Illustrated Ideology

The art of Soviet-era children's literature shifted from experimental and avant-garde to a realistic, government-mandated style under Stalin.

Vladimir Mayakovsky's children's poem Kem byt'? looked very different in its 1932 (top) version than it did in 1947, when the Soviet realist style had become standardized.

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The bold colors and abstract crowds in the illustration (left) show a May Day celebration in a 1932 edition of Elizaveta's Tarakhovskaia's Bei v baraban!

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The 1947 image of children at New Year's in Samuil Marshak's Raznotsvetnaia kniga represents "soothing images of a nostalgic past," says Bird.

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Soviet avant-garde photographers experimented with "defamiliarization." In Chto eto takoe? (1932), for example, V. Griuntal' and G. Iablonovskii show extreme close-ups of everyday objects, revealing their quotidian identities in later pages.

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Soviet avant-garde photographers experimented with "defamiliarization." In Chto eto takoe? (1932), for example, V. Griuntal' and G. Iablonovskii show extreme close-ups of everyday objects, revealing their quotidian identities in later pages.

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Aleksandr Vvedenskii's Volodia Ermakov (1935) features a strong young boy who leads his peers to become good Socialists.

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Sergei Mikhalkov's Moia ulitsa (1943) teaches children how to read a Hitler poster: "I simply laugh it off."

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In Nina Sakonskaia's Mamin most (1933), children and adults collaborate to "model a new world."

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