Over the entire course of its history, and in the first decades of its existence in particular, the Bolshevik regime relied on literacy as a tool of political indoctrination and societal transformation. Because Soviet picture books were geared towards the most impressionable stratum of readers—those who mastered reading ability along with the most basic social norms, ideological dogmas, and public rituals—they became a unique instrument for both forming and reflecting the communist worldview. Relying on the child “as an instrument of futurity” (Sara Pankenier Weld, 237) and on images of party leaders (Daniil Leiderman and Maria Sokolovskaia); Red Army soldiers (Stephen M. Norris); technological breakthroughs (Kirill Chunikhin); and violently refashioned nature (Larissa Rudova) as icons of Soviet modernity, children's book illustrations of the 1920–30s depicted the communist utopia as inevitable and gratifying—an ideal civilization worth enduring sacrifices and fighting for.
This erudite and comprehensive compendium of essays traces the impact of illustrated children's books on the formation of mass Soviet readership and uncovers the role of Soviet writers and graphic artists in fostering juvenile literature as “an ideological apparatus (among several) of the state” (8). The eighteen scholars who have collaborated on the volume came together for a series of seminars on the pedagogy of images organized by Princeton's Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton. The online resource they initially created, https://pedagogyOfImages.princeton.edu, grew into the most thorough investigation of the mass-produced, visually expressive, flagrantly proclamatory, but also often poorly made and, therefore, ephemeral body of works that document “the centrality of visual media for educating the first communist generation” (41). Lavishly illustrated itself, The Pedagogy of Images can be appreciated on its own or as a critical supplement to impressive rare children's books archives in the Cotsen Digital Collection.
Tremendous credit goes to the volume's editors for their adherence to a polyphonic, multifaceted model of scholarship, which recognizes the contradictory nature of the analyzed oeuvre. Authors who contributed to each of the three thematic segments of The Pedagogy of Images—“Mediation,” “Technology,” and “Power”—were obviously in dialogue with one another when debating such questions as the representation of revolutionary temporality in Soviet picture books (Kevin M. F. Platt), the depiction of Soviet colonization projects in Central Asia for children (Michael Kunichika), or the explication of technology as a medium of futurity in science education books and how-to magazines for adolescents (Birgitte Beck Pristed, Maria Litovskaia). The rich conceptual variety of the volume's chapters notwithstanding, the contributor's shared interpretive vocabulary, in-depth expertise on the historical context, and precise, detail-oriented focus on the optics of Soviet enlightenment give this collection of essays a gratifying integrity. The five essays in Part I, “Mediation,” for example, not only provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of “the early Soviet children's book as a dynamic interface and a versatile platform with book formats in post-revolutionary Russia” (51), but also introduce five different methodologies of juxtaposing children's literature with fine art, photography, paper crafts, and film.
Another attractive feature of the editors’ approach in The Pedagogy of Images is their unwillingness to “homogenize” and even sentimentalize the field by separating aesthetics from politics and individual creators of outstanding talent from those writers and artists who carried out their goszakaz half-heartedly. As Serguei Alex. Oushakine and Marina Balina write in their introduction, their goal was to study the role of early Soviet children's literature in introducing “the rules and modes of literary production that would late constitute the organizational basis of ‘grown-up’ literature” (8), thus giving equal attention to remarkable examples of artistry and to ideological hackwork. Several essays in the volume zoom in on the children's books that elucidate a little-known aspect of the relationship between young readers and the state intent on making them internalize political dogmas. Such authors as Aleksandar Bošković, Erika Wolf, and Katherine M. H. Reischl reveal the cultural significance and illuminate the subversivism of children's books and magazines that we perceive nowadays as having little literary and artistic value. Contrariwise, the chapters written by Helena Goscilo and Yuri Leving spotlight works by famous artists, Boris Kustodiev and Alisa Poret, respectively, but it is the conformism of their illustrations for children (and what Leving calls “the counterfeit historical record of the revolution” [114]), rather than Kustodiev and Poret's artistic greatness, that makes these investigations so interesting.
For decades to come, The Pedagogy of Images will remain a go-to resource on the early Soviet picture books for literature scholars, historians of public education, researchers of totalitarian art, librarians, and graphic artists. The main contribution it has made to these fields—and the cultural anthropology of the Soviet state in a broader sense—consists of the non-biased, conscientious, and highly sophisticated approach to the study of literary production, artistic creation, and the mechanics of publishing for young readers in the 1920–30s Soviet Union. Whereas previous publications on this subject explored either the aesthetics of graphic art or the social aspects of the Soviet pedagogy of images, the volume edited by Balina and Oushakine ingeniously addresses Soviet book illustrations for children from artistic and ideological perspectives simultaneously.
