Firefly in a Box: An Anthology of Soviet Kid Lit

Contributions by Marina Balina, Sibelan Forrester, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Dmitri Manin, Svetlana Maslinskaya, Ainsley Morse, and Serguei Alex. Oushakine

In Firefly in a Box: An Anthology of Soviet Kid Lit, translators Anna Krushelnitskaya and Dmitri Manin present a hybrid scholarly and literary volume of popular Russian-language Soviet children’s texts alongside essays that outline the significance and meanings behind these popular texts. The selection features both poetry and short prose, all of which are instantly recognizable to a Soviet native, and all of which hold cultural currency, potency, and valence similar to popular children’s literature in the United States, such as Green Eggs and Ham, Curious George, or Make Way for Ducklings. These texts have either never been translated into English before or appear in all-new translations, literary rather than literal; the featured original Soviet illustrations are reprinted for the English-reading market for the first time.

Alongside the translations themselves is a scholarly component that guides Anglophone readers to experience mainstays of Soviet children’s writing. Essayists investigate literary material and perspectives using a broad range of approaches and methodologies applied to Soviet children’s literature. Topics include the Soviet literary canon, the beginning and evolution of Soviet children’s literature in the 1920s and 1930s, interactions between literary texts for children and folklore, and the interplay between Soviet and British children’s poetry.

Anna Krushelnitskaya is a translator whose work has been featured in Poems from the Front: A Moscow Anthology; Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems; Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine (as translator and coeditor); and Babi Yar and Other Poems by Ilya Ehrenburg. Dmitri Manin is a translator whose book-length works include Crow by Ted Hughes (translated into Russian), Howl. Kaddish. Poems, 1952-1960 by Allen Ginsberg (translated into Russian), and Columns by Nikolai Zabolotsky (translated Into English).