Last Friday we had our annual "Hongor Oulanoff Memorial Lecture in Russian Literature," the fifth in a series endowed by his widow Constance.
I remember Professor Oulanoff, although he was already retired when I came to Ohio State. This lecturer, like others before her, managed to tie her own work to his by evoking Veniamin Kaverin's Two Captains, the USSR State Prize winning 1944 novel about an orphaned boy who becomes an arctic pilot. (I remember reading excerpts of this novel in college with my beloved Russian teacher, Albina Nikolaevna. Someday I too will be able to link my work to that of Prof. Oulanoff, since Kaverin was Yury Tynianov's brother-in-law twice over [they married each other's sister] and I am writing about Tynianov.)
Our lecturer was Andrea Lanoux of Connecticut College. Her work on Soviet and post-Soviet children's literature tries to isolate questions of the role of children's literature in development and ideological indoctrination, and the issue that she was exploring with us was why, precisely, post-Soviet and émigré Russian parents continue to offer Stalinist books to their pre-adolescent and adolescent children.
My idea was simple: parents want to read to their children the books they grew up with. I saved all kinds of books to share with my children -- and bought many more, from A. A. Milne's Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh to the seven Harry Potter novels [the first four of which I read aloud many many times, until my son was too impatient and had to read and re-read them himself]. Some of the books I saved were fine ... ish ... like the Nancy Drew books [mostly harmless, although my children did wonder why she was driving around solving crimes at the age of 18 while her male friends attended college], or even the Happy Hollisters. Some were less harmless -- though I had saved the Bobbsey Twins books for many years, one look at the racial and gender politics led me to drop them in the trash rather than put them on my children's shelves. [I'm not sure which version of these books I had -- their history turns out to be more complex than I realized. But I still threw them away -- not something I often do with books!]
Lanoux's lecture reminded me of one of my favorite parenting books about YA literature, Barbara Feinberg's Welcome to the Lizard Motel. The book is all about fantasy and making up stories, and she makes the important point that YA literature -- the "problem novels" which I grew up with as a young teen -- makes children leave their childhoods behind too suddenly. Reading her memoir was enough to make sure Bridge to Terabitha was not on my children's reading list.
I can still remember the contract I drew up with my 10th grade English teacher. We had read John Knowles's A Separate Peace as well as J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and were supposed to write an essay about the two. Instead, I argued that I shouldn't have to read novels about screwed up teenagers when I myself wasn't sure who or how I was. A bad time in my life for me to feel their pain. Instead of analyzing the books, I received permission to write two creative pieces -- one in the voice of Holden Caulfield, complaining about just what a phony Gene Forrester was and just how much he didn't care about those prep school problems, and one in the voice of Gene Forrester, accusing Holden Caulfield of being a real whiner. A good exercise, I think, because it enabled me to exorcise all of my anger at these two characters while also facilitating Mr. Smagorinsky's need for me to engage with the books.
Why, though, would Russian parents want their children to read Stalinist literature? Or rather, why don't the Stalinist subtexts and the hated Socialist realist "positive hero" bother them when serving them up to their own children who are living in a new and completely different reality?
I think the answer is partially a kind of nostalgia (reflective nostalgia, à la Svetlana Boym, not restorative nostalgia, as one of our graduate students in the audience pointed out), and partially to the credit of those Stalinist era authors, many of whom were able to get "good" ideas for childhood (kindness to others, patience, teamwork, etc.) into their books. Their ability to manipulate the censorship of their era -- whether through Aesopian language or just dotting the SR i's and crossing the Stalinist t's -- while also doing their own thing have made some of those books into true classics.
And then there's The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein.
As Anna Holmes wrote recently in the New York Times:
I remember Professor Oulanoff, although he was already retired when I came to Ohio State. This lecturer, like others before her, managed to tie her own work to his by evoking Veniamin Kaverin's Two Captains, the USSR State Prize winning 1944 novel about an orphaned boy who becomes an arctic pilot. (I remember reading excerpts of this novel in college with my beloved Russian teacher, Albina Nikolaevna. Someday I too will be able to link my work to that of Prof. Oulanoff, since Kaverin was Yury Tynianov's brother-in-law twice over [they married each other's sister] and I am writing about Tynianov.)Our lecturer was Andrea Lanoux of Connecticut College. Her work on Soviet and post-Soviet children's literature tries to isolate questions of the role of children's literature in development and ideological indoctrination, and the issue that she was exploring with us was why, precisely, post-Soviet and émigré Russian parents continue to offer Stalinist books to their pre-adolescent and adolescent children.
My idea was simple: parents want to read to their children the books they grew up with. I saved all kinds of books to share with my children -- and bought many more, from A. A. Milne's Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh to the seven Harry Potter novels [the first four of which I read aloud many many times, until my son was too impatient and had to read and re-read them himself]. Some of the books I saved were fine ... ish ... like the Nancy Drew books [mostly harmless, although my children did wonder why she was driving around solving crimes at the age of 18 while her male friends attended college], or even the Happy Hollisters. Some were less harmless -- though I had saved the Bobbsey Twins books for many years, one look at the racial and gender politics led me to drop them in the trash rather than put them on my children's shelves. [I'm not sure which version of these books I had -- their history turns out to be more complex than I realized. But I still threw them away -- not something I often do with books!]
Lanoux's lecture reminded me of one of my favorite parenting books about YA literature, Barbara Feinberg's Welcome to the Lizard Motel. The book is all about fantasy and making up stories, and she makes the important point that YA literature -- the "problem novels" which I grew up with as a young teen -- makes children leave their childhoods behind too suddenly. Reading her memoir was enough to make sure Bridge to Terabitha was not on my children's reading list.I can still remember the contract I drew up with my 10th grade English teacher. We had read John Knowles's A Separate Peace as well as J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and were supposed to write an essay about the two. Instead, I argued that I shouldn't have to read novels about screwed up teenagers when I myself wasn't sure who or how I was. A bad time in my life for me to feel their pain. Instead of analyzing the books, I received permission to write two creative pieces -- one in the voice of Holden Caulfield, complaining about just what a phony Gene Forrester was and just how much he didn't care about those prep school problems, and one in the voice of Gene Forrester, accusing Holden Caulfield of being a real whiner. A good exercise, I think, because it enabled me to exorcise all of my anger at these two characters while also facilitating Mr. Smagorinsky's need for me to engage with the books.
Why, though, would Russian parents want their children to read Stalinist literature? Or rather, why don't the Stalinist subtexts and the hated Socialist realist "positive hero" bother them when serving them up to their own children who are living in a new and completely different reality?
I think the answer is partially a kind of nostalgia (reflective nostalgia, à la Svetlana Boym, not restorative nostalgia, as one of our graduate students in the audience pointed out), and partially to the credit of those Stalinist era authors, many of whom were able to get "good" ideas for childhood (kindness to others, patience, teamwork, etc.) into their books. Their ability to manipulate the censorship of their era -- whether through Aesopian language or just dotting the SR i's and crossing the Stalinist t's -- while also doing their own thing have made some of those books into true classics.
And then there's The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein.
As Anna Holmes wrote recently in the New York Times:
I never liked Shel Silverstein’s spare, twee little book, not the first time I read it, back in the late 1970s, or the second time, in the mid-1980s, or the third time, just a few weeks ago, in preparation for this column.I have to agree. And yet I, like many parents before me, have read it to my children numerous times, despite finding it somewhat creepy and not feeling comfy with its message. Perhaps that too is part of what is going on with post-Soviet parents?
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