Description
Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices, and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the "multimedial childhood text," the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text, documentary evidence, and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative, as an object of material culture, and as embodied in different media (periodicals, visual culture, and cinema), the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood, history, and various modes of narrativity.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The World of Russian Childhood, Larissa Rudova
Part I Myths and Realities of Russian Childhood
1. Mikhail N. Epstein
Childhood and the Myth of Harmony
2. Svetlana Maslinskaya
From the Child’s Point of View: The Observer in Children’s Literature of the 1920s and 1930s.
3. Marina Balina
Second-Generation Memory and Émigré Children’s Periodicals: Constructing a Russian Childhood
Part II Revolutionary Changes
4. Helena Goscilo
From Double-Voiced to Univocal: Devious, Desirous, and Declarative Childhoods in Soviet Posters
5. Anastasia Kostetskaya
The Child Who Carries Weapons: The Making of a Revolutionary through Play in Valentin Kataev’s A White Sail Gleams and its Screen Versions
6. Maria Mayofis
The Late-Soviet Episteme of Childhood and Its Divergent Manifestations: Aleksandr Asarkan and Aleksandr Sharov
Part III Narratives of Trauma
7. Birgitte Beck Pristed
Social Space and Self-Made Seriality: The Wall Newspaper of an Evacuee School, 1942–43
8. Sergei Alex. Oushakine
Podranki: War Childhood Revisited
9. Sara Pankenier Weld
Childhood and Temporality in Svetlana Alexievich’s "Chronicle of the Future"
Part IV Shifting Paradigms of Russian Childhood
10. Elena Prokhorova and Alexander Prokhorov
Genre Constructions of Childhood in Recent Russian TV Series: Gender, Ethnicity, Agency
11. Matthias Schwartz
Generation Nothing and Beyond: Childhood and Youth in Contemporary Russian Literature
12. Ilya Kukulin
A Military Upbringing: The Politics of Childhood, Adolescent Social Activity, and Cultural Representations in Russia in the 2010s–2020s
