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Classical Antiquity in Children's Literature in the Soviet Union1

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Classical Antiquity in Children's Literature in the Soviet Union1 chapter 16 Classical Antiquity in Children’s Literature in the Soviet Union1 Elena Ermolaeva In this article I outline the use of Classical Antiquity in Soviet children’s literature,2 and then I focus on one subject—books for children written by classical scholars, in particular by professor Salomo Luria (in Russian: Solomon Yakovlevich Lurie). According to Isaiah Berlin, “[t]he October Revolution made a violent im- pact” on Russian culture “but did not dam the swelling tide.”3 Rigid censorship of authors and ideas was enforced not only for books written for adults but also for those written for children. Children’s literature served as an important tool for creating Homo sovieticus. Nevertheless, a considerable number of tal- ented writers continued to write for children. The fate of many of them was tragic: Nikolay Oleynikov, Grigory Belykh, and others were executed; Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Leonid Panteleyev, Vitaly Bianki, and others were subjected to repression. Some, like Lidia Charskaya, were ostracised, could not find work, and perished of illness and hunger; oth- ers, like Andrey Platonov, continued writing without any possibility of being published; others still, like Arkady Gaidar, were killed on the battlefields of the Second World War. Those who were officially recognised by the authorities, 1 My thanks go to Natalie Tchernetska and Leonid Zhmud for their corrections of this article. A note on transliteration: in transliterating the Cyrillic alphabet we chose the bgn/pcgn ro- manisation system, developed by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. For purposes of simplification, we have converted ë to yo, -iy and -yy endings to -y, and omitted apostrophes for ъ and ь. 2 Soviet children’s literature is a large subject. The following two books, both in Russian, pro- vide a helpful overview: Evgenia [Yevgeniya] Oskarovna Putilova, Detskoye chteniye—dlya serdtsa i razuma [Children’s reading: For heart and mind] (St Petersburg: Publishing House of Herzen University, 2005); Marina Romanovna Balina, Valery Yuryevich Vyugin, eds., “Ubit Charskuyu…”: Paradoksy sovetskoy literatury dlya detey (1920-e–1930-e) [“To kill Charskaya…”: Paradoxes of Soviet literature for children (1920–1930)] (St Petersburg: Aleteya, 2013). 3 Isaiah Berlin, “The Arts in Russia under Stalin,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 19, 2000, 54–62, esp. 52. © Elena Ermolaeva, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004335370_018 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Elena Ermolaeva - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 12:48:48AM via free access 242 Ermolaeva like Samuil Marshak and Korney Chukovsky, nevertheless lived and wrote in constant fear.4 Even so, there were sharply critical works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, and Platonov, as well as an anti-Stalin play—a tale for children and adults, Dra- kon [The dragon]—written by Yevgeny Shvarts (Eugene Schwartz) in 1944. As Mark Lipovetsky wrote: […] It was supposedly a satire on German Nazism, and even the most rigid and suspicious censor would not dare to claim that it was about the Soviet totalitarian regime. The Soviet regime pretended not to rec- ognise itself in Shvarts’s parable […]. Soviet censors were no fools. Their tolerance of such works most likely involved some kind of unannounced etiquette: as long as the writer did not violate the conventional rules of the fairy-tale plot and placed his characters and events outside of the con- crete world of Soviet life, he remained under the protection of fantasy.5 As for the theme of Antiquity in children’s literature, it shared a similar fate with classical scholarship and education more broadly. For the classical tra- dition managed to survive during the Soviet period despite harsh repression, including the execution of scholars, the abolition of university chairs, “zom- bifying” ideology, “the dead hand of official bureaucracy,”6 and censorship. As Alexander Garvilov observes: “[t]his survival became possible due to the in- consistent double-faced image of a Bolshevik-Communist who aimed to destroy or, in the other case, to preserve the traditional cultural values.”7 4 Chukovsky and Marshak were well-known to every child in Russia as authors of amusing poems. Chukovsky, nonetheless, also left the gloomiest diaries. Marshak, as noted by contem- poraries, worried that some anti-Soviet hints might be detected in his works; see Nadezhda Abramson, Zhivoye slovo [The living word], manuscript (1985). 5 Mark Lipovetsky, “Introduction” to part 3: “Fairy Tales in Critique of Soviet Culture,” in Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky, eds., Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Rus- sian and Soviet Fairy Tales (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 233–250 and 240–241. I am grateful to Marion Rutz (University of Trier) for information about this book. 6 An expression of Isaiah Berlin, “The Arts in Russia under Stalin,” 55. 7 Alexander Konstantinovich Gavrilov, “Klassicheskaya filologiya v sssr (1992),” in Olga Buda- ragina, Alexander Verlinsky, and Denis Keyer, eds., O filologakh i filologii [On philologists and philology] (St Petersburg: Publishing House of Saint Petersburg State University, 2010), 290 (trans. E.E.). The Russian article was based on the English version by Gavrilov, “Russian Clas- sical Scholarship in the XXth Century,” in Victor Bers and Gregory Nagy, eds., The Classics in East Europe: Essays on the Survival of a Humanistic Tradition (Worcester, Mass.: American Philological Association, 1995), 61–81. Elena Ermolaeva - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 12:48:48AM via free access Classical Antiquity In Children’s Literature In The Soviet Union 243 Classical education in the traditional form of the classical grammar school existed in Russia until 1917. In the ussr, the unified Soviet secondary school system excluded any teaching of classical languages. The secondary school cur- riculum included only a one-year course in Ancient History, both Eastern and Western. Soviet children knew Ancient Greek myths mostly from Legendy i mify drevney Gretsii [Legends and myths of Ancient Greece] by Nicholas Kuhn (1877–1940), a Moscow professor, first published in Moscow in 1922. This com- pilation had its origins in a course Kuhn created in 1914 for grammar school pupils. In the Soviet Union this book was translated into different national languages and was reprinted many times in large runs, albeit with passages removed by Soviet censors, and with quotations from Engels, Marx, and Lenin added to the preface. The book is still popular today, edited with rich illustra- tions and without any ideological prefaces. Heroism was the main pathos of Soviet children’s literature. From this per- spective Classical Antiquity was a source of rich ideological material. This is why the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and the Argonauts; heroic historical narratives and novels about Alexander the Great; and translations, such as that of Spartacus by Raffaello Giovagnoli (1838–1915) were in high demand.8 Prik- lyucheniya Odisseya [Odysseus’s adventures], a prose rendering of the Odyssey for children, written by Yelena Tudorovskaya (1904–1986), was first published in 1952 by the publishing house Detskaya Literatura [Children’s Literature], whose adviser was Ivan Ivanovich Tolstoy (1880–1954), a member of the Acad- emy of Sciences. In 1964 Tudorovskaya wrote Troyanskaya voyna i yeyo geroi [The Trojan War and its heroes], a narrative retelling of the stories of the Iliad and the Aeneid. Heroic historical narratives and novels for children were also quite popular, such as Purpur i yad [Purple and poison] about Mithridates. This was written by Alexander Nemirovsky (1919–2007), a scholar and a poet, as well as the translator of Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse. The narra- tives by children’s writer Lyubov Voronkova (1906–1976) were devoted to An- cient Greek history (Messenskiye voyny [Messenian wars], 1969); to Alexander the Great (Syn Zevsa [A son of Zeus], 1971 and V glubine vekov [In the depth of centuries], 1973); and to Themistocles (Geroy Salamina [The hero of Salamis], 8 One of the most popular books for youth in the ussr was Spartacus (1874) by Raffaello Giovagnoli. It was first published in Russia before the 1905 Revolution in an abridged version (1880–1881), as a historical adventure for young readers. After 1905 it was reissued by “leftist” publishers as an example of revolutionary literature. A complete edition came out only after 1917. A Soviet sports association founded in 1936 was called “Spartak.” Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978) composed a ballet with the same title which was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1954. Elena Ermolaeva - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 12:48:48AM via free access 244 Ermolaeva 1975). Also very popular were novels by Ivan Yefremov (1908–1972), such as his Tais Afinskaya [Tais of Athens] published in 1973. He was a paleontologist and philosopher following Nicholas Roerich and Vladimir Vernadsky. There were also translations of foreign historical novels and scholarly books on subjects related to ancient culture, such as the aforementioned Spartacus by Raffaello Giovagnoli; two Polish books: Gdy słońce było bogiem [When the sun was god] by Zenon Kosidowski (1898–1978) and Perykles i Aspazja [Pericles and Aspa- sia] by Aleksander Krawczuk (b. 1922); The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder;­ I, Claudius by Robert Graves; Civilisation
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