Fairy Tales and True Stories

Russian History and Culture

Editors-in-Chief
Jeffrey P. Brooks
The Johns Hopkins University
Christina Lodder
University of Edinburgh

VOLUME 13

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rhc

Fairy Tales and True Stories
The History of Russian Literature for
Children and Young People (1574–2010)

Βy
Ben Hellman

Leiden • boston
2013
Cover illustration: Yury Vasnetsov, The Stolen Sun (1958).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hellman, Ben, 1949– author.

Fairy tales and true stories : the history of Russian literature for children and young people
(1574–2010) / by Ben Hellman.
pages ; cm — (Russian history and culture, ISSN 1877-7791 ; volume 13)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-25637-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25638-5 (e-book)
1. Children’s literature, Russian—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Russian history and culture
(Leiden, Netherlands) ; v. 13. 1877–7791

PG3190.H453 2013
891.709’9282—dc23
2013024280

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ISSN 1877-7791
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ISBN 978-90-04-25638-5 (e-book)

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 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .......................................................................................... vii

Preface . ............................................................................................................... ix

1.. The Beginnings (1574–1770) . ................................................................. 1

2.. From Enlightenment to Sentimentalism (1770–1825) ................... 7

3.. Romanticism (1825–1860) ...................................................................... 24

4.. Realism (1860–1890) . ............................................................................... 77

5.. Modernism (1890–1917) . ......................................................................... 169

6.. All the Colours of the Rainbow (1918–1932) . ................................... 294

7.. A New Society—A New Literature (1932–1940) . ............................ 354

8.. “Under the Wise Leadership of the Party and the Fatherly Care
of Comrade Stalin” (1941–1953) ............................................................ 427

9.. Thaw in the World of Children (1954–1968) .................................... 472

10.. Years of Stagnation (1969–1985) .......................................................... 534

11.. Perestroika Reaches Children’s Literature (1986–1991) . ............... 558

12.. The New Russian Children’s Literature (1991–2010) ...................... 563

Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 573

Index of Names ................................................................................................ 577
 List of Illustrations

1.. Leonty Bunin, The Great Primer .......................................................... 3

2.. Karl Bryullov, Antony Pogorelsky (1836) ............................................ 28
3.. Rudolf Zhukovsky, The Little Humpbacked Horse (1856) . ............ 38
4.. Leo Tolstoy and His Grandchildren (1909) . ..................................... 91
5..Nikolay Vagner .......................................................................................... 134
6.. Nat Pinkerton: The Band of Three Criminals (1916) ......................... 175
7.. Lidiya Charskaya . ..................................................................................... 179
8.. Re-Mi, The Crocodile (1919) .................................................................... 291
9.. Korney Chukovsky ................................................................................... 312
10.. Vladimir Konashevich, Wash’em’clean (1923) .................................. 315
11.. Samuil Marshak ........................................................................................ 319
12.. Vladimir Lebedev, Circus (1925) . ......................................................... 322
13.. Vladimir Tatlin, Firstly, and Secondly (1929) .................................... 329
14.. Boris Zhitkov . ............................................................................................ 349
15.. Agniya Barto .............................................................................................. 382
16..David Dubinsky, Uncle Styopa (1950) ................................................. 387
17.. Vladimir Galdyaev, Lenin and Children (1978) . ............................... 401
18.. Arkady Gaydar . ......................................................................................... 405
19.. Aleksey Laptev, The Adventures of Neznayka and His Friends
(1954) ............................................................................................................ 529
20.. Gennady Kalinovsky, Gena the Crocodile and His Friends
(1986) ............................................................................................................ 550
21.. Grigory Oster (Photo: WSOY, Helsinki, Finland) . .......................... 565
 Preface

By contrast with Russian literature for adults, which had already become
part of world literature by the end of the nineteenth century, the corre-
sponding literature for children and youth has by and large remained an
unknown field outside Russia. Hardly a single writer’s name, comparable
to those of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov or Solzhenitsyn, comes to mind.
Any comparable genius or originality appeared to be missing, and thus
the genre has remained an unexplored field. Translations are few in num-
ber and, especially in the case of poetry for children, they do not appear to
do justice to the originals. The long Soviet period with its stress on Com-
munist ideals and its restrictions on the creative freedom has also tended
to have a negative influence on any possible interest.
The history of Russian children’s and youth literature in its entirety
has never been written before. In pre-revolutionary Russia, serious schol-
arly interest and research were only starting to emerge before the fateful
year of 1917, and rare attempts to outline its historical development and
portray its leading practitioners proved to be shallowly descriptive. In
the Soviet Union, the approach to children’s literature was ideologically
determined and influenced by shifting political considerations. The bulk
of pre-revolutionary literature was most often dismissed with a few gen-
eralizations about its monarchist and religious character, while stress was
laid on the critic Vissarion Belinsky’s struggle for a progressive, realistic
literature in this field, too. A reliable canon of classics could not emerge
as book publication was state controlled and based upon criteria of a non-
literary character. Simultaneously, the merits of genuine Soviet children’s
literature were clearly exaggerated. Abrupt political changes, with some
names disappearing literally overnight and turning into non-persons,
made the creation of an objective historical overview of the genre well
nigh impossible. Even today, the effects of 75 years of Soviet power are
still felt in Russia, and the few serious attempts to write the history of Rus-
sian children’s literature are rather undermined by principles of selection
that are sometimes too narrow and sometimes openly inconsistent.
This book sets out to fill the gap by encompassing the history of Rus-
sian children’s and youth literature from its earliest period to the present
time. It has been a matter of dispute to fix a date for the birth of Russian
children’s literature. While some critics consider Catherine the Great’s
x preface

allegorical tales and Nikolay Novikov’s magazine Children’s Reading for the
Heart and Mind to constitute its beginning, others go back to the sixteenth
century and the publication of the first Russian primer in 1574, which is
the view adopted in this volume.
Initially, fiction occupied a modest place among published children’s
literature. For a long time the children’s book was part and parcel of the
teaching process. Informative books gave children and young people basic
insights into various sciences and stimulated their thirst for knowledge.
Teaching was for many centuries linked to the Orthodox Church and as a
result Biblical tales were given a prominent place in early reading. It has
thus been felt necessary to include some coverage of primers, textbooks,
etiquette books and religious texts in the current presentation.
In the eighteenth century, informative literature dominated, but from
the period of Romanticism onwards fiction grew steadily stronger and
more independent. A Russian speciality, paralleling the same phenom-
enon in adult literature, was the prominent role played by journals and
magazines. Their growth reflects an increase in the audience, an issue of
primary importance in a country where illiteracy was widespread and the
school system only developing slowly. The history of Russian children’s
and youth literature is thus also the history of journals and magazines
addressed to this very special audience.
It has also been felt necessary to take into consideration Russian
translations of foreign children’s literature. During some periods a large
proportion of what Russian children read was actually translations. Fur-
thermore, the reading of literature in foreign languages was part of lan-
guage training among the children of the Russian privileged classes in the
nineteenth century. The important role of foreign children’s literature
prior to 1917 shows how closely connected Russian was with wider Euro-
pean and American culture and, by contrast, the lack of cultural contacts
during the darkest Stalinist years tells of a short-sighted, fatally damaging
nationalistic policy.
An unsettled dispute concerns how children’s and juvenile literature
should be defined. The focus here is on works written and published for a
young audience, while works originally written for adults, but later turned
into standard reading for young people as well, are only included in the
discussion in passing. A critical discourse, with reviews, bibliographies and
lists of recommended reading, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century,
with the first attempts to survey the Russian tradition being conducted at
the turn of the century. This aspect of Russian children’s literature is also
elucidated in the present volume.
 preface xi

Russian children’s and youth literature and Russian childhood reading

are presented here chronologically. For the pre-revolutionary centuries,
concepts are adopted from general histories of literature, such as Roman-
ticism, Realism and Modernism. This is not a self-evident solution and the
boundaries of the various periods are admittedly open to debate. This also
goes for the term Modernism, here denoting an opening for a multitude
of new ideas and a broadening of the very concept of children’s literature.
As for the Soviet decades it seemed more natural to divide the chapters
according to the general political situation.
The year of the first publication is indicated for works mentioned in the
text. This usually means a journal or magazine publication, but in cases
where no such publication has been identified, the year of the first book
publication is given.
The transliteration system is a modification of the British standard.
Exceptions are made for names with commonly accepted spellings. In the
footnotes and the bibliography, the Library of Congress system is used,
without diacritical marks.

I am indebted to the editors-in-chief of Brill’s Slavic and Eurasian Studies

series, Jeffrey Brooks and Christina Lodder for their reading of my manu-
script and to Professor Marina Balina for her valuable comments. Finan-
cial support has been given by the Academy of Finland and the Finnish
Association of Non-fiction Writers. I am grateful to Richard Davies, Nigel
Goffe, Paul Graves and Donna Orwin for checking and correcting my Eng-
lish. I myself, needless to say, bear all responsibility for the final version.
 CHAPTER ONE

THE BEGINNINGS (1574–1770)

The first Russian books to address children were primers. The earliest
example, the Alphabet (Azbuka), published in Lvov in 1574, was com-
posed by Ivan Fyodorov (c. 1510–83), who has commonly been called
the first Russian book printer. In the postscript Fyodorov explains that
his intention is “to lighten study for children”. The reading material con-
sists of prayers and Biblical texts. The child is asked to listen to the wise
words of the book, since knowledge and learning are as useful to man as
honey is sweet on his tongue. With a quotation from the Book of Proverbs,
the teacher is also advised to punish his pupil severely to save the child’s
soul from hell.
Fifty years later, Vasily Burtsov-Protopopov compiled his Primer (Buk-
var, 1634) at the Tsar’s command, for the education of “all you small chil-
dren”. The child learns to read in order to be able to study the Scriptures
by himself and become a good Christian. Prayers and didactic material
form the book’s main content. In a poem added to the second edition,
apparently written by Savvaty, an editor at the Moscow Print Yard, which
was the Patriarchal publishing house, the reader is asked to leave behind
“all kinds of childish insolence” and work diligently and obediently. Child-
hood is the best time for learning, as knowledge is imprinted in the child’s
soul “like the seal in soft wax.”
The monk and theologian Simeon Polotsky’s (1629–80) Primer (Bukvar,
1679), appearing a full century after Fyodorov’s, was already a substantial
volume of 160 pages. In addition to presenting the alphabet and simple
texts, it demonstrates the theory of versification. Like his predecessors,
Polotsky believed in corporal punishment as the most efficient way of
achieving results. In the “Exhortation” he states that “The birch sharpens
the mind, stimulates the memory / and turns an evil will into a good
one . . .” Polotsky produced several works for use by the children of the
court, including A Garden of Many Colours (Vertograd mnogotsvetny,
1680), a book of poetry on various subjects.
One of Polotsky’s successors as imperial teacher and unofficial court
poet was Karion Istomin (late 1640s–no earlier than 1717), editor at the
Moscow Print Yard and a teacher of Greek. Istomin is considered one of
2 chapter one

the most enlightened Russians of his time. As a present for the Tsarevich
Peter on his eleventh birthday, Istomin wrote The Book of Reason (Kniga
vrazumleniya, 1683), the first Russian book of manners. The didactic pre-
scriptions are given in the form of a conversation between the author and
his pupil. In the text the future Peter the Great is taught appropriate behav-
iour at home, at the court and at church. Istomin urges him to become a
just and wise ruler, a protector of the sciences. Another of Istomin’s books,
Polis (1694), is an encyclopaedic work with short, rhymed texts on diverse
subjects such as grammar, poetics, music, astrology, geometry, geography,
and medicine.
In his Domostroy (1696), Istomin makes sure that good manners and
Christian morals are implanted in the children with the aid of syllabic
verses. The number of bows to be made in front of the icon follows every
prescription, as does the inevitable punishment. Five whacks will follow if
children wipe their noses with their caps or behave in some other repul-
sive way. It is notable that Istomin asks that children should be given a
chance to play for the sake of their physical well-being. However, their
games should be ‘decent’ and not harmful “for the eye and chest”. Those
who play for money or start a quarrel are to be whipped and forced to
bow 300 times to the icon.
Karion Istomin’s main contribution to children’s literature was The
Great Primer (Bolshoy bukvar, 1694), also called The Illustrated Primer
(Litsevoy bukvar), as illustrations are given a prominent place. Istomin
was in fact the first Russian writer to employ the visual method in teach-
ing. Each letter of the alphabet is given its own page; in the upper corner,
human figures form the letter in question with their bodies. The engrav-
ings show objects, plants or animals, the names of which all begin with
the same letter. These words are then repeated in couplets that offer some
elementary facts about the phenomena mentioned. The information is
naturally haphazard and sketchy, as for example when whale, horse,
cypress, key and bell are lumped together. The Great Primer was printed
in 25 copies, some of which went to the Romanov children.

The reforms of Peter the Great also influenced children’s reading. The state
needed enlightened citizens and skilled craftsmen, and thus great impor-
tance was attached to the education of the younger generation. Textbooks
and practical works came to dominate children’s literature. A significant
document of the period is A True Mirror for Youth (Yunosti chestnoe
zertsalo, 1717), a courtesy book serving the process of Europeanization in
Russia. In part, this volume has the same structure as the first primers,
 the beginnings (1574–1770) 3

Fig. 1. Leonty Bunin, The Great Primer

4 chapter one

with the alphabet and the numbers followed by a compilation of wise

sayings from the Bible. But the main section is the second part with its
rules of conduct and ethical guidance. Young men and women of the edu-
cated class are given advice and admonitions concerning table manners
(“Do not be the first to grab from the plate!”, “Do not gorge like a swine!”,
“Do not clean your teeth with your knife!”), social intercourse (“Hold your
hat in your hand when your parents have something to say to you”, “Do
not interrupt your interlocutors, but let everyone have his say!”), studies
(“Young people should always speak foreign languages between them-
selves, so that they will get accustomed to them, and especially when
they have something to say that the servants are not supposed to know”),
hygiene and morals (“In church you should turn your eyes and heart
towards God and not towards the fair sex, as the church is God’s temple, a
chapel, and not a hotbed of sin!”). Adolescents are warned against immoral
tales and songs and “stupid proverbs”. The main virtues impressed on girls
in a separate chapter are piety, humility and diligence.
A True Mirror for Youth was compiled by a collective on the orders
of the Tsar. Its sources were both Russian and foreign etiquette books,
among them Erasmus’ Golden Book, translated into Russian in the late sev-
enteenth century. Authoritative church fathers, including Martin Luther,
are also quoted. The book’s initial publication in one hundred copies did
not meet the demand and subsequently A True Mirror for Youth went
through nine editions, the last one appearing in 1767.
A more modest work is The First Lesson for Children (Pervoe uchenie
otrokam, 1720) by the Archbishop of Novgorod, Feofan Prokopovich
(1681–1736). In the foreword, Prokopovich, an associate of Peter the Great,
stresses the importance of books for children. A widespread knowledge of
reading and writing is seen as basic for the welfare of the state. Through
series of questions and answers, good manners, the Ten Commandments,
the Lord’s Prayer and the Russian Table of Ranks are imprinted in the
child’s mind. Here, the aim of upbringing is to raise enlightened and pious
citizens.
Forty years later, Grigory Teplov (1717–79), a Senator and the Head of
the Academy of Sciences, taught private morality in the spirit of rational-
ism in his Teachings for My Son (Nastavlenie synu, 1760). The child is no
longer threatened with the birch; instead, the tone of Teplov’s argumenta-
tion is fatherly and tender, as he indicates the way to happiness and well-
being for his thirteen-year-old son. Among his twenty-one golden rules one
finds, for example, “Look forward, both in happiness and unhappiness!”,
 the beginnings (1574–1770) 5

“Do not lose your head in the passions of love!”, “Distinguish true friend-
ship from familiarity!”, “Do not be capriciously stubborn, but make rea-
sonable compromises!” and “Wishes and tastes change with time”.

All through the eighteenth century, foreign literature dominated chil-

dren’s reading in Russia. Translations were made mainly from French
and German, and for many decades the selection consisted almost solely
of information books. The first illustrated children’s encyclopaedia, Orbis
Sensualium Pictus (1658) by the Czech pedagogue John Amos Comenius
was translated into Russian on government instructions in Peter the
Great’s time, but published only in 1768. In the middle of the century a
move towards imaginative literature occurred, and fables became stan-
dard reading for children. Aesop’s fables were published in an illustrated
edition for children in 1747. The foreword says that these fables are taught
in almost all German schools, but that, as the German children are forced
to repeat the texts parrot-fashion, they lack any notion of the strength and
value of the fables. In Russian translation, Aesop’s fables were therefore
published together with the English publicist Sir Roger Estrange’s moral
reflections and explanations. In the fables, moral truth and a wise conduct
of life, suitable also for children, are taught in an entertaining form.
Among the few longer fictional works that were translated, Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719, transl. from French 1762–1764) and Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, transl. from French 1772–1773) stand out.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe gave birth to a whole genre of didactic adven-
ture stories, Robinsonades. Of the many works about the lives of people
shipwrecked on desert islands, François Ducray-Duminil’s Lolotte et Fan-
fan (1788, transl. 1791), Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere
(1779–80, transl. as Novy Robinzon, 1792) and Johann David Wyss’s Der
Schweizerische Robinson (1812–13, transl. 1833–34) all enjoyed popularity
in Russia. When the children in Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood (Detstvo, 1852)
play Robinson Crusoe, it is from Wyss’s version that they get inspiration.
The little Fyodor Dostoevsky also loved to play Robinson Crusoe, giving
the role of Friday to his brother Andrey.1
Tolstoy considered Robinson Crusoe to be exemplary children’s literature,
as it showed what a man can accomplish on his own, without exploiting

1 А.M. Dostoevskii, “Iz ‘Vospominanii’,” in F.M. Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh sovremen-

nikov v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 1 (М., 1990), 73.
6 chapter one

the work of others.2 In 1862 an abridged version of Robinson Crusoe,

apparently made by one of Tolstoy’s young school assistants, was pub-
lished in his pedagogical journal Yasnaya Polyana. The short sentences,
laconic style and limited vocabulary reveal the influence of Tolstoy. In
Aleksandra Annenskaya’s highly popular adaptation of 1872, information
of a natural scientific character is given greater attention than the adven-
ture plot line.
The most widely-read children’s book of the eighteenth century was
François Fénelon’s Les aventures de Telemaque, fils d’Ulysse (1717). The
story of Telemachus’ adventurous search for his father Odysseus was
published in a Russian translation in 1747 and frequently reissued in jour-
nals and textbooks, as well as separate volumes, far into the following
century. Fénelon combined adventure episodes with didactic conversa-
tions between Mentor and his protégé. This narrative solution was not
altogether new in Russian children’s literature, but as used by Fénelon, it
became widespread, especially in presentations of educational material. It
is also notable that the teaching in Les aventures de Telemaque is not given
in the form of fixed rules, but aims at convincing the young reader of what
is good for him. Additionally, Les aventures de Telemaque functioned as a
source on the mythology of ancient times.

2 L.N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90 tomakh. Vol. 55 (M., 1937), 230. (Diary
entry June 6, 1906.); V. Bulgakov, L.N. Tolstoi v poslednii god ego zhizni: Dnevnik sekretaria
L.N. Tolstogo (M. 1989), 376. (Diary entry October 11, 1910.)
 chapter two

FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO SENTIMENTALISM (1770–1825)

Around eighty percent of all Russian books for children published in the
eighteenth century appeared during its last three decades. Popular genres
were illustrated dictionaries, textbooks structured as dialogues, and moral
tales and anthologies with extracts from ancient Greek and Roman litera-
ture. Some books for pure entertainment, chiefly folk and fairy tales, also
appeared. The number of Russian writers taking an interest in children’s
books was still exceedingly small, but it included some outstanding figurers
of the time, including Catherine the Great and the publisher Nikolay
Novikov.
The reasons for the growth of children’s literature in the second half
of the century were manifold. Impulses from the French Enlightenment
reached Russia through the Tsaritsa, including a belief in the importance
of knowledge for the development of the individual and of society. Lit-
erature was to form a vital part of teaching and upbringing. It was felt
that everything should be explained and proved in a logical way. The
pedagogical ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were based on the notion
that childhood had a worth in itself. The child had the right to remain
a child and develop according to his inherent nature. Rousseau did not
pay much attention to children’s literature, but his cult of childhood as a
time of unspoiled human nature paved the way for Sentimentalism and
pre-Romanticism in literature.
Dissatisfied with the complicated structure of existing grammars,
Nikolay Kurganov (c. 1725–96), a Moscow professor of Mathematics and
Navigation, set out to compile his own Grammar, literally A Letter-Writer
(Pismovnik, 1769). The book, initially called A Russian Universal Grammar
(Rossiyskaya universalnaya grammatika), includes pages on grammar,
Russian history, and various scientific topics. Kurganov’s most remarkable
achievement was the book’s substantial literary section with its anecdotal
‘sharp-witted short tales’ (most of them translations), poems, folk poetry,
proverbs, riddles, and wise sayings. The attempt to bring Russian folklore
to readers was groundbreaking. Among the one thousand or so proverbs,
some had a radical ring, such as “The law is like a cobweb: the bumble-
bee passes, but the fly is wrapped up”, “Close to the Tsar, close to death”
and “The Tsar is far away, but God is high above”. Kurganov structured his
8 chapter two

Grammar to advance from simple texts to longer and more advanced pas-
sages, and he set out to offer young Russians both elementary knowledge
and enjoyable reading. Writers like Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol
and Alexander Herzen remembered Kurganov with gratitude. Originally
published for adolescents, Grammar eventually found a readership also
among uneducated people. The eleventh edition appeared in 1831.
For a boarding school for noble children in Bogoroditsk, Andrey Bolo-
tov (1738–1833), a professional agronomist, wrote Children’s Philosophy,
or Moral Conversations Between A Lady and Her Children (Detskaya filo-
sofiya, ili Nravouchitelnye razgovory mezhdu odnoyu gospozhoyu i eyo
detmi, 1776–1779). This voluminous work was modelled on Mme Leprince
de Beaumont’s much disseminated Magasin des enfants (1756), known in
Russia as The Nursery School (Detskoe uchilishche, 1761–68). Discussions
on religious and moral questions between a mother and her two children
are resolved in an enlightened spirit, not through rigorous prescriptions
but discursively. Having decided to leave all mischief behind them, the
children listen carefully to the wise words of their loving mother. A reli-
gious world-view lies at the core of the passages in which Bolotov, bas-
ing his knowledge upon contemporary research, explains the order of the
universe.
For the children’s theatre at his school, the first of its kind in Russia,
Bolotov wrote several plays, of which only The Unfortunate Orphans
(Neschastnye siroty, 1781) was printed. The heroes are two orphans, the girl
Serafima and the boy Erast, whose inheritance their guardian, the infa-
mous landowner Evilheart (Zloserdov), wishes to steal. “In a word, it is
not we that are dear to him, but our villages”, the girl explains. In his plan
to poison the boy and marry the girl to his own son, Evilheart, a ‘monster
of nature’, he is prevented by Count Noble (Blagonravov), the deus ex
machina of the play. With its adherence to the dramatic unities, stock
characters, ‘telling names’ and conflict between virtue and vice, the play
reads much like a children’s version of Denis Fonvizin’s classicist play The
Brigadier (Brigadir) from 1768–69. Bolotov’s drama was performed with
child-actors in most of the roles.
Another Russian playwright to take an interest in children’s literature
was Nikolay Sandunov (1769–1832). As director of the children’s theatre
of the Noble Pension at Moscow University, he knew the rules of drama-
turgy well, as can be seen from his tightly structured The Soldier’s School
(Soldatskaya shkola, 1794). The play contains a strong social critique as
Sandunov demonstrates how lawlessness prevails in the villages under the
reign of the despotic steward Nagger (Zanoza). The poor peasants live
 from enlightenment to sentimentalism (1770–1825) 9

in constant fear. But when Nagger tries to force the fair peasant maiden
Anyuta to marry him, he meets with opposition from Anyuta’s brother
Joseph. The young man is even ready to sacrifice his life to save his
sister. When Colonel Goodheart (Dobroserd) appears on the scene, evil
is unmasked and good ultimately triumphs.
Catherine the Great’s (1729–96) correspondence with French phi-
losophers is well-known, but the Tsaritsa was also active as an editor of
magazines and the author of a large number of works in various genres,
including children’s literature. For her grandsons, she composed a primer
(1781), founded a children’s library and wrote didactic dialogues and tales.
The Tale of Tsarevich Khlor (Skazka o tsareviche Khlore, 1781) and The Tale
of Tsarevich Fevey (Skazka o tsareviche Fevee, 1783) were the first original
works of fiction for children in Russia. Composed as they were in the spirit
of Classicism, the two allegorical tales are devoid of any Russian features
and the moral lesson is presented in an abstract form. The hero of The Tale
of Tsarevich Khlor is given the task of finding a rose without any thorns, a
symbol of virtue, and aided by his mentor Reason (Rassudok) and a staff
for each hand, Honesty and Truth, he manages to avoid all temptations
and obstacles in reaching the cherished goal. The birth of an ideal mon-
arch forms the happy ending. Catherine found the unusual name Khlor
in Roman history: Constantius I Chlorus (‘the Pale’) was Roman emperor
in 305–306.
The complicated, not to say incoherent, Tale of Tsarevich Fevey illus-
trates Rousseau’s ideas of a natural upbringing. For Catherine, the main
goal of education was to develop “a healthy body and an inclination for
goodness”. A positive spirit should be formed by avoiding “sad fantasies
or doleful tales”.1

Reading for the Heart and Mind

The most remarkable cultural figure from the time of Catherine the Great
is Nikolay Novikov (1744–1818). A devoted Freemason, he was at the heart
of the liberal opposition in Russia, and as a publisher he produced most of
the books printed in the 1780s. Among these were textbooks for children.
In one of his pedagogical articles he asserts that “No artist or craftsman
can do without the necessary tools; there is a saying that a student without

1 Ekaterina II, “Instruktsiia po obrazovaniiu i vospitaniiu, 1784,” Babushkina azbuka

velikomu kniaziu Aleksandru Pavlovichu (M., 2004), 8.
10 chapter two

a book is like a soldier without a rifle. Still many home teachers suffer from
the lack of textbooks.”2 Over a period of ten years, Novikov published over
forty books for children, mostly translations of non-fictional works.
Novikov’s most important contribution to children’s literature was the
magazine Children’s Reading for the Heart and Mind (Detskoe chtenie
dlya serdtsa i razuma, 1785–89), a free weekly supplement to his Moscow
Gazette (Moskovskie vedomosti). The editor explains his pioneer under-
taking in the opening words of the magazine. Those children who know
French or German do not have any problems in finding suitable literature,
but those who, for financial or other reasons, do not master foreign lan-
guages are left empty-handed. In his view Russian children need to exer-
cise their native tongue: “It is wrong to abandon one’s native tongue or
even feel contempt for it. For anyone who loves his country, it is very sad
to see that so many of you know French better than Russian.”3 Through
the foreign material, he adds, the Russian children might acquire preju-
dices against their fatherland.
In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Novikov offered six- to twelve-year-
old children a broad range of out-of-school reading material. Everything is
presented in a language and a style readily accessible to children. Science
is popularised, mostly in the form of dialogues. The editor’s good friend,
Goodheart (Dobroserd), gathers the children round him for a talk, or a
father and his son sit down to discuss natural phenomena such as the sun,
water and snow, or big issues such as the structure of the universe. History
here is most often the history of ancient times, and the geographical texts
tend to treat faraway countries, like India and China, more extensively
than Russia. That the goals of enlightenment were reached was later con-
firmed by the writer Sergey Aksakov: “After my acquaintance with this
magazine a radical change took place in my childish mind, and a new
world opened up for me (. . .) Many natural phenomena, upon which I up
till then had looked without reflection, though with curiosity, achieved a
new meaning and importance for me and became more absorbing.”4
One of Novikov’s stated goals was to mould his readers into exemplary
Christians and citizens. Every issue has a quotation from the Bible as its

2 N.I. Novikov, “О vospitanii i nastavlenii detei,” Izbrannye sochineniia (М.-L., 1951),

431–432.
3 N.I. Novikov, “Blagorodnomu Rossiiskomu iunoshestvu,” Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa
i razuma 1 (1802): 2–3.
4 S.A. Aksakov, “Detskie gody Bagrova-vnuka,” Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh. Vol. 1
(M., 1955), 299.
 from enlightenment to sentimentalism (1770–1825) 11

epigraph. Through moral tales the child is taught his duties to God, the
Sovereign, his teachers and parents, his fellow men and himself. Little
Fyodor, who has the bad habit of wasting time by sleeping late, accidentally
wakes one morning at five o’clock and, thrilled by the experience, decides
to start a new life (“Nachalo tolko trudno”). A spoiled young nobleman
sent by his father to the countryside gradually learns to appreciate rural
life, the work of the peasants and the beauty of nature (“Perepiska ottsa
s synom o derevenskoy zhizni”). In other tales, class prejudices, laziness,
vanity, ignorance, and superstitions such as fortune telling and interpreta-
tions of dreams are condemned. Girl readers are given advice on beauty
care. Fables and riddles were standard material in the magazine.
The texts published in Children’s Reading for the Heart and Mind are
not signed, and most of them were in fact borrowed, some of them from
contemporary German children’s magazines or Joachim Campe’s Kleine
Kinderbibliothek, and only slightly Russianised. Campe’s famous pub-
lication had, incidentally, also been the model and the source for the
first publications of fictional material for children in Russia. They were
anthologies which included prose and poetry pieces: moral tales, fables,
edifying talks, historical anecdotes and dramatic scenes.5 The first volume
was called A New Kind of Toy, or Entertaining and Moral Tales for the Use
of Little Children (Novogo rodu igrushka, ili Zabavnye i nravouchitelnye
skazki, dlya upotrebleniya samykh malenkikh detey, 1776). The anthology
of four volumes, A Golden Mirror for Children, Containing One Hundred
Short Stories for the Education of the Mind and Heart of the Young (Zolotoe
zerkalo dlya detey, soderzhashchee v sebe sto nebolshikh povestey dlya
obrazovaniya razuma i serdtsa v yunoshestve, 1787), included stories by
Campe and the French writer Arnaud Berquin. It formed, in the words of
the historian of early Russian children’s literature, Marina Kostyukhkina,
“an encyclopaedia of children’s vices and virtues”.6

Novikov had hoped to inspire Russian writers to turn to children’s litera-

ture, but only Nikolay Karamzin (1766–1826), at that time a new name
in literature, answered his call. In 1787, Karamzin and Aleksandr Petrov
(c. 1763–93) took over Novikov’s magazine and changed its character
radically. The pages were now filled up with longer works for an older

5 Marina Kostiukhina, Zolotoe zerkalo: Russkaia literatura dlia detei XVIII–XIX vekov
(M., 2008), 10.
6 Ibid., 16.
12 chapter two

readership. The favourite was the French writer Stéphanie de Genlis, the
dominant influence at that time on girls’ reading all over Europe. Extracts
from her educational novel Les veillées du château and her Nouveaux con-
tes moraux et nouvelles historiques (1784), expressing Rousseauian views,
were published in Karamzin’s translation in issue after issue under the
title Rural Evenings (Derevenskie vechera). Madame de Genlis taught
manners and customs and praised moral improvement in a sentimental
spirit. The long moral tale Alphonso et Dalinda, remembered as an over-
whelming reading experience in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and
Injured (Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye, 1861), a memory which still brings
tears to the eyes of the hero, was also one of the works by de Genlis
that Karamzin chose for his Children’s Reading for the Heart and Mind.
In Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–69) the children tease each other with
the nickname Madame de Genlis, another reminder of the strong impact
the French writer had upon young Russians. Another important and sub-
stantial translation for the magazine was James Thomson’s The Seasons
(1726–30); this first English poem on the natural landscape was rendered
by Karamzin in prose.
Karamzin’s own main contribution to Children’s Reading for the Heart
and Mind was the story Eugene and Julia (Evgeny i Yuliya, 1789). Against
the background of a pastoral landscape a tragic love story is played out.
The virtuous orphan Julia, in whom “heart and mind were always active”,
is waiting for the homecoming of her beloved Eugene. Close friends since
childhood, they are now about to get married. But the planned wedding
turns into a funeral, as Eugene unexpectedly falls ill and dies within a few
days. It is as if nature itself intrudes, preventing innocent, platonic love
from turning erotic. Instead, Julia is offered another kind of bliss, a life in
rural isolation with bittersweet memories of a perfect love, a grave to tend
and hopes of a heavenly reunion. This ‘True Russian Tale’, as the subtitle
proclaims, was a revelation. Instead of the usual appeal to the reader’s
rationality, it offered languid melancholy. The pedagogical side had been
replaced by a concentration on the inner life of the characters with their
strong emotions and love for nature. Sentimentalism was thus first intro-
duced into Russian children’s literature before it reached adult readers.
In addition to Eugene and Julia, Karamzin also wrote some poems for
the magazine. The persona in “The Melancholic’s Spring Song” (“Vesenn-
yaya pesnya melankholika”, 1788) is sighing and crying in the midst of
nature as it celebrates the coming of spring. “When will my spring come, /
the winter of sorrow pass, / the mental gloom disappear?” he asks his Cre-
ator rhetorically. The theme of “The Sigh” (“Vzdokh”) and “On the Death
 from enlightenment to sentimentalism (1770–1825) 13

of the Maiden **” (“Na smert devitsy **”) is grief over the death of the
young loved one. Happiness is inevitably a thing of the past in the Senti-
mental texts.
All Novikov’s activities came to a halt in 1789. Catherine the Great had
initially supported all cultural endeavours, including educational reforms,
but the French Revolution and the Pugachev mutiny made her abandon
the ideals of the Enlightenment. Russian Freemasonry came under attack,
and in 1792 Novikov was imprisoned on the orders of the Tsaritsa. The
twenty volumes of his creation, Children’s Reading for the Heart and Mind,
however, lived on, appearing for the third and last time in 1819.
Karamzin moved on to adult literature and history, but his new works
also found a readership among adolescents. It has been claimed that
around 80% of children’s reading at the end of the eighteenth century
consisted of mainstream literature with Karamzin and the classicist poet
Gavrila Derzhavin being the favourites. Genuine poetry for children was
created by Aleksandr Shishkov (1754–1841) for the Children’s Library (Dets-
kaya biblioteka, 1783–85). The content consists partly of translations and
partly of adaptations from Campe’s Kleine Kinderbibliothek. Not only are
poems like “The Bathing Song” (“Pesenka na kupane”, 1773) and “Nikolay’s
Praise of Winter Pleasures” (“Nikolashina pokhvala zimnim utekham”,
1785) good translations; they are excellent poetry in their own right. The
joys of summer and winter are evoked with an inspiring freshness. The
happy mood and playfulness are conveyed through an energetic rhythm
and ringing sounds. It has been noted the Shishkov was the first to intro-
duce the image of a playing child into children’s literature.7
The volumes of Shishkov’s Children’s Library, consisting of poems,
tales, moral conversations, fables and plays, remained a favourite among
Russian children for many decades, the last edition appearing in 1846.
When working on his novel of reminiscences, Childhood Years of Bagrov
the Grandson (Detskie gody Bagrova-vnuka, 1856), Sergey Aksakov reread
the Children’s Library and was strengthened in his conviction that it
was the best reading that Russian children could be offered. Even as a
child Aksakov had learned many of its poems by heart, and they had
remained with him ever since.8 As a language theorist, then, Aleksandr
Shishkov went down in history as an archaist, but as a poet for children,
he was an innovator.

7 Kostiukhina, Zolotoe zerkalo, 27.

8 Sergei Aksakov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh. Vol. I (M., 1955), 299.
14 chapter two

The end of the eighteenth century saw an increased interest in folklore.

Folk and fairy tales had earlier been sold in the marketplaces in the form
of chapbooks, cheap lubok-publications, but as the demand grew, they
found their way into more substantial anthologies. Sergey Drukovtsov’s
(1731–86) Grandmother’s Tales (Babushkiny skazki, 1778), Vasily Levshin’s
(1746–1826) Russian Folktales (Russkie skazki, 1780–83) and Pyotr Timo-
feev’s (years of birth and death unknown) Russian Folktales (Skazki
russkie, 1787) were not, strictly speaking, addressed to children, but they
were soon followed by more suitable volumes like Medicine Against Mel-
ancholy, or Genuine Russian Folktales (Lekarstvo ot zadumchivosti, ili nas-
toyashchie russkie skazki, 1786) and The Merry Old Woman, the Children’s
Entertainer (Vesyolaya starushka, zabavnitsa detey, 1790). The latter was
in fact a second edition of Timofeev’s Russian Folktales, now addressing
children. The tales were retellings of authentic folklore material with the
writers trying to preserve as much as possible of the original diction and
the genre’s specific traits. Fairy tales with kings, princes, helpful animals,
the evil old Baba Yaga, and dragons were now introduced into children’s
literature. In these tales not only Ivan Tsarevich but also Ivan the Fool, the
simple but clever peasant boy, manages to pass all tests and win the hand
of the beautiful Maiden Tsar.
In 1795, for the first time, a volume of Charles Perrault’s classic fairy
tales that was intended for children was published in Russian under the
title Wonder Tales with Morals (Povesti volshebnye s nravoucheniyami).
One of Perrault’s readers was Nikolay Karamzin, and the Russian senti-
mentalist’s first attempt as a fairy-tale writer, The Beautiful Princess and
the Fortunate Dwarf (Prekrasnaya tsarevna i schastlivy karla, 1793), was
partly inspired by Perrault’s “Riquet with the Tuft” (“Riquet à la Houppe”).
Karamzin treats the motif of Beauty and the Beast in a playful manner.
Much to the grief of her father, ‘The Good Man and the Tsar’, the Beautiful
Tsarevna rejects all her suitors and declares her love for the hunchbacked
court dwarf. Karamzin focuses on the inner conflicts of the princess and
her father, as they waver between decision and doubt. With humour and
hyperbole the author belies the reader’s expectations, as the hideous
fiancé does not go through any physical transformation. The conflict
between beauty and ugliness paired with wisdom is solved through the
power of love, but only on the mental plane.
A similarly light-hearted attitude to the themes of fairy tales is to
be found in The Deep Forest: a Tale for Children (Dremuchy les: Skazka
dlya detey, 1795). In the subtitle Karamzin claims that the work was an
impromptu, a literary game, written in one day and on the given condition
 from enlightenment to sentimentalism (1770–1825) 15

that certain words (balcony, forest, ball, horse, hut, field, raspberry, bush,
oak, Ossian, spring, grave, music) should appear in a given order. It is
as if Karamzin set out to parody traditional fairy-tale elements. Simul-
taneously, he is working close to the ‘horror tales’ of children’s lore, as
the commentator-narrator first awakens fear in his young audience, then
reveals that it is all a hoax. A twenty-year-old boy, “handsome as an angel,
mild as a dove”, is urged by a mysterious voice to enter the Deep Forest.
Everyone lives in fear of the place where an evil wizard, a friend of Beel-
zebub, is supposed to reign. But instead of the forces of evil, the fearless
boy, led by a white rabbit, finds the woman of his life. At the end of the
fairy tale the narrator exposes all the supernatural elements of the story,
giving them realistic explanations. The Deep Forest is not the home of
evil, but a shelter against the real misfortunes that will befall mankind in
the future.
In spite of their literary qualities and originality, Karamzin’s tales did
not become part of the literary canon for children. The explanation might
be the author’s disrespectful attitude to the genre. The author dubbed
these works ‘trifles’, a respected sub-genre in the time of Sentimentalism,
but later running the risk of their being reduced to the literal meaning of
the word.
The most widely read and disseminated books for children at the turn
of the century were all of foreign origin, with Berquin, Ducray-Duminil
and de Genlis being the most popular names.

A New Century

The first quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of stagnation

for children’s literature. Few writers of prominence paid attention to
children’s reading, the interest in fairy tales temporarily faded, and new
children’s magazines did not live up to the standard set by Novikov. The
publications were predominantly translations. The period saw a growing
interest in prose, but few of the works provide more than tedious moralis-
ing. Sentimentalism lived on, more productively than within mainstream
literature. An example is Sokrat Remezov’s (1792–1868) The Happy Ward,
or the Duty of the Grateful Heart (Schastlivy vospitannik, ili dolg blagodar-
nogo serdtsa, 1808). The story that opens the volume consists exclusively
of expressions of the boundless gratitude that a boy from a poor family
feels for the benefactor who enabled him to get an education. Essays on
modesty, love for one’s country, and God’s presence in nature were added
16 chapter two

to this ‘Russian story’. In “How to Read Books”, Remezov warns children

against reading without discrimination. The child who reads love novels
will find a gap open up in front of his or her feet and may meet the same
fate as Goethe’s Werther. Remezov’s preference was for books that con-
tain “holy and genuine truths”, books that are full of “honour and glory”.9
Pavel Vavilov, a writer about whom we know nothing, offers children
positive and negative models in A Russian Alphabet for the Teaching of
Young People of Both Sexes (Rossiyskaya azbuka dlya obucheniya yuno-
shestv oboego pola, 1816) and Exemplary Children’s Stories for the Benefit
of the Heart and the Mind (Detskie obraztsovye povesti dlya ispravleniya
serdtsa i razuma, 1817). The book stresses Christianity; first children learn
the letters, simple words, the Ten Commandments, and some basic prayers,
and then they read about the disobedient Mashinka, the well-mannered
Karolinushka, the prudent Daryushka and the untidy Katya. The title of
one of Vavilov’s moralistic stories reveals his ideal for women: “Modesty
is the girls’ best virtue.” In company the heroine wisely keeps quiet, and
she never passes on to others what she has overheard.
Under the influence of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)
and Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791–92), Mariya Gladkova
(1795–?), the first Russian woman writer of children’s literature, wrote a
sentimental travel book for children—A 15-Day Journey, Described by a
15-Year-Old Girl for the Pleasure of Her Father and Dedicated to Her 15-Year-
Old Friend (15-ti dnevnoe puteshestvie, 15-ti letneyu pisannoe v ugozhde-
nie roditelyu i posvyashchaemoe 15-ti letnemu drugu, 1810). On a trip by
a noble family from Moscow to St Petersburg, one of the daughters keeps
a diary. She takes an interest in the places they pass and in the everyday
life of the people they meet. Various social issues, such as the hard lot
of the serfs and widespread drunkenness, are also raised. The refusal of
some noble girls to use Russian upsets her. Gladkova’s intention was to
reproduce the style, thoughts and feelings of a young girl not yet affected
by reading novels.
Children’s poetry was still underdeveloped. Aleksandr Merzlyakov
(1778–1830), a professor at Moscow University, wrote two delightful
poems, “A Children’s Chorus for Little Natasha” (“Khor detey malenkoy
Natashe”, 1809) and “From Annushka to Dear Mama upon Presenting Her
with an Album” (“Ot Annushki—mamenke pri podarke alboma”, 1815).
In these poems we meet exemplary children in the company of their
parents and friends. “A Children’s Chorus for Little Natasha” questions

9 S. Remezov, Shchastlivyi vospitannik, ili dolg blagodarnogo serdtsa (M., 1808), 2.

 from enlightenment to sentimentalism (1770–1825) 17

the belief that only fairy tales and fantasy products can interest children.
The neighbour’s son is fascinated by the tales told by his nurse and fails
to see the greatness of little Natasha. The author’s answer is precisely a
“True Story for Small Children”, a presentation of one day in the life of
Natasha, everybody’s darling. While preserving her childish spontaneity,
Natasha lives up to the ideal of modesty, tenderness and simplicity. The
daily life of the heroine is presented by a children’s chorus, an interest-
ing narrative solution. In the other poem, Annushka presents her beloved
mother with an album on her name day, asking her to write down all her
precious thoughts, everything that she wants to pass on to her children.
Congratulatory poems, formally written from the viewpoint of the child,
were to remain a popular type of verse throughout the first half of the
nineteenth century.
Fables had been one of the strongest genres within classicism, and they
remained so during the first half of the nineteenth century: in this period
more than seventy books of fables for children were printed. Aesop’s
fables were published twenty times. Sergey Glinka edited Forty Fables for
Children by the Best Ancient Writers (Sorok basen dlya detey iz luchshikh
drevnikh pisateley) in 1828, and the following year his brother Fyodor, a
well-known poet, published A New Aesop for Children (Novy Ėzop dlya
detey). But Aesop was gradually to be surpassed by Ivan Krylov (1769–
1844), one of the Russian nineteenth-century classics. Some of Krylov’s
two hundred or so fables were initially published in children’s anthologies
or magazines; others made their way into children’s reading shortly after
their first publication. Starting with Nikolay Grech’s reader for grammar
schools of 1822, they became compulsory reading for Russian children.
The critic Vissarion Belinsky never tired of recommending that children
should be given Krylov’s fables because of their poetic qualities, exem-
plary language and Russian wisdom. Krylov’s position as children’s writer
was cemented by the illustrated biography Grandfather Krylov (Dedushka
Krylov, 1845), written by Dmitry Grigorovich a year after the poet’s death.
For Russian readers, many of Aesop’s and Jean de La Fontaine’s timeless
fables are better known in Krylov’s Russianised poetic renderings than in
plainer translations of the originals; however, some of Krylov’s own fables
need comments concerning their context and allegorical dimensions in
order to be appreciated.

Most children’s magazines from the first quarter of the nineteenth century
had a short life span, even though they were practically the only publi-
cations for children at the time. The Friend of Youth (Drug yunoshestva,
1807–15), called The Friend of Youth and of All Ages (Drug yunoshestva i
18 chapter two

vsyakikh let) after 1813, was the most long-lived. The editor, Maksim Nev-
zorov (1763–1827), a writer from Novikov’s Masonic circle, was an eccen-
tric recluse who considered children’s education his moral duty and was
prepared to spend all his energy and money on this cause.
The purpose of the magazine was “to promote the education of hearts
and minds and assist, as far as possible, in the development of physi-
cal capacities”.10 The sphere of activity was wide, as Nevzorov detected
vices, weaknesses and shortcomings everywhere. The tone of most of the
material, be it the lives of famous historical persons or pieces dealing
with natural science, is polemical and moralizing. As Nevzorov refused
to accept any ‘light reading’, that is “satires, epigrams, love novels and
comedies”,11 fiction came to consist of fables, amateur poetry and occa-
sional translations (of Horace among others). Of interest was the editor’s
wish to publish works by talented children, but as the example of the
eleven-year-old Sergey Vikulin shows, Nevzorov’s child readers were cast
in the same mould as the grey-haired chief editor. Little Sergey opens one
of his poems with the high-flown exclamation “Why, man, oh why! dost
thou always / strive for earthly happiness . . .” and then offers heavenly joy
as the only lasting solution.12
In keeping with the time, The Friend of Youth took a strong patriotic
and religious stand from 1809 onwards. “God Is on Our Side” was added to
the magazine’s epigraph. Fiction was now David’s Songs from The Book of
Psalms or pompous odes to the heroes of the Russian army. The father-son
pair with its never-ending ‘reasoning and conversations’ was exchanged
for stern cross-examinations of the ‘question and answer’ type. The suc-
cess of the magazine in reaching the impressive number of one hundred
issues can only be explained by the generosity of Nevzorov’s friends and
the editor’s unselfish devotion to the task.
The playwright Nikolay Ilin (c. 1777–1823) edited 24 issues of the fic-
tion magazine The Children’s Friend (Drug detey, 1809). Though this was
not acknowledged, the moral tales and short plays were almost all taken
from L’ami des enfants (1782–83) and L’ami de l’adolescence (1775–81), two
magazines edited by Arnaud Berquin. How common this policy was is
illustrated by the fact that Berquin in his turn had diligently borrowed
from the German magazine Kinderfreund (1775–82), edited by Christian

10 Drug iunoshestva 1 (1807): XI.

11 Maksim Nevzorov, “Uvedomleniia ob izdanii zhurnala ‘Drug iunoshestva’ na 1812
god,” Drug iunoshestva 10 (1811): 128.
12 Drug iunoshestva 2 (1813): 139–140.
 from enlightenment to sentimentalism (1770–1825) 19

Weisse. One of the few Russian contributions in The Children’s Friend

was Merzlyakov’s above-mentioned poem “A Children’s Chorus for Little
Natasha”.
The St Petersburg publication A Magazine for Children (Zhurnal dlya
detey, 1813–14) introduced colour illustrations into Russian children’s peri-
odicals. The anonymous editor included articles on grammar, geography,
history and religion. Fiction was given equal place with fables and anec-
dotes. The published list of almost two hundred subscribers shows that
A Magazine for Children was distributed all over the Russian empire,
including to Finland and Poland.
The Children’s Messenger (Detsky vestnik, 1815) excelled in sentimental
tales in the style of the French writer Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. Liza helps those
who suffer and feels good at heart, thinking that her activity is a Christian
virtue (“The Compassionate Lizanka”). A mother demonstrates in a dras-
tic way to her naughty son how it feels for the nestlings to be deprived
of their mother (“The Orphaned Nestlings”). God and the Sovereign are
given pride of place in the magazine. Many articles dwell on the glorious
history of Russia and its great figures. A groundbreaking series was “The
Childhood of Great Men” with its exemplary role models for children. The
first book of this kind had appeared in 1812—The History of the Childhood
of Famous People (Istoriya detstva znamenitykh lyudey).

The year of 1812 and the victorious war against Napoleon’s armies made
the Russians aware and proud of their own identity. In literature the trend
took the form of national fervour and a heightened interest in historical
themes and heroic ideals. Children’s literature responded to the historical
moment. The changes can be seen even in primers. In its composition
and page layout, A Gift for Children in Memory of the Events of the Year
1812 (Podarok detyam v pamyat o sobytiyakh 1812 goda, 1814) is reminis-
cent of Istomin’s Illustrated Primer, as each of the letters has its own page,
34 loose cards in all. Ivan Terebenyov’s (1780–1815) coloured caricatures
and the satirical two-line poems depict the French army as composed of
poor wretches in rags, forced to live on crows, while the victorious Rus-
sian people are glorified. The Russian muzhik literally forces the French
soldiers to dance to his tune. But pity for the defeated is also part of the
Russian, purely Christian, spectrum: “As terrible as his revenge is, just as
sincere is his love.”
One of the writers for children (and others) most associated with 1812
is Sergey Glinka (1776–1847). Enrolled in the home guard, he raised money
for the army and appealed to national sentiments as a tribune. Patriotism
20 chapter two

was also at the core of his literary activities. True to his maxim, “Teach
your children to serve their Fatherland and not themselves”,13 in Russian
Historic and Moral Tales (Russkie istoricheskie i nravouchitelnye povesti,
1810–20) he celebrated national heroes, like Ivan Susanin and Aleksandr
Menshikov. These were true Russians, who rose above selfishness and
devoted their life to the service of Russia. This ideal is also illustrated by
the fate of Natalya Dolgorukova in “A Model of Love and Conjugal Fidel-
ity” (“Obrazets lyubvi i vernosti supruzheskoy”). Orphaned at an early
age, this ‘angel on earth’ experienced only a short period of happiness.
During the reign of Anna—a time when, according to Glinka, as a result of
foreign influence “pity and all sincere emotions were considered a crime”,14
Dolgorukova’s husband is exiled to Siberia. Throughout all the hardships
she stays by his side, and when he is finally executed, she decides to
become a nun. Girl readers are taught conjugal love, faithfulness, simplic-
ity, and unselfishness. Happiness proves to be short-lived, while a life in
the service of the Fatherland is bathed in eternal glory. The tale is based on
Dolgorukova’s own notes but follows the model of Russian hagiography.
In Glinka’s works, moral greatness is largely a thing of the past. The
author expresses his concern for the spirit of modern times. A father must
save his children from the morass of foreign influence—mainly French—
in philosophy, fashion and lifestyle. Card games, balls, novels, theatre and
luxury in general are condemned as leading to vanity, frivolity and god-
lessness. High society has already lost its genuine Russianness. In these
didactic stories, written in the spirit of the prevailing official patriotism,
the narrator gets emotionally involved, stressing his position through
italics, exclamation marks and sighs. The revealing names—Sensible
(Zdravomysl), Goodheart (Dobroserdov), Beneficent (Blagotvor), Brave
(Khrabrov) and Debauchee (Razvratin)—delineate who is who in Glinka’s
world.
The same ardent advocacy of Russian monarchism and patriotism is to
be found in Glinka’s much-read serial Russian History for the Purpose of
Education (Russkaya istoriya v polzu vospitaniya, 1817–19, 1823–25). The
author already in the preface states his case: “All the Russian chronicles
bear witness that not a single evil deed has escaped punishment and that
persecuted innocence was never anywhere deprived of the pleasure given

13 Sergei Glinka, Russkie istoricheskie i nravouchitel’nye povesti. Vol. 1 (М., 1819), 28.
14 Sergei Glinka, Russkie istoricheskie i nravouchitel’nye povesti. Vol. 2 (M., 1820), 21.
 from enlightenment to sentimentalism (1770–1825) 21

by a pure conscience. These edifying truths are not based on fantasies, but
on events confirmed by the annals of history. In this sense Russian history
can truly be called a school of national morals.”15 The fourteen volumes
also include Glinka’s own comments, as he reads history as a moral tale.
Glinka’s A New Game for Children and Pictures from Nature and the Arts
with Additional Moral Poems (Novaya igra dlya detey i kartiny prirody i
iskusstv s prisovokupleniem nravstvennykh stikhotvoreniy, 1826) is inno-
vatory. According to Glinka’s calculations, the 36 coloured pictures could
be combined in more than 20,000 ways, and playing with them meant
combining business with pleasure.
In addition to his magazine for adults, The Russian Messenger (Russky
vestnik), a counterpart to Karamzin’s Messenger of Europe (Vestnik
Evropy), Glinka published a children’s magazine, New Children’s Reading
(Novoe detskoe chtenie, 1819–24). As the title indicates, the magazine was
oriented towards Novikov’s eighteenth-century enterprise. Telemachus for
Educational Purposes (Telemakh v polzu vospitaniya) filled one issue in
1821, as did Glinka’s own adaptation of Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, carrying the revealingly conservative subtitle The Consequences of
Thoughtlessness and the Triumph of Family Virtues (Sledstviya legkomys-
liya i torzhestvo semeystvennykh dobrodeteley). The editor’s interest in
history could be seen from his regular column, “An Extensive Russian
Chronicle” (“Obshirnaya russkaya letopis”). Poems in the form of odes to
members of the Imperial family could also be found on the pages of the
magazine.
Glinka stressed the role of the parents in the process of children’s read-
ing. His own publications were admittedly not accessible to children at
first glance: they had to be explained by the fathers and the mothers. Only
then, through this gesture of parental love, could children’s literature fulfil
its mission.
Glinka was also much involved in the vogue for Plutarch’s Parallel
Lives (Sravnitelnye zhizneopisaniya) that emerged in these years. Plu-
tarch’s biographies of great men from ancient history had already been
translated into Russian in the previous century, but they were now passed
on to a young audience. In 1808–10 Pierre Blanchard’s adaptation of Plu-
tarch for Adolescents (Plutarkh dlya yunoshey) was published in eight
volumes. Blanchard was also responsible for a volume of biographies of

15 Sergei Glinka, “Predislovie,” Russkaia istoriia. Vol. 1. Third ed. (М., 1823), 28.
22 chapter two

famous women, Plutarch for the Fair Sex (Plutarkh dlya prekrasnogo pola),
translated into Russian in 1816–19 by the poet Fyodor Glinka. Nevzorov
included chapters from Parallel Lives in his magazine The Friend of Youth,
and Sergey Glinka followed this example in New Children’s Reading.
In Russia, ‘Plutarch’ became a generic term, denoting biographies of
famous people in general, irrespective of who the author was. Russian
political and military figures, from Peter the Great and Suvorov to the
heroes of battles against Napoleon, stood alongside the classicist writers
of the eighteenth century, like Lomonosov and Derzhavin. The gallery of
women ranged from Princess Olga to Countess Ekaterina Dashkova, presi-
dent of the Russian Academy up to her death in 1810.

The most interesting publication of a pedagogical nature from this period

is the Children’s Museum (Detsky muzeum, 1815–29). Every issue includes
several colour engravings and accompanying texts in three languages—
Russian, German and French. In all, the magazine ran to 154 encyclopaedic,
large-format issues with scientific material. The full title reveals its broad
scope: “The Children’s Museum, or a Collection of Illustrations of Ani-
mals, Plants, Flowers, Fruits, Minerals, Costumes of Different Nationalities
in Their Original Form, Antiquities and Other Things for the Exhortation
and Amusement of Adolescence, Collected and Engraved after the Best
Models, with Short Explanations at the Level of Children’s Understand-
ing.” Thus, in the opening issue the reader obtained elementary informa-
tion about the elephant, the camel and the ostrich.
The Children’s Museum was a luxurious and expensive publication. The
same can also be said of the period’s many encyclopaedic anthologies. They
include the French-Russian Children’s Encyclopaedia, or a New Abbreviation
of All the Sciences (Detskaya ėntsiklopediya, ili Novoe sokrashchenie vsekh
nauk, 1802, 1818), Children’s Encyclopaedia, or the Latest Understanding of
All the Sciences (Detskaya ėntsiklopediya, ili Noveyshee ponyatie o vsekh
naukakh, 1811), The Latest Children’s Encyclopaedia, or an Understanding of
All the Sciences (Noveyshaya detskaya ėntsiklopediya, ili Ponyatie o vsekh
naukakh, 1815) and A Precious Gift for Children, or A New and Complete
Encyclopaedia and Russian Alphabet (Dragotsenny podarok detyam, ili
Novaya i polnaya ėntsiklopediya i rossiyskaya azbuka, 1818).
As developments within the different sciences advanced, it gradually
became more and more difficult to summarise all knowledge in one vol-
ume, and authors were forced to limit their scope and publish more spe-
cialised works. Pierre Blanchard popularised the botanical and zoological
 from enlightenment to sentimentalism (1770–1825) 23

findings of the French scientist Georges de Buffon in a volume translated

into Russian as Buffon for Young People (Byuffon dlya yunoshestva, 1814). It
included short, fascinating descriptions of different human races, animals,
birds and fishes. According to the preface to a Russian edition of 1866, the
book was “not cold and dry science, but filled with charm and passion”.16

16 Biuffon, Rasskazy dlia iunoshestva iz estestvennoi istorii (M., 1866), 3.

 chapter three

ROMANTICISM (1825–1860)

In the 1820s, Russian literature entered a new phase, Romanticism. The

changes were also felt in writing for children. A more favourable attitude
to imagination and emotional life brought with it a new way of looking at
childhood. Children were perceived as higher beings with an enchanted,
poetic world of their own. The concept of ‘a dual world’ signifies the co-
existence of everyday life and a world of fantasy, with the child effortlessly
crossing the borderline. This is the basis for the genre of fantasy, exempli-
fied during the Romantic period by works like Antony Pogorelsky’s The
Black Hen and Vladimir Odoevsky’s The Little Town in the Snuffbox. These
were the first Russian children’s books to achieve classic status. Still read
and appreciated are also the fairy tales in verse written by the Romantic
poets Aleksandr Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Ershov. Many of
their fairy tales were based on foreign models, but in Russia they became
part of a search for a genuine ‘folk spirit’.
The interest in the national past and tradition found an outlet in books
on Russian history and geography. Adaptations of biblical stories were
also popular. The dominant genre of the period was, however, the moral
tale, an edifying epic or dramatic story on good manners and high moral-
ity. These stories contain no national features, and they often turn out to
be translations or adaptations without any mention of the original source.
The significance of their moral lessons can hardly be disputed, but, never-
theless, only period pieces were produced in this genre.
During the Romantic period, the first Russian writers devoting them-
selves almost exclusively to children’s literature appeared on the scene.
Boris Fyodorov, Anna Zontag, Vladimir Lvov, Aleksandra Ishimova, Pyotr
Furman and Viktor Buryanov were all genuine children’s writers, whatever
the literary level of their works. Gradually there emerged an awareness
that children’s literature formed a field of its own, separate of literature
for adults. A children’s book should not only be edifying, it should also
have literary qualities. The critic Vissarion Belinsky played an influential
role in this process.
The number of titles rose steadily. While a total of approximately 320
titles were issued in the period 1801–1825, the number more than dou-
bled in the next quarter-century, rising to around 860, a publication rate
 romanticism (1825–1860) 25

of more than thirty per year. By the middle of the 1830s, the output of
original Russian children’s literature surpassed the number of transla-
tions. Much fiction also found its way into readers and textbooks, proving
that literature was by now perceived as an indispensable part of a child’s
upbringing.

Fairy Tales and Fantasy

After a short-lived vogue for folktales at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, these more or less disappeared from children’s literature for several
decades. During the Romantic era, the folktale reappeared, both in the
form of adapted folklore material and original, artistic fairy tales. A six-
volume publication of Johann Musäus’ German folktales in 1811–1812 was
a visible sign of a growing appreciation. In 1825 a volume of new trans-
lations of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales appeared, but the crucial turning
point was a publication the following year in the magazine The Children’s
Interlocutor (Detsky sobesednik). The set of “Children’s Tales” (“Detskie
skazki”) included “The Briar-Bush” (“Kolyuchaya roza”), “Dear Roland
and the Maiden Bright Light” (“Mily Roland i devitsa Yasny svet”), “Brother
and Sister” (“Bratets i sestritsa”), “Little Red Riding Hood” (“Krasnaya
shapochka”), “The Enchantress” (“Volshebnitsa”) and “Raul the Blue Beard”
(“Raul sinyaya boroda”). The sources were not mentioned, but a closer
examination reveals them to be works by Charles Perrault, Ludwig Tieck
and the Brothers Grimm.
A cautious attitude was taken towards the genre of fairy tales, as can
be seen of the instructions accompanying the tales published in The Chil-
dren’s Interlocutor: “It is the mentor’s duty to explain to the children the
moral lesson of these tales and to separate in them the embellishments of
fantasy of useful truths.”1 The section of fairy tales was attributed to Vasily
Zhukovsky, a poet with close connections to German literature, but it was
in fact Zhukovsky’s niece and protégée, Anna Zontag, who was responsible
for the translations. This became clear in 1828, when Zontag included the
translations in her own volume Stories for Children (Povesti dlya detey).
Zhukovsky took an interest in Zontag’s work, and in a letter to her in 1827,
he expressed his view on translating for children: “Do not translate slav-
ishly, but as if you were telling your daughter a foreign story: this will give

1 Quoted in Nikolai Trubitsyn, “О skazkakh V.A. Zhukovskogo,” Russkii filologicheskii

vestnik 1 (1913): 131–132.
26 chapter three

your style a delicate clarity and simplicity.”2 This was also the policy of
Zontag, as she did not translate word for word, but retold the fairy tales in
a personal, creative way. When the hunter opens the wolf ’s belly in “Little
Red Riding Hood”, “out came flowers, then pies, and after that a milk jug
rolled out and milk spilled on the floor; he made another cut, and a red
cap appeared and suddenly the girl herself jumped out alive!”
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the King of the Mice (Nussknacker
und Mäusekönig, 1816) was to become a Russian favourite, not least
because of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. The German fantasy tale was translated
into Russian in 1835, appearing both as a separate volume, The Tale about
the Nutcracker (Skazka o Shchelkune), and in a slightly Russified version,
“Mr Nutcracker Doll” (“Kuklya Gospodin Shchelkushka”), to be found in
The Children’s Little Book for 1835 (Detskaya knizhka na 1835 g.) by Viktor
Buryanov. In 1840 the volume A Present for the New Year: Two Fairy
Tales by Hoffmann for Children Large and Small (Podarok na novy god:
Dve skazki Gofmana dlya bolshikh i malenkikh detey) included not only
The Nutcracker and the King of the Mice but also The Unknown Child (Das
fremde Kind, 1817). The unnamed translator was probably Vladimir Odo-
evsky, a great admirer of Hoffmann. In 1846, a more substantial Hoffmann
volume appeared under the title Fairy Tales for Children (Volshebnye
skazki dlya detey).
Wilhelm Hauff’s Oriental fairy tales were introduced by Zontag in 1844,
when the collection The Caravan (Die Karawane) appeared in a free, but
unabridged, translation, with the title A Fairy Tale in the Form of a Lit-
erary Miscellany for Easter Sunday of 1844 (Skazka v vide almanakha na
Svetloe Voskresene 1844 goda). Three years later, in 1847, Hans Christian
Andersen appeared in Russian as a children’s writer, when Julius Lundahl
(1818–54), a Swedish-speaking Finn, translated his “The Little Match Girl”
(“Malenkaya prodavshchitsa spichek”) into Russian for the magazine Little
Star (Zvyozdochka). In the same year A New Educational Library (Novaya
biblioteka dlya vospitaniya) published “The Nightingale” (“Solovey”) and
“The Ugly Duckling” (“Gadky utyonok”) in Apollon Grigorev’s rendering.

The Black Hen

1829 is a memorable year in the history of Russian children’s literature.

The publication of Antony Pogorelsky’s The Black Hen, or the Underground

2 Ibid., 131.
 romanticism (1825–1860) 27

Inhabitants (Chornaya kuritsa, ili podzemnye zhiteli) in fact signified the

birth of an original, prominent Russian children’s literature. Up to that
time children’s books had been covertly didactic and moralistic, as well
as highly dependent upon foreign patterns. The artistic side was under-
rated and fantasy and poetic feeling absent. The portrayal of children was
neither psychologically nor stylistically convincing. The Black Hen totally
changed the picture.
Antony Pogorelsky (1787–1836), a pseudonym for Aleksey Perovsky, was
a minor writer of romantic tales. Doubles, strange metamorphoses, and
meetings with the Evil Spirit filled his works. For the amusement of his
nephew, the future writer Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, he created
a tale about the meeting between a boy and an inhabitant of the under-
ground. Pogorelsky labelled The Black Hen a magic tale; he had made a
groundbreaking choice of genre for the work, in which realistic scenes are
freely mixed with fantastic episodes. All is based upon solid insight into a
child’s way of experiencing the world. The hero is a young boy, Alyosha,
who lives in a boarding school in St Petersburg at the end of the eigh-
teenth century. Out of kindness, he saves the life of a black hen, which
turns out to be a Lilliputian in disguise. As a sign of gratitude, the Lillipu-
tian takes Alyosha on nocturnal trips to his subterranean kingdom. Here
the boy is presented with a talisman, a magic hemp-seed, which can make
every wish come true. A thoughtless request—to know all lessons without
doing any homework—brings out the worst sides of Alyosha’s character.
Of having been a humble and diligent boy, he turns into a complacent
idler. Eventually, he even goes back on his word and discloses the secret
world of the Lilliputians. As a result, Alyosha not only loses his wonderful
talisman and his friend, but also causes the ruin of the hidden world.
Pogorelsky’s The Black Hen has unanimously been read as a cautionary
tale. From his friendship with the black hen, Alyosha learns the impor-
tance of fidelity and diligence. Deceiving himself in the choice between
good and bad, he simultaneously deceives his friends, both above and
under ground, and it is only by admitting his treachery to the hen that he
is able to free himself from his shortcomings.
In some respects, The Black Hen is reminiscent of German romantic
prose. Works by Clement Brentano, Friedrich de La Motte Fouqué, the
Brothers Grimm, and Ludwig Tieck, as well as folktales about subterra-
nean worlds of gnomes, have all been mentioned as possible sources of
influence. Pogorelsky was even personally acquainted with Hoffmann.
Ultimately, all comparisons serve more to demonstrate the originality of
Pogorelsky’s fantasy tale than to explain it. The Black Hen became a clas-
sic of Russian children’s literature because of its convincing portrait of
28 chapter three

Fig. 2. Karl Bryullov: Antony Pogorelsky (1836)

 romanticism (1825–1860) 29

childhood, its absorbing story line and timeless morals, but there is also
ambivalence in the text that makes it attractive to a dual audience.
The fantastic events of the tale are explained by Alyosha’s readings.
Just like Don Quixote, he has read too many romances of chivalry and too
many magic tales, and, as a result, he perceives the surrounding world in
a distorted way. His friendship with the black hen Chernushka and his
move from reality into a fantasy world are his way of searching for com-
pensation for the parental love and care that he lacks. For a long time
Alyosha only lives in his dreams and fantasies, alienating himself more
and more from his school and comrades. In this reading, the German
teacher of the boarding school functions as Alyosha’s saviour when he
gives the boy a good beating and forces him to admit that his nocturnal
adventures are no more than fantasies. From that point on, knowledge
and science take the place of dreams, and the beauty of St Petersburg
surrounding him replaces the pitiful imitations that he encountered in
the subterranean world.
Chernushka appears to be Alyosha’s benefactor, but in the world of
symbols and folk superstitions, a black hen has always been linked to the
Evil Spirit, either representing Satan himself or acting as his go-between.
The hen is indeed trying to win the boy’s soul, drag him down into the
underground and turn him into an obedient tool of its will. Pogorelsky’s
choice of a hemp-seed and not the traditional ring for a talisman has
caused astonishment. However, just like hashish, traditionally extracted
from hemp, the talisman gives its user a deceitful feeling of omnipotence.
Alyosha has been blamed for his failure to keep his promise not to reveal
the secrets of his subterranean friends, but it can also be argued that this
is the only way for him to be saved. Only by breaking with the forces that
the black hen represents can he can rid himself of his bad habits and harm-
ful fantasies and again win the acceptance of the school community.
The Black Hen also bears witness to Pogorelsky’s fascination for Free-
masonry. Alyosha is a candidate for membership in a secret organization
with its own social ideals and hierarchy. He passes the initiation test but
fails to become a ‘spiritual knight’, because he divulges the organisation’s
secrets. His self-examination brings out many intolerable traits of char-
acter. Alyosha clearly lacks modesty, moderation and self-denial, all cen-
tral ideals for a Freemason. The precarious stature of the subterranean
kingdom and subsequent expulsion of its inhabitants reflect the problem-
atic situation for Freemasonry in the Russia of Pogorelsky’s time. Many
regarded masonry as a religious apostasy whose members served the
30 chapter three

cause of Antichrist. Hence the unmasking of such a fraternity served the

welfare of society.
The Black Hen was hailed as a sensation in the children’s magazine
New Children’s Library, and its editor, the writer Boris Fyodorov, urged
Pogorelsky to enrich children’s literature with more works of the same
sort in the future.3 Leo Tolstoy mentioned it as one of his childhood
favourites.4 The favourable reception notwithstanding, Pogorelsky did not
write anything else for children, and thus The Black Hen remained his only
work within the genre.

The Town in the Snuffbox

The other significant fantasy tale of the period, Vladimir Odoevsky’s (1803–
69) The Little Town in the Snuffbox (Gorodok v tabakerke, 1834), is also
based upon the concept of a dual world, with a child functioning as the
bond between the two realities. Misha is curious about his father’s musi-
cal box, and in a dream, he enters its fascinating world and learns how
its different components function and interact. All small parts are given
individual human features. When the boy wakes up, he can faultlessly
explain the mechanism of the box to his father. Knowledge is attained not
through studies, but with the help of dreams and a lively imagination. The
rest can later be extracted from books, as Misha’s father points out.
The critic Belinsky was thrilled, writing in his review that E.T.A. Hoff-
mann could well have been the author of The Little Town in the Snuffbox.
The tale was hailed as a useful introduction to the laws of mechanics. That
Odoevsky simultaneously had given his work an allegorical dimension was
overlooked. What Misha encounters in the musical box is in fact a minia-
ture society, pointedly hierarchic. For those on the bottom, the bell-boys,
life is hard, endless toil. Like the Russian serfs, they are forever bound
to their place. The hammers and the roller, that is the middle class and
the landowners, justify the existing order with the argument that they are
just cogs in a huge machine. The ultimate power in this unhappy world
belongs to Tsarevna Spiral. In his dream, Misha sides with the exploited
people, and opposing the warning of his father, he touches upon the great
spring. The results of the allegorical attempt at a revolution are disastrous.

3 Novaia detskaia biblioteka 1 (1829): 110.

4 L.N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii v 90 t. Vol. 66 (M., 1953), 67. (Letter to M.M. Lederle.
October 25, 1891.)
 romanticism (1825–1860) 31

This concealed analysis of the repressive side of Russian autocracy leads

the reader to discouraging conclusions: the existing, highly unfair social
order is not to be questioned.
Odoevsky favoured fantasy in literature for adults, but for children he
never again produced anything similar to The Little Town in the Snuffbox.
His other celebrated children’s book, Frost Ivanovich (Moroz Ivanovich,
1841), is a fairy tale which makes use of Russian folkloric motives, devices
and stylistic ideals. The Grimm Brothers’ Frau Holle can also been seen
as a source of inspiration. Two girls are contrasted—the humble and dili-
gent Miss Stitcher (Rukodelnitsa) and the cold-hearted Miss Lazy-Bones
(Lenivitsa). With the help of Frost Ivanovich, a forerunner of the Russian
Father Christmas, the sympathetic protagonist is rewarded, while her neg-
ative counterpart is left empty-handed. An important part of the moral
behind Frost Ivanovich is that good deeds should not be done for the sake
of compensation, but have a worth of their own. Odoevsky employed
the same opposition between diligence and laziness in “The Broken Jar”
(“Razbity kuvshin”), which he claimed to be a Jamaican tale, and “The
Two Trees” (“Dva dereva”). In “The Inhabitant of Mount Athos” (“Zhitel
Afonskoy gory”) the holy man learns from a flower that one should serve
mankind without demanding gratitude.

Pushkin and Zhukovsky

The thirties was a decade of flourishing for literary fairy tales in verse.
Aleksandr Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Ershov all were inspired
by Russian folktales, still largely existing only in oral tradition, and from
European romantic literature. Their choice of putting fairy tales into verse
might seem astonishing, as hardly any predecessors in Russia, or outside
Russia, for that matter, can be found. For them it was a way of giving
folklore new literary qualities, but also a reflection of their wish to write
primarily for an adult audience. In the case of Pushkin and Zhukovsky, it
did take several decades before their works were established within chil-
dren’s literature.
Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837), so central in Russian literature in gen-
eral, is also a key figure in Russian children’s literature. His fairy tales in
verse, even if they were not created for young people, have become clas-
sic children’s reading. Pushkin did not admire contemporary children’s
literature. The primitiveness of the moral tale disturbed him, and he was
likewise annoyed by the predominant, outdated stylistic ideals. Russian
32 chapter three

folklore inspired him to try his hand at fairy tales. During his exile to
the Mikhaylovskoe estate in 1824–25, he listened to tales told by his old
nanny, and made notes for future works. Not only the motifs of these folk-
tales, but also the beauty of their language, pleased him. Although only
one of Pushkin’s five completed fairy tales was indisputably based on Rus-
sian material, he gave a Russian form and language to foreign sources. He
wrote his fairy tales in 1830–1834, at the peak of his poetic powers, and
they are among his finest artistic accomplishments.
The first of Pushkin’s fairy tales, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his Son the
Glorious and Mighty Knight, Prince Guidon Saltanovich and the Fair Swan-
Princess (Skazka o tsare Saltane, o syne ego slavnom i moguchem bogatyre
knyaze Gvidone Saltanoviche i o prekrasnoy tsarevne Lebedi, 1831), is the
most original and elaborated. It is told in trochaic tetrameter with vari-
ous fairy-tale figures and motives intricately woven together. The char-
acters are more psychologically complex than was common within folk
tradition. Prince Guidon, who as a child was left to die, but who narrowly
escaped, sets out on a search for his father, Saltan. The plot progresses
dynamically, without abstract descriptions. In the end, the striving of the
good man is rewarded, and the family is reunited in a moving scene. The
Swan-Princess, the helpful animal, turns into a beautiful woman, ready
for marriage, and a new empire is established for the young couple. It is
a world of happiness and prosperity with parallels to the myths of Peter
the Great’s creation of St Petersburg.5 The Tale of Tsar Saltan ends, just
like Russian folktales, with a celebration, where even the bad characters
are forgiven simply ‘for the joy’ of it.
Mark Azadovsky convincingly showed in 1936 that Pushkin’s The Tale
of the Dead Tsarevna and the Seven Heroes (Skazka o myortvoy tsarevne
i o semi bogatyryakh, 1834) was mainly based upon the Grimm Brothers’
Snow White (Schneewittchen) and not upon a Russian folktale, as previ-
ously had been claimed.6 In his library, Pushkin had a French collection
of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales of 1830. Some minor Russian national
features were added to the tale, however. The seven dwarves are mous-
tached Russian heroes, bogatyrs, who, when not working in the woods,
chop off Tatar heads. The Tsarevna is sheltered from her evil stepmother

5 See J. Orlov, “Mif Peterburga i obraz tsarya v ‘Skazke o tsare Saltane’,” in A. Kovacs,
I. Nagy I. (ed.), Materialy III i IV Pushkinologicheskogo kollokviuma v Budapeshte. Studia
Russica Budapestinensia II–III (Budapest, 1995), 75–86.
6 M.K. Azadovskii, “Istochniki skazok Pushkina,” in Pushkin: Vremennik Pushkinskoi
komissii. Vypusk 1 (M.-L., 1936), 148.
 romanticism (1825–1860) 33

by the bogatyrs, but she refuses to marry any of them, as she wants to stay
true to her betrothed, the Tsarevich Elisey. Led by the sun, the moon and
the wind, Elisey finds his beloved and brings her back to life. The Tsarevna
stands out as Pushkin’s ideal woman, diligent, good-hearted and faithful.
At the wedding, the storyteller is present, drinking and rejoicing with the
others.
The Tale of the Fisherman and the Little Fish (Skazka o rybake i rybke,
1835) is the most popular among Pushkin’s fairy tales and the first to be
incorporated within the body of children’s reading. Rhymes and a tradi-
tional metric scheme are omitted here, in accordance with the poetics of
the West-Slavic songs that Pushkin was translating at the same time. In
spite of his poverty, the fisherman places no demands on the golden fish
that he has captured. In a Russian context, the fisherman can be seen
as representing the Slavophile ideal of kindness, simplicity and unselfish-
ness. The title chosen by Pushkin links the man to the fish, making him
part of nature. The wishes of his wife are, on the contrary, infinite, driven
as she is by the false ideal of power and might. Her thirst for domination
reaches its peak as she asks to become, not pope or God, as in the Ger-
man original, but ‘the sovereign of the ocean’. This is an attempt to attain
dominion over the very source of life. In addition, the ideals of the patri-
archal family have been forgotten in this outburst of gender hubris. In the
end, the couple is thrown back to their starting point. The Russian saying
‘by a smashed trough’, that is ‘to be no better off than when you started’,
comes from Pushkin’s fairy tale.
Anna Akhmatova was the first to point out that The Tale of the Golden
Cockerel (Skazka o zolotom petushke, 1835) was based upon “The Legend
of the Arabian Astrologer” from Washington Irving’s collection The Alham-
bra (1832).7 In the xenophobic atmosphere of Stalin’s time, this finding was
not welcome, and Soviet Pushkinists duly reprimanded Akhmatova. The
first cultural bridge across the Atlantic Ocean had been established via a
French translation. Pushkin’s enigmatic fairy tale has a strong streak of
Oriental mysticism. The threat against peace and stability does not come
from outer enemies, as King Dadon thinks, but from within himself; his
passion for a femme fatale destroys him. Blind to bad omens, he breaks
his promises, defies destiny and dies suddenly and violently. Akhmatova
proposed an allegorical reading, in which we see the two tsars of Russia
during Pushkin’s time wavering between the abuse of power and a wish

7 Anna Akhmatova, Sochinenii. Vol. 3 (Paris, 1983), 171.

34 chapter three

for withdrawal from the throne. Pushkin himself appears as the wise man,
eventually deprived of his promised rewards.
The Tale of the Priest and His Workman Balda (Skazka o pope i rabot-
nike ego Balde, 1831) is one of the folktales that Pushkin jotted down at
his country estate in 1824. The priest is looking for a farm hand and finds
his man in Balda, who “eats for four and works for seven”. The only pay-
ment Balda request is food and the right to hit his master three times
over his head when the year has passed. So as not to have to ‘pay’ Balda,
the priest gives him impossible tasks, but the simple, hardworking man
turns out to be cleverer than his master. The playful tone of the comic tale
breaks off as Balda, with a heavy hand, exacts his ‘payment’, pronouncing
the verdict: “Priest, you shouldn’t have gone rushing off after cheapness.”
A satirical portrait of a priest was highly sensitive in Pushkin’s time, and
when the fairy tale was posthumously published in 1840, Vasily Zhukovsky
wisely changed the priest into a merchant. On the other hand, The Tale
about the Priest and His Worker Balda was a favourite in Soviet times, as
it appeared to testify to Pushkin’s anticlerical disposition and sympathy
for the workman.
Pushkin had plans to publish his fairy tales as a cycle, arranged not
chronologically, but according to their themes. The tales can in fact be
divided into two groups. In The Tale of Tsar Saltan and The Tale about the
Dead Tsarevna and the Seven Heroes, home and family constitute the main
values, and both tales have a conventional happy ending. The protago-
nists of The Tale of the Fisherman and the Little Fish, The Tale of the Golden
Cockerel and The Tale of the Priest and His Workman Balda are gripped by
a strong passion that makes them blind. They trust in their own strength
but, when confronted with the laws of the outer world, they perish. The
same theme of false and fatal roles appears in other works by Pushkin in
the thirties, as in his ‘small tragedies’ and The Queen of Spades (Pikovaya
dama).
The plots of Pushkin’s fairy tales develop swiftly. Detailed descriptions
and inserted episodes are avoided. Simple epithets are preferred to meta-
phors. Pushkin adopted some stylistic features and traditional formulas
from folktales, but this did not shield him from criticism by contemporary
traditionalists. Belinsky frankly declared Pushkin’s fairy tales to be bad,
devoid of any poetic value. They were unsuccessful imitations, in which
all traces of the true Russian folk soul were lost.8 Today it is precisely their

8 V.G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 2 (M., 1953), 347.

 romanticism (1825–1860) 35

authenticity and their lack of artificiality which is admired. In Russia the

fairy tales have come to be considered as the quintessence of Pushkin’s
intimate bond with the Russian people, though this view carries the obvi-
ous risk of losing sight of the pan-human and pan-European background
of these works.
Pushkin did not set out to renew Russian children’s literature. In 1836,
he turned down Vladimir Odoevsky’s offer to publish in the magazine
Children’s Library (Detskaya biblioteka). Significantly, he did not consider
his fairy tales as relevant in this connection. Their entry into the chil-
dren’s canon came later, starting in the 1860s when Konstantin Ushinsky
included some of Pushkin’s fairy tales and poems in his popular readers.

In the summer of 1831 the poet Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852), the main
representative of early Romanticism in Russian poetry, was Pushkin’s
neighbour in Tsarskoe Selo. Both were fascinated by folklore, and some-
thing of a competition in writing fairy tales in verse arose between them.
Like Pushkin, Zhukovsky wrote for an adult audience, but his tales also
became classic children’s reading after his death.
Zhukovsky’s contributions to the literary duel of 1831 were The Sleeping
Tsarevna (Spyashchaya tsarevna, 1832) and The Tale of Tsar Berendey, His
Son Tsarevich Ivan, the Plots of Koshchey the Immortal and the Prudence
of Tsarevna Mariya, the Daughter of Koshchey (Skazka o tsare Berendee,
o syne ego Ivane tsareviche, o khitrostyakh Koshcheya Bessmertnogo
i o premudrosti Marii tsarevny, Koshcheevoy docheri, 1833). The first-
mentioned fairy tale, written in trochaic tetrameter, was modelled upon
both Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty” (“La belle au bois dormant”) and the
Grimm Brothers’ “The Briar-Bush” (“Dornröschen”). The changes are insig-
nificant, but the stories are told with great refinement and, partly, also
with irony. True to the spirit of the originals, Zhukovsky did not set out to
individualise the heroes or psychologically motivate their action. Instead,
he indulged in detailed, poetic descriptions and added an erotic dimen-
sion. One genuinely Russian feature is the standard ending—a party that
the storyteller attends.
The Tale of Tsar Berendey is basically a Russian fairy tale, handed over
to Zhukovsky by Pushkin, but it also bears traces of the Grimm Brothers’
“Dear Roland and the Maiden Bright Light” and “The Two King’s Children”
(“Die beiden Künigeskinner”). Tsar Berendey thoughtlessly promises to
give the evil Koshchey Bessmertny “what he has but does not know”. It
turns out to be his own newborn son, Ivan Tsarevich. However, Ivan is
saved from Koshchey by the cunning, fair Mariya Tsarevna, Koshchey’s
36 chapter three

daughter. It is an exciting tale about the triumph of love and the power of
the cross over evil and forgetfulness. Nikolay Gogol was very pleased that
the ‘German’ Zhukovsky had created something so completely Russian in
its spirit and literary devices. However, it has generally been considered a
weakness that Zhukovsky preferred the solemn and heavy hexameter to
the trochaic tetrameter. A Russian fairy tale in hexameters has been seen
by some as an impossible combination, but it can also be argued that
what was achieved was a prose-like diction, radical for its time.
Dating from the 1840s, a decade when Zhukovsky himself had small
children, there are three tales in verse—The Tale of Tsarevich Ivan and
the Grey Wolf (Skazka ob Ivane-Tsareviche i serom volke, 1845), The Tulip
Tree (Tyulpannoe derevo, 1845) and Puss in Boots (Kot v sapogakh, 1846).
The Tale of Tsarevich Ivan and the Grey Wolf is Zhukovsky’s masterpiece. It
unites a host of well-known figures and motives from Russian folktales in
a clever and ingenious way. Ivan, the youngest of three brothers, aspires
to the hand of Beautiful Elena, and to reach that goal he needs the help
of the Firebird, the Grey Wolf, the horse Golden Mane (Zolotogriv) and
Baba Yaga. With the help of ‘the water of life and the water of death’ he
rises from the dead to continue his quest. The evil force is personified
in Koshchey Bessmertny, and to kill him is not easy, as his death is in a
coffer under an oak on an island. In the coffer there is a hare, in the hare
a duck, in the duck an egg, and in the egg Koshchey’s death. In the end,
Ivan needs a cudgel-out-of-the-sack, a table-be-set and а cap of invisibility
to kill Koshchey and win Elena for his bride. A humorously playful detail
is that the Grey Wolf stays in the family as nanny, telling fairy tales to the
small children and teaching the older ones to read and write. The whole
story is said to have been found among the posthumous papers of this
fabulous beast.
The Tulip Tree is a blank-verse version of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy
tale Von dem Machandelbaum (The Almond Tree). It is a ghost tale, full
of ghastly details, and consequently seldom published for children. Zhu-
kovsky’s last fairy tale in verse, Puss in Boots, comes close to Perrault’s
original, Le Maître Chat, ou le Chat botté, except for some slightly satirical
accents.
Russian critics tend to treat Zhukovsky’s children’s stories unfairly. It
is as if the competition of the summer of 1831 is still going on and Push-
kin, the national poet, must wear the victor’s wreath. Such critics consider
Zhukovsky too European to deal with Russian material and too concerned
with the original texts. While simplicity and spontaneity were character-
istic of Pushkin’s fairy tales, Zhukovsky developed a refined, highly poetic
 romanticism (1825–1860) 37

diction. On the other hand, it can be claimed that Zhukovsky eventually

showed more interest in purely Russian material, while also being more
innovative. He concentrates more on pure adventure plots and approaches
them with subtle irony and parody. At a time when the position of fairy
tales as children’s reading was far from established, Zhukovsky unequivo-
cally defended the genre: “I presume that fairy tales for children should
be pure fairy tales, with no other goals than a pleasant, pure development
of fantasy.”9

The Little Humpbacked Horse

In literature for adults, Pyotr Ershov (1815–69) is a nonentity, but in chil-

dren’s literature, his position as a classic surpasses even that of Pushkin.
The Little Humpbacked Horse (Konyok-Gorbunok, 1834) is one of the most
popular Russian children’s books of all time. Ershov wrote it as an 18-year-
old student at the University of St Petersburg. Inspired by Pushkin’s fairy
tales, he set out to create something similar, using figures and motives
from fairy tales he had heard during his Siberian childhood. The metre
he chose was Pushkin’s favourite—the trochaic tetrameter. The result
was a masterpiece. After reading The Little Humpbacked Horse, Pushkin
is supposed to have exclaimed: “Now I can also stop writing this kind of
literature.”10
The Little Humpbacked Horse is a folktale pastiche in which Ivan the
Fool rises to power, assisted by a little magic horse. Ivan, the youngest
of three peasant brothers, is considered a fool, but is in fact simple, hon-
est and straightforward. If needed, he can also show cleverness and cour-
age. Even so, he is quite passive, sleeping much of the time, or despairing
when facing difficult tasks. Without his little humpbacked friend and
other helpers among the animals, he would not have caught the Firebird,
brought Tsar Maiden to the court and found her ring at the bottom of
the ocean. However, as Vladimir Propp has pointed out, the protagonist
of the folktale is nevertheless always a hero, and his helpers and donors
are expressions of his power and capabilities.11 In the end, Ivan the Fool

9 V. Zhukovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: V 20 t. Vol. 4 (M., 2009), 518–519.

(Letter to P.A. Pletnev, 1845.)
10 A.K. Iaroslavtsov, Petr Pavlovich Ershov, avtor skazki “Konek-Gorbunov”: Biograficheskie
vospominaniia tovarishcha ego A.K. Yaroslavtsova (SPb, 1872), 2.
11 V.Ya. Propp, Istoricheskie korni vol’shebnoi skazki, (L., 1946), 150.