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Soviet Children’s Picture Books Of The 1920s As primers Of The Of The Future. Book Review Of The pedagogy Of Images: Depicting Communism For children. Ed. By M. Balina And S. Oushakine. Toronto: university Of Toronto Press, 2021
Abstract
The review gives a response to the collection of articles “Depicting Communism for Children”, published in 2021 edited by American researchers Marina Balina and Sergei Oushakine. The collection is based on the materials of many years of discussions, held at seminars and conferences at Princeton University (USA), dedicated to the modern approach to the study of the phenomenon of Soviet children’s books of the 1920s and 30s.
The reviewed book The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children, edited by Marina Balina and Sergei Oushakine, is dedicated to Soviet children’s book illustrations of the 1920s–1930s, which had an ideological function. The introduction and sixteen chapters written by different authors demonstrate a variegated picture in which there is a place for avant-garde artistic experiments, educational projects and discussions about children’s books. Illustrations for books that were not related to politics did not come into the focus of attention of the authors of the collection, but nevertheless the coverage of the material is very wide. Different chapters examine how paper, nature, electricity, vezdekhodnost (goeverywhereness), time, the death of Lenin, the Red Army, the proletariat, and “Americanism” were represented in children’s illustrations. Due to involvement of many researchers, the book presents different approaches and methods of visual analysis borrowed from visual studies, art criticism, and history. Not all the authors are convincing in their analysis, but the publication of this collection is undoubtedly an important event in this field of study, even though illustrations for children of the 1920s and 1930s are well-studied.
The article discusses the process of building a “resource approach” in relation to nature in early Soviet children’s non-fiction. On examples from books on energy, technology, minerals, flora and fauna, it is shown how the sentimentalization of nature is abandoned and redirected towards consumer discourse. Methodologically the article is in the zone of intersection of literary approaches, adhering to the tradition of rhetoric studies and attempts to contextualize it, using the arsenal of digital humanities and automated construction of concordance according to the lemmas “benefit”, “useful”, “use” with the corpus tool (DetKorpus). The analysis of the identified contexts of word usage demonstrates how, with the help of the concept of “benefit”, authors create a new way of nature management in the readers’ minds, in which “taking advantage” becomes a key condition in interaction with the outside world. With regard to the extraction of raw materials, energy resources, the development of territories, and wildlife, authors use the rhetoric of “metaphorical violence” – the suppression and coercion of free natural forces that should be put at the service of man. Such ideological components of this phenomenon as the campaign to promote the first five-year plan and M. Gorky’s texts, conceptualizing the project of an anthropocentric world, in which a person acts as a source of power, reorganizing the “first nature” into culture – “second nature”, are considered. The existence of a special trend within the framework of non-fiction, formed by a specific author’s rhetoric, with a double pragmatics of texts, consisting not only the translation of ideas, but also involvement of children in economic and production processes, is summarized.
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