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 indoctrinati...
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