Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood

Marina Balina is Isaac Funk Professor Emerita and Professor of Russian Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her scholarship focuses on historical and theoretical aspects of twentieth-century Russian children’s literature. She is the author of numerous articles in English, German, and Russian. She served as editor and co-editor of 12 volumes, most recently Hans Christian Andersen and Russia (2020) and The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children (2021). Larissa Rudova is Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and Professor of German and Russian at Pomona College. She is the author of two monographs, Pasternak’s Short Fiction and the Cultural Vanguard (1994) and Understanding Boris Pasternak (1997). She has co-edited a volume of scholarly articles, Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (2008), as well as three thematic journal clusters on children’s and young adult literature and culture. Anastasia Kostetskaya is an Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. She holds a PhD in Theory of Language from Volgograd State Pedagogical University and another PhD in Russian Literature and Culture from Ohio State University. She is the author of□ Russian Symbolism in Search of Transcendental Liquescence: Iconizing Emotion by Blending Time, Media, and the Senses (2019).

Introduction: The World of Russian Childhood, Larissa Rudova

Part I Myths and Realities of Russian Childhood

1. Mikhail N. Epstein

Childhood and the Myth of Harmony

2. Svetlana Maslinskaya

From the Child’s Point of View: The Observer in Children’s Literature of the 1920s and 1930s.

3. Marina Balina

Second-Generation Memory and Émigré Children’s Periodicals: Constructing a Russian Childhood

Part II Revolutionary Changes

4. Helena Goscilo

From Double-Voiced to Univocal: Devious, Desirous, and Declarative Childhoods in Soviet Posters

5. Anastasia Kostetskaya

The Child Who Carries Weapons: The Making of a Revolutionary through Play in Valentin Kataev’s A White Sail Gleams and its Screen Versions

6. Maria Mayofis

The Late-Soviet Episteme of Childhood and Its Divergent Manifestations: Aleksandr Asarkan and Aleksandr Sharov

Part III Narratives of Trauma

7. Birgitte Beck Pristed

Social Space and Self-Made Seriality: The Wall Newspaper of an Evacuee School, 1942–43

8. Sergei Alex. Oushakine

Podranki: War Childhood Revisited

9. Sara Pankenier Weld

Childhood and Temporality in Svetlana Alexievich’s "Chronicle of the Future"

Part IV Shifting Paradigms of Russian Childhood

10. Elena Prokhorova and Alexander Prokhorov

Genre Constructions of Childhood in Recent Russian TV Series: Gender, Ethnicity, Agency

11. Matthias Schwartz

Generation Nothing and Beyond: Childhood and Youth in Contemporary Russian Literature

12. Ilya Kukulin

A Military Upbringing: The Politics of Childhood, Adolescent Social Activity, and Cultural Representations in Russia in the 2010s–2020s