Based on sources from rare book libraries in Russia and around the world, Picturing the Page offers a vivid exploration of illustrated children’s literature and reading under Lenin and Stalin – a period when mass publishing for children and universal public education became available for the first time in Russia. Through an analysis of illustrations in fairy tales, classics, and wartime picture books, Megan Swift elucidates the vital and multifaceted function of illustrated children’s literature in repurposing the past.
Picturing the Page demonstrates that while the texts of the past remained fixed, illustrations could slip between the pages to mediate and annotate that past, as well as connect with anti-religious, patriotic, and other campaigns that were central to Soviet children’s culture after the 1917 Revolution. The author also shows that during World War II, picture books created a sense of a shared past by reaching out to child readers of the 1940s and beyond them to their parents, the first generation of Soviet readers who had been shaped by the pictures on the page.
This is the first work to examine illustrated children’s literature under Lenin and Stalin and to make use of rarely-explored Soviet children’s books from libraries around the world.
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