ABSTRACT
Children's literature in Russia has always been the subject of rigorous debates. Literary critics and editors, writers and scholars of literary history, educators, and politicians occupied themselves with the discussion of the artistic, ethical, and esthetic value of this literature, of its specificity, and of its place within the whole body of literary production. According to Russian scholar Irina Arzamastseva (2005), the first interest in children's literature as a subject for study and investigation can be traced to the 1820s and 1830s (p. 7). It was initiated by both commercial needs of book publishers who began to create the fist book catalogues as well as the interests and demands of educators who fulfilled the role of the mediators among writer, publisher, and reading audience. By separating children's books into a special category, publishers often grouped them with books for the simple folks (i.e., readings for peasants and the lower middle class), thus stressing the unsophisticated character of this literature. For educators, the most decisive criterion was that of the didactic purpose of children's literature, and for many years the artistic value of children's literature was held hostage to its pedagogical merit (Setin 1972, p. 13). The most influential Russian literary critic of the first half of the nineteenth century, Vissarion Belinskii, who was among the first serious evaluators of the quality of children's books in Russia, stated, “Children's books are written for education, and education is an extremely important task: it decides the future of a human being” (Belinskii and Chernyshevskii 1954, * p. 42). Belinskii also insisted on those special qualities that a children's writer needed to possess. According to the critic, a children's writer is a unique individual who “like a poet is born with this extraordinary ability and could not have been made into one” (p. 47). Another nineteenth-century democratic literary critic, Nikolai Dobroliubov (Odetskoi literature, p. 349), who is often viewed as a successor to Belinskii's literary platform, called for children's literature to become “a textbook of life,” the necessary tool that should prepare young readers on how “to resist life's evil, … retain the purity of soul, and defend communal truth from lies, violence, and self-interests” (p. 322). Thus, from the very early days on, the ideological agenda imposed on Soviet literature for children was hardly a creation of the Soviet propaganda system. Formed in the democratic revolutionary circles of the nineteenth century, the idea of ideinost’ (ideological content) in the literary work as its first and foremost value was transferred into the postrevolutionary environment and applied to whole body of literature, past and present, foreign and domestic. 2
