chapter nine

Thaw in the World of Children (1954–1968)

In April 1953 Stalin died. All over the Soviet Union, people mourned their departed leader, and children’s authors filled the pages of newspapers and magazines with eulogies. “In the whole world, children had not / such a close and dear friend”, wrote Anatoly Moshkovsky in his poem “The immor- tal name” (“Bessmertnoe imya”, 1953),1 and Valentina Oseeva, the author of the Vasyok Trubachov trilogy, affirmed in her obituary for “The Great Friend of Children” that children had returned Stalin’s feelings “with a warm and genuine love”.2 Three years later, in 1956, the new Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, made a speech to the Twentieth Party Congress that contained the first public disclosures on the millions of innocent victims of the Stalin years. No Soviet citizen could have been ignorant of the arrests, the executions, and the existence of a huge system of prison camps, but these horrors were now unambiguously linked to yesterday’s deity, Stalin. It was a new page in the history of the Soviet Union. In cultural life this was the start of a period of revaluation and fresh thinking, which took its name from a significant novel by Ilya Ehrenburg, The Thaw (Ottepel, 1954–56). There was a break from the rigid inter- pretation of socialist realism that had characterised the Stalin era, and greater scope for individual characterization and social criticism. In some respects, the period was reminiscent of the 1920s: there was something of the same enthusiasm and optimism, the same feeling of transforming everything from the ground up. One can also speak of a ‘thaw’ in Soviet children’s literature, although it was expressed in much less spectacular ways than in adult literature. There were no sensational works to compare with Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone (Ne khlebom edinym, 1956) or Boris Pasternak’s banned Dok- tor Zhivago (1957). The coming to terms with the lawlessness and injus- tices of the Stalin era left children’s literature practically untouched; there was no Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for younger readers. The closest was Nina

1 Druzhnye rebiata 4 (1953): 6. 2 Druzhnye rebiata 4 (1953): 11. thaw in the world of children (1954–1968) 473

Kosterina’s Diary (Dnevnik Niny Kosterinoy, 1962), an authentic teenage diary covering the years 1936–41, in which Nina (1921–41) writes about school and leisure time, first love and life with her friends in Moscow. Everything changes when the wave of terror touches her own family, and her father’s arrest makes her the ‘child of an enemy of the people’, a pariah class in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The diary could have been important read- ing for young people, but it was originally published in the adult magazine Novy mir and subsequently ‘forgotten’ in the Brezhnev era. The Thaw years saw the emergence of a new generation of writers with their own aesthetic vision and literary programme. Children’s literature opened out in terms of subject matter and style. In prose, there was a break with well-tried models and conventions, allowing writers to give a psychologically sharper portrayal and a darker but often more plausible picture of the conditions in which Soviet children grew up. Poetry, mean- while, offered unique opportunities for experimentation, as it had in the 1920s. It was again opened up to children’s experience of the world, their fantasies and word games.

Windows Opened Up

After decades of enforced but self-satisfied isolation, a window was slightly opened to the outside world. Some new foreign writers were introduced, while some long-since forgotten names of importance were ‘rehabilitated’ through new translations. The best qualities for a foreign writer hoping for an introduction to the Soviet book market were to have a revolution- ary background and to be a Communist and a friend of the Soviet Union. The Italian Gianni Rodari was the perfect case, as he had joined the Ital- ian Communist Party in 1944, participated in the Italian resistance move- ment and fulfilled his long-cherished dream of a visit to the USSR in 1952. Rodari’s poems, both nonsense and agitational verse, were swiftly trans- lated into Russian by Marshak. In an essay, the Soviet maestro explained his fondness for his Italian colleague: “Only those who live close to the people and speak its language can write poems which are worthy of being placed side by side with folk songs and counting-out rhymes. To my mind, Gianni Rodari is such a poet. In his poems I can hear the ringing voices of children playing in the streets of Rome, Bologna and Naples.”3

3 Samuil Marshak, “Stikhi Dzhanni Rodari,” Literaturnaia gazeta 141 (1952): 1.