In this long-awaited book, Andrea Lanoux, Kelly Herold, and Olga Bukhina present a panorama of new Russian children's literature and adolescent fiction that emerged on the book market after the fall of the Soviet Union. Growing Out of Communism is launched in the Brill series of Russian History and Culture that also includes Ben Hellman's 2013 Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (1574–2010). The new-published book shares with this earlier volume a handbook quality and encyclopedic ambition, and its three authors pick up where Hellman left off, by developing his very short final chapter on contemporary children's literature (1991–2010) into a fascinating, full monograph, devoted to the last three decades of strong institutional transformations, but also literary innovations within this field.
The project deserves attention, because Lanoux, Herold, and Bukhina demonstrate the originality and plurality of post-1991 children's literature that remained underrated and almost non-translated by publishers in the west, while it was often dismissed by Russian parents and pedagogues who routinely lamented “that children don't read anymore” (196). Ironically, the authors even quote a church cleric who recently bemoaned the loss of Soviet literature for teens (231–32). This supports the authors’ claim that the prescriptive canon of didactic (but anti-religious) Soviet children's literature continues to serve both as a persistent “shared text” of the past (1), against which the new children's literature is measured, but also as a “vital progenitor” of this literature (xxiv). Nevertheless, the title emphasis on “Communism” is slightly misleading, since the authors also show how the new Russian literature for adolescents is growing out of and is closely related to the globalization of the capitalist book market (159). The manuscript was finalized before Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but a concluding outlook foreshadows negative developments in the publishing industry of children's literature that are now accelerated by the war. These bleak perspectives only increase the urgency and relevance of studying alternative narratives for children and teens in Russia today.
Growing out of Communism is thematically rather than strictly chronologically structured. The first chapter provides an overview of the Soviet pre-text and state institutions of children's literature, and presents its main genres, master plots, and child hero-protagonists. Based on personal interviews with publishers and authors, and supplemented by publishing statistics, the following chapter uncovers the post-communist emergence of a private publishing landscape that cultivated both commercial giants of children's books and brands, and from the early 2000s, also several niche publishers of quality books for toddlers to teens. Ch. 3 discusses the agency of the targeted child consumer audience of (often unattainable) mass-market literature, from cultural adaptations of translated global brands, over advice literature, hereunder sex education books, to popular genre fiction. Ch. 4 introduces key authors and their creative works, spanning from the 1990s playful, anti-didactic children's poetry to the 2010s historical fiction of Stalinist repression. Ch. 5 provides narrative analyses of selected adolescent fiction works by predominantly female authors. These writers break with the Soviet myth of a “happy childhood” and deal with “dark” taboo themes, by first centering on orphan-protagonists as the “blameless victims of societal dysfunction” (160), and later foregrounding first-person voices of neuro-diverse or traumatized teens. Lanoux, Herold, and Bukhina devote a final chapter to the vibrant children's book communities from physical book fairs to online networks. In the child and teen readers’ engaged responses to the new books, the authors find glimpses of a “more inclusive and democratic” world of Russian children's and young adult literature (225). However, elsewhere the authors refer to well-known distribution and economic problems that made new children's books inaccessible to young readers outside the elitist, urban centers of the publishing industry.
Among smaller disturbances to the reading flow are several redundancies combined with lengthy footnotes that sometimes appear repetitive. Possibly, this is a deliberate editorial choice to facilitate stand-alone chapters of the e-book edition to meet the new requirements of academic readers who just like children and teens “don't read books anymore.” Brill's hard backs are unaffordable to most students but Growing out of Communism is hereby recommended for your research libraries.
