Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood: Myths and Realities

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.

Marina Balina is Isaac Funk Professor and Professor of Russian Studies Emerita at Illinois Wesleyan University. The focus of her scholarship is on historical and theoretical aspects of twentieth-century Russian children’s literature. She is editor or co-editor of eleven volumes, including Endquote: SotsArt Literature and Soviet Empire Style (2000); Politicizing Magic: Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (2005); Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (2008); Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (2009); Constructing Childhood: Literature, History, Anthropology (2011); Cambridge Companion of the 20th Century Russian Literature (2011); To Kill Charskaia: Politics and Aesthetics in Soviet Children’s Literature of the 1920s and 1930s (2014); Hans Christian Andersen and Russia (2019), and most recently, The Pedagogy of Images: Teaching Communism to Children (2021.)

Larissa Rudova is Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and Professor of German and Russian at Pomona College. She is the author of two monographs, Pasternak’s Short Fiction and the Cultural Vanguard (1994) and Understanding Boris Pasternak (1997). She has co-edited a volume of scholarly articles, Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (2008), as well as three thematic journal clusters on children’s and young adult literature and culture. Together with Marina Balina, she is a founding member of the international research group, ChEEER (Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia), affiliated with ASEEES. Her numerous articles have been published in American, Canadian, European, and Russian journals and scholarly volumes. Her research interests include modern Russian literature and popular culture; cinema studies; gender studies; children’s and young adult literature; Russian material culture; fashion studies; and representations of childhood.

Anastasia Kostetskaya is an Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. She holds a PhD in Theory of Language from Volgograd State Pedagogical University and another PhD in Russian Literature and Culture from Ohio State University. She is the author of Russian Symbolism in Search of Transcendental Liquescence: Iconizing Emotion by Blending Time, Media, and the Senses (2019). Her current research interests include Soviet war childhood; childhood memory of civilian Stalingrad at the intersection of Russian and German cultures; Russian and German cinematic Stalingrad discourse; oral and written narratives of child-survivors and teenage Ostarbeiter and preservation of memory; childhood and national identity in Russia and East Germany; revolutionary childhood. Her articles and book reviews appeared in international scholarly journals, such as Names: A Journal of Onomastics, Slavic and East-European Journal, German Life and Letters, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Filoteknos: Children’s Literature, Cultural Mediation, Anthropology of Childhood, and Detskie chteniia/Children’s Readings: Studies in Children’s Literature (Research Institute of Russian Literature/Russian Academy of Sciences). She is currently an executive officer of the international research group, ChEEER (Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia), affiliated with ASEEES.