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glyptodonsneeze's review
5.0
Stunning children's book reproductions scattered with text introduce Western adult art snobs about the colorfully modernist art of a new society, storybooks that throw off the bourgeois shackles of tsars and princesses, witches and fairies. This is socialist literature for socialist children and society grinds joyfully like a well-oiled machine, but with plenty of fun because "play is the work of children." Also, if you were anybody in Russian literature at the time, you were apparently writing for children and not mentioning it so much, but it's where the paychecks were coming from. I've read plenty about poets like Mayakovsky and Mandelstam and not a word about their vast bodies of work for young people. Not to mention Kornei Chukovsky, the Dr. Seuss/Roald Dahl/Edward Lear of Russian children's literature began writing around the time of the revolution, and several of his poems are printed in full here. Inside the Rainbow excerpts stories in English, or includes them in the reproduction of book art. There's a fantastic hodgepodge of stuff, from Civil War child soldiers to poems to photo montages to Lenin's gripings to memoirs of Soviet childhoods. The trouble is when funnest of books are not reproduced in full, like the fantastic rhyming story of a letter mailed from Leningrad to London and delivered by that most efficient of Soviet workers, the postman. Will the letter be delivered? Will Maksim Maksimovich write a letter back? How did Maksim Maksimovich flee to London? Why are postmen so cheerful?
http://surfeitofbooks.blogspot.com/2015/05/neglected-children-russian-children.html
http://surfeitofbooks.blogspot.com/2015/05/neglected-children-russian-children.html
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