>It's a shame to use up my posting limit on this maybe, but I wanted
>to add that there was something else at which the USSR simply
>excelled: Children's cartoons. The Soviet version of Winnie the Pooh
>is flat-out brilliant.
>
>Incidentally it's somewhat fashionable for Russian rock and pop
>groups to do versions of Soviet cartoon themes and music from old
>children's television shows. "Yaitsa" (Eggs), by Diskoteka Avariya,
>is a version of a Soviet children's song about, yes, eggs (Good for
>breakfast! Good for lunch! Good for children and adults!), and part
>of the melody I believe is a sample from music from the Soviet
>children's cartoon show "Nu, pogodi!"
Soviet Children's Picture Books from the Twenties and Thirties: <http://www.iisg.nl/collections/sovietchildren/>
Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era: <http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/russian/>
***** Stories for Little Comrades Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children's Books Evgeny Steiner
In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the most prominent avant-garde artists were eager children's book illustrators. Reaching a mass audience of unformed, malleable young people appealed to their commitment to an art manifesto based on the creation of a new kind of person for the revolutionary age. At the same time, the opportunity to work for good pay along with a low risk of censorship were practical attractions.
The Constructivist artists drew considerable attention in the West for their brilliant creativity in using geometric designs, machine-age forms, and an architectural sense of space in their approach to the visual arts. Rejecting easel painting as a passé bourgeois preoccupation, they turned to designing and mythologizing objects of everyday use. In a major reassessment of their work, Evgeny Steiner forcefully demonstrates that the Constructivists were as committed to implementing Utopia -- regardless of the human cost -- as their establishment counterparts.
Basing his work almost completely on primary sources -- Russian picture books from the Russian State Library, private collections, and publishers' archives -- Evgeny Steiner tells his story in deft prose with a wry sense of humor. The solidness of his sources, the range of his interests, and the depth of his understanding of Russian life combine to make this an unusually perceptive book on a fascinating cultural issue that combines the visual arts, literature, and politics.
Read Sample Chapter(s): <http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/chapters/STESTC.pdf>
<http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/STESTC.html> *****
Evgeny Steiner: <http://www.scps.nyu.edu/faculty/index.jsp?insId=3515&let=S>
Children's Literature: <http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/children/index.htm>
***** The Lion and the Unicorn 21.1 (1997) 59-85 Communist in a Coonskin Cap? Meridel Le Sueur's Books for Children and the Reformulation of America's Cold War Frontier Epic Julia Mickenberg
It might come as a surprise to learn that in the early years of the Cold War, at the height of McCarthyism, left-wing authors in the United States wrote and published radical books for children. These writers, many of them blacklisted from other publishing venues, rejected the Cold War's "victory culture"--the violent and exclusionary rhetoric of American superiority--and instead attempted in their children's books to recover the egalitarian, diverse, and cooperative elements of American history and folklore. 1 In particular, I want to bring attention to Meridel Le Sueur, an author who wrote books for children during the 1940s and 1950s, a period in children's literature which has been neglected in scholarship, perhaps on the assumption that children's literature produced in this "conformist" era merely served the status quo. In Le Sueur's children's books on Abe Lincoln, Nancy Hanks (Lincoln's mother), Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, and an adopted son of Black Hawk, Sparrow Hawk, Le Sueur paid tribute to America's democratic folk heritage and to heroes of the working class. Her celebration of the nation's past took place at a time when she herself was under intense public scrutiny for her political involvements and was unable to publish most of her writings. Infused with hope and a fundamental belief in American "promise," Le Sueur's children's books reutilize American national folk heritage in an attempt to discredit capitalism. The books therefore indicate cracks in the so-called capitalist consensus of the postwar period, and for this and many other reasons, they are worth remembering. . . .
[The full text is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lion_and_the_unicorn/v021/21.1mickenberg.html> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] *****
Julia Mickenberg: <http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/ams/about/mickenberg.htm> -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>