ABSTRACT

For forty years Samuil Marshak was a leading figure in Soviet Russian children's literature, both as a writer and as an editor. Although he made his mark as a satirist and a skillful translator of English poetry, it was mainly as a children's writer that he achieved a lasting fame. Maxim Gorky (1958) called Marshak the founder of and the foremost specialist on Soviet children's literature, 1 an accurate statement also insofar that his output closely reflects all the changes in the ideological and aesthetic spheres of the Soviet society. In the twenties Marshak was part of the avant-garde culture; in the thirties, as socialist realism became the literary norm, his poems about the transformation of the country and feats of heroism played an active part in pushing children's literature in a new direction. After World War II, Soviet patriotism with all its insignia dominated his works, leading to the author's crowning as poet laureate.