Chapter 8. Mirror images
On Soviet-Western reflections in children’s books of the 1920s and 1930s
Evgeny Steiner | National Research University Higher School of Economics
This chapter compares the Soviet and the Western children’s books of the 1920s–1930s. The creative output of the Soviet innovative artists and writers was in many respects isomorphic to the production of the modernist left artists and educators in the West. The various kinds of formal experiments in the sphere of visual representation are considered in detail. An important topic that is investigated is the “production book”, the genre of children’s books about machines and about how things are made. It corresponds with the idea of “here and now” proclaimed by the American educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell. A special emphasis is placed on the demonstration of similarities in the concepts of the New Man (Soviet) and the New Generation (American).
References
Primary Sources
Agnivtsev, Nikolai
1926 Malen’kii Chorny Murzuk. Illus. Samuil Adlivankin. Moscow: Mol. Gvardiya.
Agnivtsev, Nikolai
1926 Tvoi Mashinnye Druz’ya. Illus. Alexey Efimov. Moscow: Raduga.
Artzybasheff, Boris
1954 As I See. New York NY: Dodd, Mead.
Boccioni, Umberto et al.
1910 Manifesto of the Futurist Painters 11 February 1910 // The Niuean Pop Cultural Archive. URL:
[URL] (22 November 2013).
Brown, Margaret Wise
1938 The Little Fireman. Illus. Esphyr Slobodkina. New York NY: William Scott & Co.
Burton, Virginia Lee
1935 Choo Choo: The Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Burton, Virginia Lee
1939 Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Cendrars, Blaise
1928 Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs. Illus. Pierre Pinsard. Paris: Les Éditions des Portiques.
Deharme, Lise
1928 Il était une petite pie. Illus. Juan Miró. Paris: Edition Jeanne Bucher.
Exposition le Livre d’Enfant en U.R.S.S: 27 avril-22 mai
1929 Paris: Editions Bonaparte.
Fillmore, Parker
1919 Czechoslovak Fairy Tales. Illus. Jan Matulka. New York NY: W. Collins, Sons & Co.
Hoyt Swift, Hildegarde
1929 Little Blacknose: The Story of a Pioneer. Illus. Lynd Ward. New York NY: E. M. Hale & Co.
Il’in, Mikhail
1927 Karmanny Tovarishch. Moscow & Leningrad: GIZ.
Il’in, Mikhail
1930 Rasskaz o Velikom Plane. Moscow: GIZ.
Ionov, Ilya
1926 Topotun. Illus. Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. Leningrad: Raduga.
Kalinin, Nikolai
(ed.) 1995 Ol-Ga-lina from Chichago.
Da! 2-3: 39-48.
Lebedev, Vladimir
1922 Chuch-lo. Petrograd: Epokha.
Liddell, Mary
1926 Little Machinery. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page and Co.
Lissitzky, El
1928 Chetyre Arifmeticheskikh Deistviya (Published in 1984 by Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne).
Marshak, Samuil
1925 Vchera i Segodnya. Illus. Vladimir Lebedev. Leningrad: Raduga.
Marshak, Samuil
1927 Sem’ Chudes. Illus. Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. Leningrad: Raduga.
McMahon, John
1922 In and Out, Up and Down: A Door Book. New York NY: John Martin’s Book House.
Meigs, Cornelia
1928 The Wonderful Locomotive. Illus. Berta & Elmer Hader. New York NY: McMillan Co.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague
1925 Kniga Rasskazov pro Zdes’ i Teper’ dlya Detei ot 2 do 7 Let. Moscow: GIZ.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague
1925 Neboskreb. Moscow: GIZ.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague
1925 Pesenka Novogo Parovoza. Moscow: GIZ.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague
1927 Kak Borya Gulyal po Nyu Yorku. Moscow: GIZ.
Mitchell, Lucy Sprague
1929 Kak Voda Popala v Vannu. Moscow: GIZ.
Mukerji, Dhan Gopal
1928 The Gay-Neck. Illus. Boris Artzybasheff. New York NY: Dutton.
Parain, Natalie
1932 Ronds et Carrés. Paris: Flammarion.
Patri, Angelo
1928 Pinocchio in America. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co.
Patri, Angelo
1930 The Adventures of Pinocchio. New York NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co.
Pavlovich, Nadezhda
1925 Parovoz-gulyaka. Illus. Boris Kustodiev. Moscow: GIZ.
Piper, Watty
[Arnold Munk]
1930 The Little Engine That Could. New York NY: Platt & Munk.
Poltavsky, S
1927 Detki-Raznotzvetki. Illus. Sergey Chekhonin. Moscow: ZIF.
Schwitters, Kurt, Steinitz, Käte & van Doesburg, Theo
1925 Die Scheuche Märchen. Hannover: Aposs Verlag.
Shaposhnikov, G
1927 Vanya v Kitae. Illus. Anatoly Kalinichenko. Rostov-na-Donu: Sev.-Kavkaz ODN.
Shatalova-Rakhmanova, Maria
1926 Figury. Leningrad: Raduga.
Stein, Gertrude
1939 The World Is Round. Illus. Clement Hurt. New York NY: William R. Scott.
Vvedensky, Aleksandr
1929 Zheleznaya Doroga. Illus. Alisa Poret. Leningrad: GIZ.
Zilov, Lev
1924 Mai i Oktyabrina. Illus. Vladimir Smirnov. Moscow: Mospoligraf.
Secondary Sources
Atzmon, Leslie
1996 Scarecrow fairytale: A collaboration of Theo Van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters.
Design Issues 12(3): 14-34.
Averill, Esther
1930 Avant-garde and traditions in France. In
Contemporary Illustrators of Children’s Books, compiled by Bertha E. Mahony & Elinor Whitney, 89-96. Boston MA: The Bookshop for Boys and Girls.
Bates, Ernest Sutherland
1932 We Americans: A study in infantilism. In
Our Neurotic Age: A Consultation,
Samuel D. Schmalhausen (ed), 434-452. New York NY: Farrar and Rinehart.
Beeck, Nathalie op de
2004 The first picture book for modern children: Mary Liddell’s little machinery and the fairy tale of modernity.
Children’s Literature 32: 41-83.
Benjamin, Walter
1999 Arcades Project. Translated by
Howard Eiland &
Kevin McLaughlin; edited by
Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Buck-Morrs, Susan
2002 Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Calhoun, Arthur W
1930 The child mind as a social product. In
The New Generation: The Intimate Problems of Modern Parents and Children,
Victor F. Calverton &
Samuel D. Schmalhausen (eds), 74-87. New York NY: Macaulay.
Chukovsky, Kornei
1963 Ot Dvukh Do Pyati, 17th edn. Moscow: Detgiz.
Denning, Michael
1996 The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York NY: Verso.
Dietrich, Dorothea
1993 The Collages of Kurt Schwitters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Flerina, Evgenia
1926 Pedagogicheskaya otzenka proizvodstvennykh knig dlya doshkol’nikov. In
Iz opyta issledovatel’skoi raboty po detskoi knige: Analiz proizvodstvennoi knigi dlya doshkol’nikov,
Esfir I. Stanchinskaya &
Evgenia A. Flerina (eds), 11-14. Moscow: Doshk. Otd. Galvsotsvoprosa.
Hearn, Michael Patrick
1996 Discover, explore, enjoy. In
Myth, Magic, and Mystery: One Hundred Years of American Children’s Book Illustration,
Michael Patrick Hearn,
Trinkett Clark &
H. Nichols B. Clark (eds), 1-41. Boulder CO: Roberts Rinehart Publishers and Norfolk VA: In cooperation with The Chrysler Museum of Art.
Higonnet, Margaret
2009 Modernism and childhood: Violence and renovation.
The Comparatist 33: 86-108.
Ivanov, Vyacheslav V
2009 The theme of chronotope in the culture of the newest time. In
Potom i Opytom (
By Sweat and Experience),
Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, 312-339. Moscow: Tsentr Knigi BGBIL im. M.I.Rudomino.
Mahony, Bertha
1929 Realms of Gold. Boston MA: Horn Book.
Mahony, Bertha & Whitney, Elinor
(eds) 1930 Contemporary Illustrators of Children’s Books. Boston MA: The Bookshop for Boys and Girls.
Mickenberg, Julia
2010 The new generation and the new Russia: Modern childhood as collective fantasy.
American Quarterly 62(1): 103-134.
Pankenier, Sara
2006 Infant non sens: Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-garde, 1909–1939. PhD dissertation, Stanford University.
Segal, Elena
1962 Iz Vospominanii. In
Zhizn i Tvorchestvo M. Il’ina, 276-403. Moscow: Detgiz.
Stales, José Lebrero & Pérez, Carlos
(eds) 2010 Toys of the Avant-garde. Málaga: Fundación Museo Picasso Málaga.
Steiner, Evgeny
1999 Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children’s Books. Seattle WA: University of Washington Press.
Steiner, Evgeny
2014 Avant-garde and the Construction of the New Man: Utopias of the 1920-30s.
Sztuka Europy Wschodniej (Warszawa-Torún) 2: 93-102.
Steinitz, Käte
1968 Kurt Schwitters: A Portrait from Life. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Sverdlova, Klavdia
1925 Slaby uchastok ideologicheskoi raboty (The weak sector of ideological work).
Na Postu: 113-120.
Wright, Rowe
1928 Women in publishing: May Massee.
Publishers’ Weekly 29 September.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Conrad, JoAnn
2019.
Modernity and Modernism in Twentieth-Century American Picturebooks.
International Research in Children's Literature 12:2
► pp. 127 ff.
Emeliyanova, Maria
2019.
I periodici per l’infanzia degli anni Venti e la creazione del futuro cittadino sovietico
.
Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale :1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.