Congress had produced a number
of works with an anti-religious slant: Lyubov Voronkova’s The Big Sister
(Starshaya sestra, 1955), Vladimir Tendryakov’s The Miraculous Icon (Chu-
dotvornaya, 1958), Sergey Baruzdin’s “Novye Dvoriki” (1961), and Vladimir
Zheleznikov’s “May Man Help” (“Da pomozhet chelovek”, 1961). The pat-
tern had been drawn up in a classic of Soviet atheist children’s writing,
Ėduard Bagritsky’s poem “The Death of a Pioneer Girl” (“Smert pionerki”,
1932), in which a Young Pioneer is led into temptation by a believing
mother or grandmother, but withstands the test. In Bagritsky’s poem, the
Pioneer girl Valya is on her deathbed, but she has enough strength left to
push away the cross that her mother holds out to her. She is inspired by
the cheerful song of a passing Young Pioneer detachment.
One setback for progressive forces within children’s literature was the
reorganisation that took place at Detsky mir in 1964. The publishing house
came under new management, and the name was changed to Malysh (The
Little One). Malysh’s target audience was children under nine, but, as it
turned out, it was unable to attain the position Detsky mir had occupied

29 “Rechʼ S. Mikhalkova,” ibid., 45.

30 Interfaks. Religiia. Arkhiv novostei 1989–2004, accessed March 15, 2013, http://www
.interfax-religion.ru/ykr/?act=archive&div=9320.
 thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 485

under Timofeev. Another organisational change in the world of publish-

ing saw the giant Detgiz being taken over by the publication committee
of the Russian Federation and returning to its original name of Detskaya
literatura.
The Fourth Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union was held in 1967. This
was the Soviet Union’s jubilee year, a fact that left its mark on all the
speeches. Any real conflict was swept under the carpet, as the delegates
devoted themselves to glorifying fifty years of Soviet power. The task of
presenting an overview of children’s literature had been given to Sergey
Mikhalkov, who suggested that the main aim of writers should be to tell
their young readers about “the daring and noble deeds performed by the
people building the most just and humane society the world has ever
known”.31 In the previous fifty years, three and a half billion Soviet chil-
dren’s books had done just this. Mikhalkov was loudly applauded when
he assessed the quality of these books: “We can justly claim today that the
intellectual nourishment we give to children is rich in calories, and rich in
vitamins such as honesty, courage, unselfishness and patriotism!”32
The same year saw the publication of Irina Lupanova’s Half a Century:
Soviet Children’s Literature 1917–1967 (Polveka: Sovetskaya detskaya litera-
ture 1917–1967), a serious attempt to analyse individual works, thematic
lines and recurring motifs in the post-revolutionary literature. At the
same time, Lupanova was not able to avoid the usual clichés: the history
of Soviet children’s literature is seen as a triumphal march towards ever
higher artistic and humane heights. Half a Century ends in praise of the
Party’s inspiring support of the children’s writers as it was expressed in
the resolutions of the latest, Twenty-Third Party Congress.

The New Poetry

The most interesting elements of the new literature could be found in

poetry. Detsky mir, the children’s publisher that was willing to back new
and unconventional writing, attracted poets such as Boris Zakhoder,
Valentin Berestov, Ėmma Moshkovskaya, Roman Sef, Irina Tokmakova
and Genrikh Sapgir. Writers such as these drew their inspiration from
children’s rhymes, folklore and the avant-garde poetry of the 1920s. Their

31 “Doklad S.V. Mikhalkova,” Chetvertyi s’’ezd pisatelei SSSR 22–27 maia 1967 g.: Ste-
nograficherskii otchet (M., 1968), 46.
32 Ibid., 55.
486 chapter nine

models were Korney Chukovsky, the early Samuil Marshak and Daniil
Kharms, whose childlike playfulness and humour were now being redis-
covered. The poets wanted to reproduce children’s voices, their fantasies
and emotions. A popular title was “Happy Poems”, a heading that also
covered counting-out rhymes and tongue-twisters, two genres which now
experienced a renaissance.
Great emphasis was laid on children’s aesthetic development. Broken
forms, changing rhythms, flexible rhyming schemes and unconventional
word play all added to the degree of difficulty in poems. Once again,
children’s poetry stood out as an area that could offer greater creative
freedom than poetry for adults. Some authors consciously exploited the
opportunity to address a dual audience in the same poem, while others,
such as Sapgir, Igor Kholin (1920–99) and Evgeny Reyn (born 1935), pub-
lished in the Soviet Union for children only, while their adult poetry had
to be smuggled out of the country.
The older generation of writers unreservedly acknowledged the talent
and technical brilliance of their young colleagues. At the same time, they
expressed concern that the new poetry was lacking in civic spirit. Barto
commented at a children’s literature meeting in 1963 that many young
authors now were devoting themselves to “happy trifles” and what she
saw as purely formalistic experiments.33 At the Third RSFSR Writers’ Con-
gress in 1970 she complained about the tendency just to stick to riddles,
tongue-twisters and word play, and quoted with disapproval colleagues
who claimed to write “eccentric poems for children”.34 There is no such
thing, she said, just unsuccessful attempts to copy the talented Daniil
Kharms. What was needed were poems on political issues and lyrical
poems with exemplary heroes for readers aged 11 to 13.
Ideologically and politically orientated poetry was irrevocably set aside,
much to the worry of the defenders of a rigid socialist realism. At the
Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1967, Barto demanded that children
should be told about the American bombing of Vietnam. To her mind,
modern poems for children were bordering on total disintegration: “Chil-
dren first learn to master sounds, then words, and then they start to think.
With many poets, the development is the other way round; thoughts,
then words, then meaningless sounds.”35 She found support from Sergey

33 Agniia Barto, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh. Vol. 4 (М., 1984), 269.

34 Agniia Barto, “O literature dlia detei,” Tretii s’’ezd pisatelei RSFSR 24–27 marta 1970
goda: Stenograficheskii otchet (M., 1972), 134.
35 “Rech’ A.L. Barto,” Chetvertyi s’’ezd pisatelei SSSR, 99.
 thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 487

Mikhalkov: “Word play is fine when it reflects the play of reason, when it is
thought through. But with some young poets, playing with words does not
just lead away from important topics; it also robs their poems of any sort
of sense.”36 Lev Kassil spoke along the same lines: in the prose of young
writers he had found an annoying “cult of elusiveness”, as if “straight talk”
had been deserted together with the Stalin cult.37
But time was on the side of the poets of the Thaw. When Ėmma Mosh-
kovskaya became a member of the Writers’ Union in 1967, the paradigm
shift within Soviet poetry was a fait accompli.

Foremost among the new poets was Boris Zakhoder (1918–2000). His first
poems for children were published in 1947, the year in which he gradu-
ated from the Gorky Institute of Literature, but it was not until the Thaw
that he was able to develop his special gift to the full. His poem “The Let-
ter Ya” (“Bukva ya”) had lain in his desk drawer for a decade before being
published in New World in 1955. It is a virtuoso piece about how the last
letter in the Russian alphabet, ‘Ya’, rebels. ‘Ya’ is not just a letter; it also
means ‘I’ in Russian, and so it feels it really ought to come first. But the
revolt of the selfish letter ends in ignominious defeat; without the help of
the other letters, it can only shout “I, I, I”. The poem is aimed at egotism,
but could apparently also be read as a critique of the Stalin cult.
The same year saw the publication of In the Back Row (Na zadney parte,
1955), which attracted favourable comment from Chukovsky, among oth-
ers. The book contained poems about Vova and Petya, two mischief-
makers who are perpetually in conflict with their surroundings. The boys
neglect their homework, play at naval battles during lessons, argue with
each other, and dream of how much easier life could be with a bit of
magic. In lively colloquial language with a flexible rhythm, the boys them-
selves tell of their pranks. A major part of the humour lies in the innocent
tone, a narrative device that Nikolay Nosov had introduced in his stories
of Mishka and Kolya.
Zakhoder joined the Writers’ Union in 1958. He was the oldest in the
writers’ collective of Detsky mir, yet one of the most vital and modern.
Zakhoder’s poems are full of humour and linguistic and intellectual exper-
iments, quite in the style of Chukovsky. The poem “The Whale and the Cat”
(“Kit i kot”, 1964), first published in Youth, has been seen as Zakhoder’s
artistic credo. The poem describes an upside-down world where all estab-
lished roles are reversed. Order is restored and realism triumphs, but this

36 “Rech’ S.V. Mikhalkova,” ibid., 48.

37 “Rech’ L. Kassilia,” ibid., 206.