ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the certain rhetorical aspects of the Soviet politics of horror from a transcultural perspective. It examines a specific quality of children's literature and cinema that manifests itself in peculiar representations of evil, cruelty, and violence and, as a result, in unique appropriations of the emotion of fear. Soviet writers attempted various strategies for legitimately describing or referring to evil. Only a few of them became successful and "canonical," and once again, not without difficulties. A well-known example from debates over the relationship between children and man-eaters can be used to demonstrate how this aesthetic mechanism of transforming evil, which involves both authors and their critics, worked. The original's scenes of brutality were modified or omitted from this iconic Stalin-era classic to conform to the Soviet literary ethos in the development of which Tolstoi himself participated. The Soviet project for the taming of evil, however, had its own specific rules.
