Article published in:

Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde
Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 5] 2015
► pp. 189–214

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).

Published online: 29 July 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.5.09ste

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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

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