talented Leningrad writers and artists gathered around Raduga, the Studio for
Children’s Literature and the magazine Novyi Robinzon [The New Robinson] (1923–
1925). The central name was Samuil Marshak, who for children’s literature recruited
not only acclaimed poets like Osip Mandelshtam and Boris Pasternak but also the
Oberiuts, a group of absurdists, who had been banished from adult literature.
The Oberiuts found refuge in the Marshak-led section for children’s literature of the
state publishing house Gosizdat and in the artistically outstanding children’s magazines
Yozh [Hedgehog] (1928–1935) and Chizh [Siskin] (1930–1941). Simultaneously the
Communist Party strengthened its hold on the growing generation through the
foundation of political children’s organisations. A prominent goal of magazines like
Murzilka and Pioner (1924–) was to mould the readers into communists.
The greatest name in Russian children’s verse is Kornei Chukovsky. His output was
not large, but his popularity and influence have been immense. A recurrent theme in his
fairy tales in verse, like The Crocodile (1917), The Great Cockroach (1923) and The Fly’s
Wedding (1924), is the revolt against usurpers of power. Evil shrinks as it meets
resistance. The same theme was used in a didactic fairy tale like Wash ‘Em Clean
(1923). Characteristic of Chukovsky’s verses is a lingustic and rhythmic virtuosity and a
whimsical humour and fantasy, features which most clearly stand out in the nonsense-
poem The Telephone (1926). A source of inspiration for Chukovsky was the English
nursery rhyme. Samuil Marshak was a leading name both as a writer and as an
organizer in Soviet Russian children’s literature for over forty years. In the 1920s he was
part of the avant-garde, publishing in cooperation with Vladimir Lebedev excellent
picture books (Circus, 1925) and anecdotal, funny poems (Oh what an absent-minded
man, 1928). In his didactic poems, Marshak taught respect for work.
Chukovsky and Marshak influenced the Oberiuts, above all Daniil Kharms. Typical of
Kharms’s poems and short prose texts (Firstly and Secondly, 1928) was a childlike
humour, play on words and the use of unexpected points of view. Another approach
represented ideologically committed poets, like Vladimir Mayakovsky, who wanted to
prepare children for the political struggle.
Prose works were written about children in the civil war and their involvement in the
building of socialism. A social problem that was reflected strongly was the situation of
the homeless waifs and the attempts to integrate them into the society. In the
autobiographical The Shkid Republic (1927), L.Panteleev and Grigory Belykh depicted life
in a Soviet juvenile reformatory. A satirical picture of the pre-revolutionary school was
offered by Lev Kassil in The Grade Book (1929) and The Land of Shvambraniya (1931).
A talented author of books on popular science was the engineer M. Ilyin, while the
description of nature found its master in Vitaly Bianki. His experimental A Forest
Newspaper (1928) consisted of ‘news-items’ about events in nature. Of Bianki’s many
successors, Evgeny Charushin, Mikhail Prishvin and Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov deserve
mention. Boris Zhitkov’s principal genre was short, dramatic adventure stories with the
sea or exotic countries as the setting. Quick reactions and courage are demanded of his
heroes. The posthumously published What I Saw (1939) is a novel encyclopedia for
preschoolers, in which Soviet reality is presented from the viewpoint of an inquisitive
little boy.
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