I was very happy when translator
and writer Olga Bukhina sent me a note last month asking if I’d like her to
write another guest post about Russian literature for children. I was happy to
say Yes: some of you told me you enjoyed her previous guest post, plus I’d been
so busy teaching and working on preparations for Read Russia that I was getting
behind in my own reading and writing. Of course, Olga’s topic sounded great, too—writers
who write for adults and kids—and two of the writers she mentions in her post were
in New York last week for BookExpo America and Read Russia events. I’m grateful
to Olga for writing this post (even more so because I came home exhausted and
with a bad cold)… and for being such a good friend and colleague last week in
New York!
Many contemporary writers who write primarily for adults have
tried their hands at writing for children, or perhaps it’s better to say that
they’ve experimented with writing books that can be read both by adults and by kids.
As Dmitry Bykov
eloquently put it in the subtitle to one of his books, “A Children’s Book for Adults,
or An Adults’ Book for Children.”
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
has published a lot of short stories about children, such as her series Девочки (Girls), but her Истории про зверей и людей (Stories of Animals
and People) are for kids. The book starts with three tales with very long descriptive
names. История про воробья Антверпена, кота Михеева, столетника Васю и сороконожку
Марью Семеновну с семьей (A Story of Antwerp
the Sparrow, Mikheev the Cat, Vasya the Aloe Plant, and Maria Semenovna the
Centipede and Her Family) is
about three creatures who first get together out of loneliness. They stay together for the sake of helping a muddle-headed
mother centipede to raise her enormous family. These little tales are funny and
to the point, and have just exactly the right proportion of light humor and
moral message. Yes, it is good to love everyone, including “those who do not
look like you, for example, sparrows, cats, and aloe plants.” The tales are
followed by a collection of very short stories, Детство-49 (Childhood-49),
published before as a separate book. These are more realistic vignettes of post-World
War II Soviet childhood, and the reader clearly sees the events through the
child-protagonist’s eyes and senses the child’s biggest fear or strongest
desire.
Bykov’s О зверьках и зверушах (About Critters
and Creatures), whose
subtitle I already mentioned above, is sometimes published as a part of a larger
book В мире животиков (In
the World of Animalitos). He co-authored these tales with his wife Irina Luk’ianova. They are tiny stories
about various animal-like creatures who live in different towns, Гордый (Proud-Town)
and Преображенск (Transfiguration-City). They are female and male, and behave just like people
in spite of their tassel tails. Some of them are very good, others are very
bad, and still others are somewhere in between. There is a lot of contemporary politics,
eternal religious debate, Christian allusions, parodies of Russian
intelligentsia, and gender role discussions in these tales. Some of them are truly
for children, others are more for adults, but all of them are written in a fairytalish
form with a light touch. Сказка о необитаемом острове (A Tale of the Desert Island) about the adventures of two young
ones, Il’ka and Fedya, is, to my
taste, the most touching story in the collection.
Boris Minaev is a different case: he is someone who
started as a children’s writer and moved into adult literature later on. His Детство Левы (Leva’s
Childhood) is a quite realistic story of Soviet Jewish childhood in
the early 1970s. It is almost a memoir with details which are very familiar to
anyone who lived through these times: the yard outside of the apartment
building, soccer and other games, the Victory Day celebration, the fear of
darkness, a hole in the asphalt which turned out to be a cave without a
treasure, a children’s movie for 10 kopeks in the local movie theater, and a first
cheap cigarette.
Another time-traveling experience is Boris Akunin’s Детская книга
(Children’s Book). It is a part of his famous Fandorin series, but this
time the main character is not an Erast Fandorin, an aristocrat and an
adventurist, and not his grandson, a Moscow detective, but his great grandson
and namesake who lives in contemporary Moscow and travels to 1914, to the time
of Boris Godunov in the 17th century, and to the future with the
help of “chronoholes.” It is a combination of adventure novel and historical
fiction, and a page turner.
The postmodern tales
of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Lyudmila
Petrushevskaya) are really in their own category. The longer I read them, the
more I am convinced that they are
not in the realm of children’s literature. Their dark and absurdist humor
targets a much more mature audience, even though the series about Barbie dolls from the collection
Настоящие сказки (The Real Tales) looks like children’s stories, and many other
stories refer to classical fairy-tales. A similar literary device was used by Alexander Kabakov in his Московские сказки (The Moscow Tales), where he
applies well-known fairy-tales and legends, like the Tower of Babel, to
contemporary situations.
For more: Olga Bukhina often writes Russian-language posts for a blog maintained by the Working Group for
Study of Russian Children’s Literature and Culture. The blog also contains pieces written
in English.
Up next: A few notes on BookExpo America and Read Russia, then a post about an
actual book I’ve read. Maybe Zakhar Prilepin’s The Black Monkey... I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to getting back to writing about my books!
Disclaimers: The usual.
