Stuart Jeffries,
“Out with bourgeois crocodiles! How the Soviets rewrote children's books”, The Guardian 24/5/2016
From the capitalist ice cream eater who came to a sticky end to the
Malevich-inspired adventures of two squares, Bolshevik kids’ books sparked an
avant garde revolution in illustration.
In 1925, Galina and Olga
Chichagova illustrated a two-panel poster that called for a revolution in
children’s illustration in the new Soviet Union. The left panel featured
traditional characters from Russian fairytales and folklore – kings, queens,
the Firebird, the witch Baba Yaga and, my favourite, a crocodile in elegant
nightcap and dressing gown. “Out,” read the caption, “with mysticism and
fantasy of children’s books!!” Meanwhile, the right panel depicted what the
sisters thought fellow artists should be illustrating to improve the first
generation of little Soviet citizens. Under the beneficent eye of Lenin were
images of young pioneers in red neckerchiefs, working on collective farms, as
well as illustrations of Red Army cavalry troops riding into battle, factories,
and aircraft. Anthropomorphised crocodiles, apparently, weren’t sufficiently
revolutionary.
In one
cautionary tale, a bourgeois capitalist eats too much ice cream and freezes to
death. This call to revolutionise children’s illustration was part of
socialism’s bigger political struggle. “In the great arsenal with which the
bourgeoisie fought against socialism, children’s books occupied a prominent
role,” wrote one L Kormchii in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda in 1918, “The
bourgeoisie, well aware of the force of children’s books, took advantage of
them to strengthen their own power … We struggle and we die, but before we
drown in our own blood, we must seize these weapons from enemy hands.”
“The idea
was to abolish fantasy literature and illustration because they were seen as
bourgeois and unhelpful to the revolution,” says Olivia Ahmad, curator of A New Childhood: Picture
Books from Soviet Russia. Imagine if Harry Potter or
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s Room on the Broom were deemed unacceptably
counter revolutionary. In one cautionary tale called Ice Cream, by writer
Samuil Marshak and illustrator Vladimir Lebvedev, a bourgeois capitalist eats
too much ice cream and freezes to death. In Red Neck, a poem by Nicolia Aseev,
a faithful Young Pioneer (the Soviet youth group) refuses to take off his red
neckerchief even when attacked by a raging bull, thus demonstrating doughty
revolutionary commitment even in the face of an unpleasant goring.
Soviet children’s
literature was fun in the 1920s and early 30s, even while it propagandised for
socialism and helped Soviet children to do what many of their parents could
not, namely read. Just as the Soviet Union needed to be electrified and
industrialised at breakneck pace, so the children of the revolution needed to
be educated fast if their homeland was to survive in a hostile world. Cheaply
produced, captivatingly illustrated books were the answer. Early Soviet picture
books, explains Ahmad, were printed lithographically on to cheap paper, then
folded and stapled to create 10-15 page paperbacks. Children’s books were,
then, part of the Soviet political struggle. But the revolution is not so much
in the text as in the images. What Walter Benjamin wrote of Moscow during his
1927 visit – “Each thought, each day, each life lies here as on a laboratory
table” – is true of the thrilling changes in illustrations for children’s books
during the early years of the Soviet experiment.
The
illustrations for Red Neck, for instance, were done by Natan Altman, a theatre
designer and cubo-futurist sculptor. Here Altman’s figurative line drawings
were laid over angular abstract shapes, a design which we are familiar with,
but in the 1920s must have been discombobulating to Russian eyes. The great Russian artist El Lissitzky went
further. In About Two Squares: a Suprematist Tale in Six Constructions, he
riffed on recent Russian avant garde experiments by borrowing Kazimir
Malevich’s black square. In the story, the black square joins a red square that
represents communism and both head off on a dialectical space trip. The two
flat shapes crash to Earth causing destruction in three dimensions – a kind of
abstractionist depiction of the Bolshevik revolution – from which emerges a new
Earth built in the red of communism.
The book
format itself was the scene of revolutionary experiment. In Isaak Eberil’s
illustrations for A Cinema Book About How the Pioneer Hans Saved the Strike
Committee, our hero alerts strikers about the approaching police. But what’s
exciting is not the message but the format: the images were printed as mock film
reel, which kids were encouraged to cut out and project themselves (somehow). Similarly,
Aleksei Laptev’s book The Five Year Plan illustrates the state of farming, coal
and iron production in 1927, but what’s wonderful about it is that each page
can be folded out to reveal planned expansions in each sector by 1932. When
fully opened, the book is two metres long. If I’d been a 10-year-old Russian
child in 1927, I would so have wanted that for my bedroom wall.
My favourite
works in the show are Alisa Poret’s illustrations for How the Revolution was
Won, featuring scenes from October 1917, not least because she uses an elevated
perspective borrowed from Soviet film pioneers like Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein
to give an epic tenor to her material.
Such works
were in an ideological struggle with earlier, illustrated children’s books.
Ahmad shows me some sumptuous pre-revolutionary illustrations by Alexander Benois
for his 1904 Alphabet in Pictures series. One frame illustrates a letter
alongside a teeming array of expensive looking dolls. You can almost smell the
privilege, hear nanny padding across the nursery carpet. Another letter is
illustrated with some toffs in powdered wigs looking at the stars through their
telescopes from their St Petersburg terrace. Though charming, these images
depict a world that Bolshevism sought to overcome.
Contrast
Benois’s illustrations with Vladimir Lebedev’s 1925 Alphabet, in which each
letter is starkly printed in black and decorated with tersely expressed, yet
vibrant animal figures. It’s an alphabet for a new era - for the children of
the revolution. One of the exhibition’s heroes is the artist Vera Ermolaeva, a Russian pioneer of non-objective art, suprematism, and constructivism.
In 1918 she founded the first Soviet children’s book publisher, a collective
called Segondia (Today). She and her fellow artists used basic materials, flat
perspective and distorted proportions, thereby forging a link between
pre-Revolutionary avant garde art, old depictions of Russian folklore and the
revolutionary demands of the day. Ermolaeva’s illustrations are among the most
endearing in the show. One is a poster for a poem called Cockerel, another the
cover illustration for a volume of Walt Whitman’s poem O, Pioneers! But her
story is tragic. In 1934, she was arrested for “anti-Soviet activities” and
sent to a work camp in Kazakhstan, where she was shot in 1937. Recently, she
was honoured by Russian women, including members of Pussy Riot, who founded the
Vera Ermolaeva Foundation
of Contemporary Feminist Art to support
female artists.
The era
hymned by this exhibition came to an end, Ahmad argues, in 1934 when the
All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers adopted socialist realism as the only
tolerable aesthetic style. Non-objectivism? Constructivism? Suprematism?
Surrealism? Primitivism? All these isms, which had been so important in the
flourishing of children’s illustration in the previous decade and a half, were
deemed inimical to the Soviet state. By
then, censorship and greater state control over publishing was becoming more
intense. For instance, El Lissitzky’s Yiddish-language book The Only Kid became
one of the first titles to be destroyed following renewed state censorship in
the 1930s of the leading language of Russian Jews. Increased censorship prompted the exile of
many avant garde artists who had revolutionised children’s illustration during
the previous decade and a half. Russian emigrés Nathalie Parain and Feodor
Rojanovsky, for instance, went to France where they created the beloved Père
Castor series of illustrated children’s books. Other artists, such as Marshak
and Lebedev, stayed and tailored their work to fit the new Stalinist order.
The
excitement of the early years of the Soviet experiment in children’s books may
have been over, but it had an important afterlife. Soviet books brought to
Britain inspired the creation of the Puffin Picture books in 1940. And now
there is this exhibition, the first of its kind in Britain, to remind us of
that scarcely conceivable, utopian moment when children’s books were a place
for avant garde experiment and revolutionary political struggle.
