Russian Childrens Book Research

RUSSIAN CHILDREN'S BOOKS

Tatiana Glebova, Where is the bear?

The most prominent artists of the Russian Revolution were the children's book illustrators, they had a mass audience of uninformed, malleable young people that they could mold into allies of the Soviet Union, these young people appealed to their commitment to an art manifesto based on the creation of a new kind of person for the revolutionary age. 

Within children's books illustrators work, they mostly used geometric designs, with machine-age forms and an architectural sense of space in their approach to the visual arts. 

In the early 1930s, the people in charge within the Soviet Union decreed that avant-garde had no right to exist, making local authorities, law enforcers and their interior ministry system take up the task of liquidating these artists as a class and in the unprecedentedly short historical span of the first Five Year Plan (1928 - 1932) had accomplished that task on the whole. 

Avant-garde did not die though, it merely adopted itself into a new historical situation with childrens book illustrations, poster design, typeface etc. Authorities realised they had made a mistake but by this time Avant-garde had already surfaced in pretty much anything with a design. 

'To the envy of all Europe, illustration of children's books is developing in our country in a most interconnecting and significant fashion... Illustration, too, has its exploration of new paths, its fierce competition among schools, but all this is being done so richly, so vividly and confidently; the artist of the word has on the whole and in general fallen behind the artist of the image' 
- Anatoly Lunarcharsky. 

An absence of the art market and an increased government made artists look for other means to adapt, images from art and literature reinforced and developed dominant ideologies and in some way anticipated them. 

Picture books for toddlers and children might not seem like a good place for the reconstructing of the message brought to the masses by leading figures in the art world of the 1920s, but we can find much in them that is both edifying and instructive.

Children's books are aimed at an audience of thousands thus giving them a much broader social impact and an logical place to start in relation to a new utopia like thinking, Books for children are significant for builders of the new world, since it wasn't a matter of re-informing but in forming to begin with. 

'Contemporary children's books and contemporary illustration must educate the citizen in the child, the citizen who will be ready to build the culture of the new world.' 
- Pavel Dulsky 

Avant-garde movements are generally prone to the feeling that everything done before by their elders is bad and must be either destroyed or replaced, however even with their forward and logical thinking in relation to children's books and creating this new utopia with their visual imagery, avant-garde still didn't get their hoped for immediate reaction and it instead took a long time for it to become a big thing.

Stories for Little Comrades; 
Revolutionary Artists and the making of Early Soviet Children's Books 
by Evgeny Steiner