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Russia
Ben Hellman
The first Russian books explicitly addressed to children were primers, with Ivan
Fyodorov’s ABC-Book (1571) as the earliest sample. The birth of the picture book was
The Illustrated Primer (1694), in which Karion Istomin with the help of poems and
pictures gave young people maxims and scattered facts about the surrounding world.
Peter the Great favoured books on courtesy, like A True Mirror for Youth (1717), which
served the Europeanising process of Russia. Correspondingly foreign literature
dominated children’s reading all through the eighteenth century.
The Enlightenment and the pedagogy of Rousseau introduced new ideals into
children’s literature during the reign of Catherine II. The Empress’s own didactic
allegories constituted the first attempts to write fiction for children in Russia. The ideals
of the period found expression in the first children’s magazine, Detskoe chtenie dlya
serdtsa i razuma [Children’s Reading for the Heart and the Mind, 1785–1789]. The
editor Nikolai Novikov offered 6 to 12-year-old children a wide range of informative
material in an engaging form while publishing fiction only sparingly.
The figures for children’s books published in the eighteenth century vary, according to
the principle of definition, from fifty to four hundred. The number steadily grew in the
nineteenth century, when the importance of periodicals (which could most easily reach
the scattered readership) increased. The first illustrated magazine appeared in St
Petersburg in 1813–1814.
The main epic genre of Romanticism was the fairy tale. Anonymous folk-tales and
songs had always occupied a prominent place in oral children’s culture, but it was only
in the nineteenth century that they were systematically collected. The children’s
magazines introduced folk-tales on a broader scale in the middle of the century, and
Aleksandr Afanasyev’s classical collection Russian Folk Tales (1855– 1864) also dates
from this period. Afanasyev compiled a special edition for children in 1871.
Much earlier—in the 1830s—fairy tales in verse had been composed by Russian
Romantics. Originally written for adults, they gradually also gained a place in children’s
literature. Aleksandr Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Ershov took subjects, motifs
and literary devices mainly from Russian folklore, but as Zhukovsky’s The Sleeping
Tsarevna (1831) and Puss in Boots (1845) and Pushkin’s The Tale About the Fisherman
and the Fish (1835) show, west European fairy tales were also known in Russia.
Ershov’s The Little Hump-Backed Horse (1834) was a folk-tale pastiche, in which a
peasant boy rises to riches and power with the help of a magic horse.