The October Revolution in 1917 profoundly shocked the cultural ecosystem. The new authorities recast notions of freedom, of the arts, and of the public. Links between and among audiences at different levels that had thrived in the prerevolutionary cultural market were dismantled. Over time the government imposed strictures on culture requiring alignment with political directives. By 1934, the official policy of Socialist Realism was mandatory and compliance enforced by rewards and terror. The early years of revolutionary ferment yielded aesthetic innovation of the highest order, yet the mounting pressures took their toll on creativity. Writers, artists, and performers responded variously. Some took cover in works employing irony and in the (somewhat) safer terrain of children’s literature. By seeding children’s literature with values counter to those practiced by Soviet officialdom, selected writers and artists spread counter-values to a new generation. They worked with the guile of the fox, the flight of the firebird, and, perhaps, the recklessness of the Fool. By keeping alive Russian stories of wise Fools, sentient animals, and magical powers, their creators carried forward folkloric traditions barred from the reigning Socialist Realism. In doing so, they protected limited public space for artistic innovation.

In the dark hours of the 1930s, authors and illustrators drew succor from the compassion in folklore. Goodness is closely allied with Foolishness in Russian folklore; each derives from an amalgam of innocence and kindness. In tale after tale, hapless heroes selflessly help troubled creatures and later reap multiples of the assistance rendered. Authors and illustrators sought sanctuary in this unrealistic parallel world, revisiting and updating tales of talking animals, exotic times and places, and Fools whose wishes are granted. The hidden meanings – their potent messages about the good, the bad, and the wily – slipped under the censors’ radar, reaching adult readers as well as children. Successive new editions of Petr Ershov’s Little Humpbacked Horse (1834) reached wide Soviet audiences. Andrei Platonov developed a remarkable collection of fairytales in the 1940s, while his teenaged son was imprisoned in the GULAG. Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter protected the wolf from hunters. Kornei Chukovsky created a ménage of friendly animals and a kindly Russian Dr. Dolittle to tend them. Daniil Kharms penned a tale of inclusion and tolerance in 1929, as Stalin’s hold on the arts tightened. These and other works countered the cruelty and cynicism of Socialist Realism.

Imperial Russia’s most popular historical novel was not War and Peace but a story of folkloric origins that celebrated freedom and poked fun at authority. The Legend of How a Soldier Saved Peter the Great from Death appeared in multiple versions from 1843 onward and drew upon mythologies of the Fool – in sacred accounts, the Holy Fool (Iurodivyi); in secular tales, little Ivan the Fool (Ivanushka-Durachok). The hero of Russia’s first commercialized folktale, Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf, tricks a tsar as the protagonist of the contemporaneous children’s classic, The Little Humpbacked Horse. The freedom of fools was attractive enough in traditional society; amidst multi-dimensional change after the Emancipation, the idea of release from traditional constraint was electrifying. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others created a dialogue between the familiar and the new by peopling their works with recognizable characters, foremost among which was the Fool. In so doing they illuminated ideas of self-fulfillment free from oppressive and unjust authority. But the era’s authors and readers also knew that when authority seemed most in shadow, it could return in force. The tension between freedom and order reflected ambivalence toward each that endured in Russian traditions and new works.