Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary: The University of Chicago exhibit website

Check out the website for The University of Chicago's exhibit "Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary."  The exhibit has concluded in its physical location (The University of Chicago Library), but the website is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in Soviet children's books and illustrations.  The site offers sections on Media and Style, Social Organization, Technology, Socialism for the Nations, Individuals (Aleksandr Deineka, Samuil Marshak and Mikhail Il’in, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dem’ian Bednyi and Viktor Deni, Oberiu), and Educational Materials.

The exhibit was curated by Robert Bird and Matthew Jesse Jackson and a team of University of Chicago graduate students. An (inexpensive) catalogue of the exhibit is available here at The University of Chicago Press.

Book Announcement: Russische Kinderliteratur in der Sowjetunion der Jahre 1920-1930

Here's another title for a bibliography on Russian and Soviet's children's literature: Russische Kinderliteratur in der Sowjetunion der Jahre 1920-1930, by Gertraud Marinelli-Konig.

Larissa Rudova reviewed this book in Slavic Review 68:2 (Summer 2009): 446-447, and there are two online reviews of the book available--one in English and one in German.  In the first of these reviews, Aaron J. Cohen writes for Canadian Slavonic Papers, 

"This book is an expanded version of a dissertation completed in 1976. It describes and categorizes the genre of children's literature in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. The author treats the subject using a structuralist approach, and readers who are interested in the formal and institutional structure of this genre should find the book useful."

Catriona Kelly's "Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia,1890-1991"

Alexandra Smith, University of Edinburgh, reviews Catriona Kelly's Children's World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991 for the WGRCLC site.  Smith writes,

Kelly’s encompassing study will be of immense interest to a wide range of readers, including social historians, anthropologists, cultural studies specialists, and anyone seeking to understand the effects of a Soviet childhood and the problem of trying to generalize about the diversity of educational practices.

Read the review in its entirety here.

Competing Ideologies in Children's Literature in Russia, 1918-1935

Larissa Rudova writes in to let everyone know that Jacqueline Olich's Competing Ideologies and Children's Literature in Russia, 1918-1935 is available at Amazon and other booksellers.  Here is the book's description from the Amazon site:

After the October Revolution of 1917, the impetus to control authorship, the potential of children's literature as a creative medium, and the desire to communicate their visions to child-readers and their parents drew many ideologues to children's literature. Political figures, pedagogues, bureaucrats, authors, and illustrators entered into a public debate about what form a Soviet children's literature should assume. This interdisciplinary study integrates original Russian archival research, scholarship in Russian cultural and social history, and theoretical studies of children's literature to show how the process of creating children's literature in Soviet Russia was a contested one. Adults entered into a symbolic discussion about the meaning of their past, present, and future by authoring and contesting children's literature.

 If you are interested in reviewing this book, please let me know at kellyherold@gmail.com.