the novels of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Viktor Dragunsky composed amusing stories
about the imaginative boy Deniska, while Nosov taught diligence and honesty in a
popular fairy tale trilogy about the Lilliputian Neznaika [Dunno] (1954–1965). Vladimir
Suteev’s fairy tales with the author’s own illustrations represent the Russian story book
at its best.
The Brezhnev years were a period of stagnation in children’s literature. While poetry
declined, prose for young people, however, saw some new names, like Albert Likhanov,
Vladimir Amlinsky and Vladislav Krapivin. Yury Korinets won international fame with the
novels Far Away, Beyond the River (1967) and In the White Night By the Bonfire (1968).
Readers were attracted by the friendship across the generation gap and the lyrical
description of nature, but Korinets’s principal concern was to celebrate the spirit of the
October Revolution. In his main work, The Wisest Horse (1976), he poignantly portrayed
an orphan and his horse. Vladimir Zhelezhnikov’s school story Scarecrow (1981) with its
analysis of the cruelty of the collective, received much attention.
Yury Koval’s ambiguous Yearling Fox (1974), in which an arctic fox heads for freedom
with the help of children, was translated into many languages. Soviet favourites were Kir
Bulychov’s humorous science fiction tales about little Alisa in the world of tomorrow and
the series of fairy tale books with which Aleksandr Volkov followed up of his pirate
version of The Wizard of Oz. The most famous Russian fairy tale figure is Cheburashka
from Eduard Uspensky’s Gena the Crocodile and His Friends (1966). Here and in Uncle
Fyodor, the Dog, and the Cat (1974) Uspensky praised the spirit of solidarity. The weak
and small but good-hearted defeat the narrow-minded bureaucrats. Uspensky’s humour
ranges from the absurd to linguistic puns and situation comedy.
The end of the Soviet era and the abandonment of the socialist ideals put children’s
literature in a radically new situation. A big part of the literary legacy was rejected, while
undeservedly forgotten names were brought to life. A more liberal attitude towards
religion emerged with reprints of pre-revolutionary books with biblical tales for children.
Simultaneously a flood of western light reading and comics challenged the traditional
stress on serious literature. The birth of a new Russian children’s literature has only just
begun.
Further ReadingAkimova, A. and V. (1989) Semidesyatye, vosmidesyatye...Problemy i iskaniya sovremennoi
detskoi prozy, Moscow: Detskaya literatura.
Babushkina, A.P. (1948) Istoriya russkoi detskoi literatury, Moscow: Uchebno-pedagogicheskoe
izdatelstvo.
Chekhov, N. (1909) Detskaya literatura, Moscow: Polza.
Hellman, B. (1991) Barn- och ungdomsboken i Sovjet-Ryssland. Från oktoberrevolutionen 1917 till
perestrojkan 1986, Stockholm: Rabén and Sjögren.
Lifschutz-Loseff, L. (1981) ‘Children’s literature, Russian’, in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian
and Soviet Literature, Vol. 4, Gulf Breeze: Academic International Press.
Lupanova, I.P. (1974) Sovetskaya detskaya literatura 1917–1967. Ocherki. Moscow: Detskaya
literatura.
Setin, F.I. (1990) Istoriya russkoi detskoi literatury, Moscow: Prosveshchenie.
Sokol, E. (1994) Russian Poetry for Children. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
764 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE