The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Stalin years 207

with these priorities. It is significant that throughout the Stalinist period, the quest for a “Red Tolstoy” continued. Appropriately trimmed and packaged, his legacy was not incompatible with many versions of socialist realism. A “Red Dostoevsky” or “Red Chekhov” is inconceivable.

The Dragon and destruction (Evgeny Shvarts)

With its lack of irony and its advocacy of a straightforward Purpose, socialist realism (if judged by Enlightenment criteria) seems to infantilize its participants. For skeptics, this is one reason why children’s literature enjoyed such high status under communism. But more substantial reasons exist for the high priority placed on writing fiction for the young. Intense interest in the proper upbringing of the “New Soviet Child” (Gorky founded the first post-revolutionary magazine for children in 1919) reinforced Russia’s distinguished research record in developmental child psychology. Writing for children attracted brilliant literary talents who were also shrewd child psychologists – most notably the poets Samuil Marshak (1887–1964) and Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969), both prote´ge´s of Gorky – as well as avant-garde poets and prose writers interested in Modernist, Formalist techniques of “estrangement.” But children’s literature was always ahaven.The “world from theview of thechild”is an ancient mode of protest against servility and convention, from the Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to the response of the childish Natasha Rostova to an opera performance in War and Peace. Fantastic and eccentric visions too whimsical or provocative to pass the grown-up censorship were often tolerated as a category of childish imagination.

Like Nikolai Gogol, Evgeny Shvarts (1896–1958), son of a provincial doctor, was active in amateur theatricals asa child and displayed a great gift of mimicry. In the early 1920s, Shvarts arrived in post-Civil War Petrograd, where he associated with Surrealist, Absurdist, and Futurist poets; by the end of the decade he was working for children’s literary magazines and the Leningrad Children’s Theatre.In 1933 he was invited by the Experimental Workshop of the Leningrad Music Hall to create a “Soviet fairy tale.”15 His first attempt, a satire against obstructionist bureaucrats, already exhibited his trademark deadpan tone. His basic recipe mixed everyday routine with the fantastic; concretely realizing metaphors (the bureaucrat really is a bloodsucking vampire; the cleaning lady is a good fairy, with a certain quota of miracles to perform each quarter) and committing itself, by hook or crook, to the happy end.

Shvarts had a talent for performing the brief, incongruous, manic-dramatic anecdote. He was famous for his jingles and madcap improvisations (a nervous