Part of
Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, seascapes and cityscapesEdited by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 7] 2017
► pp. 203–220
This chapter examines the artistic functions of the visual and verbal depiction of a child’s fantasy country in Lev Kassil’s novel Sсhwambrania (1933) against the background of the state’s interest in geography and cartography. After a short overview of the political circumstances that accompanied the reforms in Soviet cartography, this chapter applies Harley’s approach to the interpretation of the two maps of the child’s fantasy world of Sсhwambrania, considering the graphic and linguistic components of these maps and their description in the text, and, in addition, reconstructing the different types of context relevant to Kassil’s book.