chapter three

ROMANTICISM (1825–1860)

In the 1820s, Russian literature entered a new phase, Romanticism. The changes were also felt in writing for children. A more favourable attitude to imagination and emotional life brought with it a new way of looking at childhood. Children were perceived as higher beings with an enchanted, poetic world of their own. The concept of ‘a dual world’ signifies the co- existence of everyday life and a world of fantasy, with the child effortlessly crossing the borderline. This is the basis for the genre of fantasy, exempli- fied during the Romantic period by works like Antony Pogorelsky’s The Black Hen and Vladimir Odoevsky’s The Little Town in the Snuffbox. These were the first Russian children’s books to achieve classic status. Still read and appreciated are also the fairy tales in verse written by the Romantic poets Aleksandr Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Ershov. Many of their fairy tales were based on foreign models, but in Russia they became part of a search for a genuine ‘folk spirit’. The interest in the national past and tradition found an outlet in books on Russian history and geography. Adaptations of biblical stories were also popular. The dominant genre of the period was, however, the moral tale, an edifying epic or dramatic story on good manners and high moral- ity. These stories contain no national features, and they often turn out to be translations or adaptations without any mention of the original source. The significance of their moral lessons can hardly be disputed, but, never- theless, only period pieces were produced in this genre. During the Romantic period, the first Russian writers devoting them- selves almost exclusively to children’s literature appeared on the scene. Boris Fyodorov, Anna Zontag, Vladimir Lvov, Aleksandra Ishimova, Pyotr Furman and Viktor Buryanov were all genuine children’s writers, whatever the literary level of their works. Gradually there emerged an awareness that children’s literature formed a field of its own, separate of literature for adults. A children’s book should not only be edifying, it should also have literary qualities. The critic Vissarion Belinsky played an influential role in this process. The number of titles rose steadily. While a total of approximately 320 titles were issued in the period 1801–1825, the number more than dou- bled in the next quarter-century, rising to around 860, a publication rate romanticism (1825–1860) 25 of more than thirty per year. By the middle of the 1830s, the output of original Russian children’s literature surpassed the number of transla- tions. Much fiction also found its way into readers and textbooks, proving that literature was by now perceived as an indispensable part of a child’s upbringing.

Fairy Tales and Fantasy

After a short-lived vogue for folktales at the end of the eighteenth cen- tury, these more or less disappeared from children’s literature for several decades. During the Romantic era, the folktale reappeared, both in the form of adapted folklore material and original, artistic fairy tales. A six- volume publication of Johann Musäus’ German folktales in 1811–1812 was a visible sign of a growing appreciation. In 1825 a volume of new trans- lations of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales appeared, but the crucial turning point was a publication the following year in the magazine The Children’s Interlocutor (Detsky sobesednik). The set of “Children’s Tales” (“Detskie skazki”) included “The Briar-Bush” (“Kolyuchaya roza”), “Dear Roland and the Maiden Bright Light” (“Mily Roland i devitsa Yasny svet”), “Brother and Sister” (“Bratets i sestritsa”), “Little Red Riding Hood” (“Krasnaya shapochka”), “The Enchantress” (“Volshebnitsa”) and “Raul the Blue Beard” (“Raul sinyaya boroda”). The sources were not mentioned, but a closer examination reveals them to be works by Charles Perrault, Ludwig Tieck and the Brothers Grimm. A cautious attitude was taken towards the genre of fairy tales, as can be seen of the instructions accompanying the tales published in The Chil- dren’s Interlocutor: “It is the mentor’s duty to explain to the children the moral lesson of these tales and to separate in them the embellishments of fantasy of useful truths.”1 The section of fairy tales was attributed to Vasily Zhukovsky, a poet with close connections to German literature, but it was in fact Zhukovsky’s niece and protégée, Anna Zontag, who was responsible for the translations. This became clear in 1828, when Zontag included the translations in her own volume Stories for Children (Povesti dlya detey). Zhukovsky took an interest in Zontag’s work, and in a letter to her in 1827, he expressed his view on translating for children: “Do not translate slav- ishly, but as if you were telling your daughter a foreign story: this will give

1 Quoted in Nikolai Trubitsyn, “О skazkakh V.A. Zhukovskogo,” Russkii filologicheskii vestnik 1 (1913): 131–132.