In prose, Vladimir Dahl produced revisions of folk-tales, while Antony Pogorelsky
wrote an original fantasy story, The Black Hen, or The Subterranean Inhabitants (1829),
in which a Petersburg schoolboy gets to know the secret world of some Lilliputians and
thereby learns fidelity and diligence. Vladimir Odoevsky also combined a realistic and a
fantasy layer, when he acquainted the children with the mechanics of a music box (The
Little City in a Snuffbox, 1834). His Moroz Ivanovich from Uncle Irinei’s Fairy Tales and
Stories for Children (1838) was a variation of Cinderella, while the prototype for Sergei
Aksakov’s The Scarlet Little Flowers (1858) was the French fairy tale Beauty and the
Beast.
Romanticism also brought with it growing interest in the national past. Pyotr
Furman’s biographical tales about the great men of Russia were popular reading up to
the early twentieth century. Aleksandra Ishimova, the first prominent woman writer in
Russian children’s literature, popularised Russian history (1837–1840) and biblical tales
(1841) with due concern for the readers’ fondness for dramatic events. Ishimova was
also influential as the editor of two girls’ magazines. The extensive literary output of
Boris Fyodorov is full of praise of Christian virtues, as his favourite subheading, ‘Moral
examples’, reveals. Viktor Buryanov specialized on geography, taking the children on
‘walks’ in a popular trilogy (1836–1838).
Poetry was widely included in children’s magazines, but only by the mid-nineteenth
century was a significant artistic level reached. Vasily Zhukovsky wrote small, charming
poems with bird- and animal-motifs, but more to the liking of children were the Russian
imitations of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter. The first translation had been
published in 1849, only four years after the original.
The realistic novel brought fame to Russian literature in the nineteenth century. The
development of children’s literature was not as remarkable, even if leading critics early
attached importance to this field of literature and worked for the birth of a realistic
school. With his numerous reviews, Vissarion Belinsky laid a basis for a theory of
children’s literature. Writers had to give a truthful picture of the society and awake a
civic spirit, without forgetting, however, the readers’ literary taste. Belinsky’s endeavours
were continued in the 1850s and 1860s by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai
Dobrolyubov. Out of the existing Russian children’s literature, only magazines like
Novaya biblioteka dlya vospitaniya [The New Library for Education] (1847–1849) and
Podsnezhnik [Snowdrop] (1852–1862) were approved by these utilitarian critics.
Realism became dominant in children’s literature in the 1860s. Many prominent
writers of adult literature made sporadic attempts to write for youth. Another factor of
importance was the broadening and democratisation of the readership through a
network of schools. For the elementary schools the prominent pedagogue Konstantin
Ushinsky edited two influential readers, Children’s World (1861) and The Native Word
(1864), and he preferred to use fictional narratives in information texts. A central place
was given to poetry, folk tales, riddles and proverbs.
Lev Tolstoi founded a school for peasant children in 1859, and compiled The New Primer
(1875) and A Russian Reader (1875–1885) for the use of the pupils. Recommended by the
Ministry of Education, these books were widely used in Russia until the October
revolution. Apart from non-fiction material on natural science and history, A Russian
Reader included stories, fairy tales and fables. Features in common were a short form, a
758 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE