The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain is Peter Sís’s autobiographical account of his childhood in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. Illustrated by Sís and marketed as a children’s book, The Wall blends its simple surface narrative, which details the rise and fall of the U.S.S.R. chronologically across his boyhood, with historical facts, personal journal entries, and Sís’s own photographs and drawings from his youth. While children are Sís’s target audience, the book certainly resonates with adults equipped with the context to unpack Cold War-era terminology and references that today’s children may be unfamiliar with. Producing a children’s picture book that encapsulates the tenuous history of the Cold War and the very serious themes of censorship, oppression, and free expression demonstrates a profound trust in contemporary child readers to understand the literary and visual elements Sís utilizes in his work, albeit perhaps on different levels than their parents. However, the gap between contemporary American culture and Sís’s Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia is actually negligible. Ideologically, The Wall is much more easily navigated than it first appears, even by readers who were not alive during the Cold War, because it has been “Americanized.”
It is through The Wall’’s illustrations that Americanization can best be seen. The illustrations throughout are extremely artful and establish motifs that aid in the thematic statements of the piece. For instance, images of Soviet occupation and increased involvement throughout Czechoslovakia are presented through black, white, and red line drawings. These harsh images starkly contrast the bright, water-color depictions of Western culture, most notably during the Prague Spring of 1968 scenes. Here Sís uses a two-page spread to depict the beautifully overwhelming exposure to previously contraband hallmarks of the West such as The Beatles, Allen Ginsberg, the Harlem Globetrotters, and uncensored art and literature. This scene also asserts a sense of Western superiority in its standards of living on the other side of the iron curtain. As Sís depicts the rigid conformity and even familial distrust affecting Cold War Czechoslovakia, the reader is encouraged to villainize the Soviets and view Western culture, specifically American culture, as the glorious pallbearer of personal and artistic freedom and of moral and social uprightness. In response to the June 17, 1968 Beach Boys concert at Prague’s Lucerna Hall, for example, young Sís exclaims, “America to the rescue!”[i] The Soviet Union’s horrible oppression and manipulation of Czechoslovakia is highlighted throughout the book, yet all it takes is an American rock concert to set the nation’s troubles on the back burner. While Sís is an insider to Czech culture, the inculcation of American individual-worship and all-consuming commitment to insert-any-freedom-here leaves the narrative feeling steeped in a Western superiority complex. For these reasons, it is not terribly surprising that The Wall won the coveted American award for illustration, the Caldecott Honor, for its “service to children.”
It is no surprise that literature coming out during the cold war demonstrates pro-Western sentiments. For instance, the American children’s character Eloise goes to Moscow, ever-suspicious of the Reds, in Eloise in Moscow by Kay Thompson. Published in 1959, six years after the end of Stalin’s tyrannical rule, Eloise in Moscow echoes strongly the anti-Communist sentiments that swept America in the 1950s and continued throughout the 1960s. For instance, every illustration depicting Soviets portrays them as unsmiling and suspicious-looking. Repeatedly, Eloise voices the prejudices and negative opinions of the American people: “You have to be careful of what you do and say in Moscow otherwise they will swoop down and snip-snap at your wrists and send your radio to Copenhagen by rail” (Thompson 15). The irony of this projection of a fearful Soviet Union, which was undoubtedly true under Stalin’s reign, is that the U.S. itself feared communism and underwent witch hunts for Communists akin to those held under the Soviet Union’s Stalinist regime to discover anti-Communists. Suspicion and invasion of privacy are widespread themes throughout the book. When portraying her experience at a Russian hotel, for instance, Eloise expresses extremely stereotypical American sentimentalities about the Soviets: “Everybody knows what everybody’s doing every minute of the day in Moscow. Here’s what you are never alone” (Thompson 20). Eloise in Moscow conveys a sense of American superiority representative of the context of its publication and condescends to the Soviet people by playing into Western and American anti-Communist prejudices.
While it is only to be expected that children’s literature about Russia produced during the Cold War acted as a vessel for negative American political opinions toward the Soviet Union, our post-Cold War present still employs these modes of telling the Soviet narrative. For example, in Eugene Yelchin’s Breaking Stalin’s Nose, published in 2011, the Soviet Union is portrayed as a brainwashing machine. Similarly to Eloise, the ideas of intrusion, suspicion, and fear of the Russian people are emphasized. While there are no overt references to Western culture, Yelchin’s story still belittles Soviet ideology and projects Western supremacy in that the protagonist, Sasha Zaichik, begins the novel extremely devoted to communism, Stalin, and the Young Pioneers, only to realize the flaws in his country after his father, a “devoted Communist,” is taken to prison by the secret police: “I take a last look at the [Young Pioneer] banner, turn away, and dash out the back door, down the stairs, and out of the school. I don’t want to be a Pioneer” (Yelchin 141). By rejecting the symbol of Communist youth and embracing his independence through that rejection, Sasha represents the Western ideals of free will, hardly complicating the simplistic narratives of the past. For his story, Yelchin, like Sís, won a highly coveted American children’s literature award, the 2012 Newbery Honor award.
The allegedly obvious negative qualities of communism—especially under Stalin—is not surprisingly asserted in books like Sís’s, Thompson’s, and Yelchin’s. It is worth noting, however, that the Bolshevik ideology that manifested itself in the first Five Year Plan was extremely well-received and fantasized over by Americans in the 1930s. New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five Year Plan by Soviet engineer M. Il’in became a best seller in the United States in 1931. A Soviet schoolbook that was meant to inform Russia’s youth about the five year plan, the NRP, appealed most notably to progressive U.S. educators. They were enraptured this text because of the agency it afforded their child readership. Throughout the text, children are continuously reminded that the part they play in the development of “New Russia” is just as large, if not larger, than the adult revolutionaries that set it in motion. Julia Mickenberg defines this fascination with the possibilities of “New Russia” as the “fantasy of collectivism” in her article “The New Generation and the New Russia: Modern Childhood as Collective Fantasy” (103). Mickenberg asserts that America fell in love with the hope-fused ideal of the industrial, equality-based utopia that the Five Year Plan and collectivism promised, but immediately turned against the mindset once the realities of that social model, when stretched to its extreme, reflected a way of life vastly different from our own, one that was inherently threatening. According to Mickenberg, “one theme of the NRP is the contrast between old and new; a key subtext is that Soviet Russia is new because it rejects the logic underpinning the West in general and the United States in particular” (104). While that newness initially enthralled forward thinkers, the downward trends that began revealing themselves through the actual implementation of the Five Year Plan left the U.S. avoiding the new in favor of the familiar. The possibilities presented by this revolution could not overcome the American fear of subversive thinking—especially in its children.
The expectations of the Soviet children Mickenberg discusses also represent an ideological disparity pertaining to how literature is presented to and representative of children. Where America fetishizes childhood and seeks to protect youthful innocence, the Soviet Union, at least in its infancy, regarded everyone, adults and children alike, as equal individuals with the capacity to effect change on their nation’s future through hard work and intellect and addressed them as such in their literature. In fact, the Russian trend of involving children with real-world objects and situations in children’s books reached America in an extremely iconic way: the early Little Golden Books such as Henry Lent’s Diggers and Builders (1934) and Watty Piper’s The Little Engine That Could (1930) dared to imagine the potential of children (113-14). This mindset enchanted American educators and terrified American parents; childhood functioned as a vessel for revolution in these books, instilling power within the minds and lives of children unprecedented in the modern world.
It is precisely the “uneasy tension between collectivity and individuality” (129) Meckinberg speaks of that made the early Soviet influence over U.S. progressive thinking so fleeting. These integral differences left Russia as a distant other totally separate from the U.S. both culturally and ideologically. Inevitably, extensive censorship and the discrepancy between idealistic plans and harsh reality led to the complete reversal of American opinion toward the Soviet stance on education, industry, and socialism. The fantasy of collectivism gave way to the rustic fantasy of the past, which romanticized the toiling Russian peasant.
After the dissolution of the Soviet-Union in 1991, there was a massive influx of Russian children’s literature into the United States. The obvious reason for this was the U.S. attitude that authors were now “allowed” to portray Russian characters and Russian stories without seeming to support Communism. Despite this supposed “freedom,” however, American authors still played it safe by sticking to the folktale narrative. Full of babushkas, farmhands, and fantastical speaking animals, Russian folktales were, and still are, at the forefront of children’s books depicting Russian life, the irony being that the images portrayed are far removed from the present reality of post-Perestroika Russia. Almost every Russian folktale picture book published in post-Cold War America tends to default to these infantilized folklore tropes in order to expose Russian culture to American children, resulting in the impartment of didactic morals upon Americanized Russian tales that generally possessed none in their original form.
For instance, the legend of Baba Yaga—the evil witch with iron teeth who dwells deep in the Russian forest, feasting on the bones of children and cackling in her cabin that dances on chicken legs—is across the board depicted as an evil hag in Russian lore, an evil hag that is often defeated not by ingenuity but by the mere transferal of goods, as in Rita Grauer’s Vasalisa and her Magic Doll (1994), Geraldine McCaughrean’s Grandma Chicken Legs (2000), and Jane Yolen’s The Flying Witch (2003). While The Flying Witch adapts the legend to focus more on the little-girl protagonist’s quick wits than her purely feminine worth, the little girl knows she can defeat Baba Yaga because of her “two good feet, fine sense of direction, two strong arms, and clever mind,” (12) whereas Grauer’s Vasalisa symbolizes ultra-femininity and both she and McCaughrean’s Tatia only escape Baba Yaga with the help of their magical doll companions. Each of these versions stick to the classic construct of the Baba Yaga folktale.
However, Patricia Polacco, known for her ornately romanticized interpretations of Russian folklore in children’s picture books, presents a misunderstood Baba Yaga in Babushka Baba Yaga (1994). This incarnation of Baba Yaga actually loves children—there are no iron teeth or eaten children involved. Instead, this Baba Yaga dreams of one thing: becoming a babushka, which she does for a little boy with no grandmother. There are many problems with this retelling, primarily that it completely disregards the role of the oral tradition in Russian culture. While there is no purely didactic moral to the original tale, the underlying practical lesson is that woods are dangerous and children should not enter them alone—very important to remember in a country that is mostly forested. This lesson serves a physical, concrete purpose, not a moral one. Conversely, Polacco’s Baba Yaga represents the very American concept of “not judging a book by its cover.” This is problematized, however, by the fact that once Baba Yaga is discovered for what she truly is by the other babushkas, she can only regain her place amongst them by performing a heroic act of redemption: saving her little boy from a pack of wolves in the woods. Upon re-welcoming Baba Yaga into their circle, one babushka exclaims, “those who judge one another on what they hear or see, and not on what they know of them in their hearts, are fools indeed!” as across the room the mayor agrees with a hearty “hear, hear!” (31). In a tidy two pages, Polacco’s Russian villagers gladly forgo decades of cultural conditioning and welcome the demon of the forest, Baba Yaga, into their households, around their children, and into their hearts.
Despite their differences, a commonality amongst all of these Baba Yaga stories is the depiction of the families as either peasant or merchant class. Even in picture books printed within the last decade, America does not tend to deviate from the romantic view of Russia as a mysterious land of rustic farmhands. One of the most noteworthy examples of peasant lore is the fable of the turnip. This folktale tells of a peasant couple’s extraordinary predicament involving a giant turnip which can only be removed by the collective effort of the entire farm, down to the lowliest field mouse. The first example, The Turnip, was pulled from a collection of traditional Russian oral folktales titled Once Upon a Time and re-illustrated for American publication in 1990. Openly drawing its roots from Russian folklore, illustrations in The Turnip depict the dedoushka and baboushka as typical Russian peasants in dress and speech—at one point the couple must “call Mashenka,” their granddaughter, for help, for “she is young and strong” (12). All of the farm-animal characters are referred to by their Russian names—geouchka the dog, keska the cat—all but the humble hero, the field mouse, who is simply “field mouse.”
While following the same basic plotline, Aleksi Tolstoy and Niamh Sharkey’s The Gigantic Turnip (1998) shows no blatant placement in Russia through either text or illustration. The dedushka and babushka characters are portrayed as white American mom’n’pop farmers. Both portly and snowy-haired, grandpa bespectacled and grandma aproned, the pair receives help from their milk cow, two pigs, three cats, four hens, five white geese, six yellow canaries and, of course, a field mouse, to remove their pesky turnip. All in all, that’s a total of 22 additional turnip-yankers in comparison to dedoushka’s and baboushka’s four. This is significant in that it represents an exaggerated, almost mocking—and decidedly fantastic—collectivism. By displaying white characters who mock a collectivist solution, Tolstoy and Niamh discount the belief so integral to idealist socialism that a few working together can accomplish more than one working alone—the idea that initially caught America’s wildest imagination. It is also a very American form of children’s literature to involve the “count-along” interactivity within a picture book, shifting the focus of the turnip story from the possibilities of teamwork to the act of rote counting as the child reads or is read the book. This method also does a disservice to the folktale by limiting its cultural education.
Another function of the romanticized Russian peasant is a mythical connection with the land. Both Rafe Martin and Susan Gaber’s The Language of Birds (2000) and Patricia Polacco’s Laba and the Wren (1999) depict Russian children—one the son of a merchant and one the daughter of peasants, respectivel—with the ability to communicate with birds. Yet again, Polacco’s is the more problematic of the two—her dedication reads, “For children everywhere, who should be full of joy and free from care,” which, in and of itself, discounts decades of intellectual agency instilled in Soviet children. In Laba and the Wren, Laba, whose mama and papa are peasants, saves a Wren from falling from a tree; as repayment, the Wren offers to grant her any wish “for her kindness” (4). Laba claims she is content and has no need for the Wren’s generous offer and returns home. Her parents, of course, are infuriated and force her to return to the wren to request a larger house and more fertile land. This pattern continues as her greedy parents remain dissatisfied with their lot. They move higher and higher up the ranks of nobility until finally they ask to be turned into gods. The frustrated Wren tells Laba it has been done and, lo and behold, upon returning home, her parents are peasants again. Polacco depicts the Russian peasant as a god.
Where Polacco constructs a didactic lesson through peasant-worship within the confines of a Russian folktale, Martin and Gaber’s The Language of Birds follows Russian storytelling patterns much more respectfully. Brothers Ivan and Vasilii are tasked by their merchant father to prove their ability to hold their own in the real world. Each is sent off with ten gold coins to see what worth they can make from it. Vasilii spends all his gold on himself getting drunk at the fair, whereas Ivan, like Laba, rescues a young bird and is granted a wish for his kindness. Ivan wishes to “always understand the language of the birds,” (4) and the bird agrees to teach him their language. This knowledge serves him well throughout his and Valisii’s travels and finally, by ridding the Czar’s castle of some pesky crows, it earns him the hand of the czarina. In keeping with tradition, this lesson has a practical component. Ivan must learn a useful skill; it is not simply bestowed upon him in a wish. Though he does speak to the bird through the mystical enhancement of the power of kindness, it is his practical knowledge of being able to act as an interpreter for birds, a reader of signs, which earns him his happy end. Laba is left a poor peasant—or a god, as Polacco would have it.
This reliance on the folktale narrative is not entirely a result of American stubbornness or anti-Communist sentiment. In her article, “Russian Children’s Literature Before and After Perestroika,” Maria Nikolajeva explains that the prevalence of the Russian folktale in American children’s literature today can be directly linked to its pervasiveness during Soviet regime: “The cultural climate in the Soviet Union was far from favorable to the free expression of ideas, and for some authors a children’s book, […] or fantastic tale, appeared to be the best way to express beliefs that in strictly realistic prose might seem controversial or alien to the official ideology” (106). As much as American children’s authors turn to folktales in an effort to tiptoe around the underlying anti-Communist censors still programmed into U.S. parents’ brains, Russian children’s authors during the Cold War sought to evade the physical censors of the Soviets by employing folktales as a means of telling stories that would not have passed muster otherwise. Similarly, in her article “The Politics of Innocence: Soviet and Post-Soviet Animation on Folklore Topics,” Natalie Kononenko argues that folklore was able to evade most of the downfalls of censorship because it “drew on national heritage” and “had a timeless quality” that was “innocent of ideology and thus something that deals with the human rather than the political” (273). Of course, the opposite can be said of what was really achieved through the manipulation of folklore under the watchful eye of Soviet censorship, but Russian authors drew on the misguided concept of fairy tale innocence to trick the adult watchdogs; children knew better the importance of legend.
Jumping to the present context, Nikolajeva also explains why authors have not been able to establish children’s narratives about modern-day Russia: “The rapidly changing social scene demands a keen eye, and today’s sophisticated young readers will not be deceived by primitive slogans, adventure plots, and superficial characters. Russian orphans, street urchins, war victims, drug addicts, and teenage mothers have not yet found a voice in literature for the young” (109). Much the same can be said of our own norms in children’s literature. While children’s books exist that span these topics, they generally exist on the fringes and serve very pointed, didactic purposes. The fact that Nikolajeva’s article was published over 15 years ago yet still retains its relevance illustrates the gaps in Russian children’s literature that still exist. While saddening, it is expected. The politics of publishing act in accordance with American anxieties about childhood innocence, which run counter to the common beliefs help about socialist leanings, and thus result in stores for children that follow the path worn by so many. Russia in literature for children is most palatable when it is folktale, unless it is decidedly anti-Communist.
Works Cited
Grauer, Rita. Vasalisa and her Magic Doll. New York: Philomel Boks, 1994. Print.
Kononenko, Natalie. “The Politics of Innocence: Soviet and Post-Soviet Animation on Folklore Topics.”Journal of American Folklore . 124.494 (2011): 272-294. Print.
McCaughrean, Geraldine. Grandma Chickenlegs. Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Books, Inc., 2000. Print.
Mickenberg, Julia. “The New Generation and the New Russia: Modern Childhood as Collective Fantasy.” American Quarterly. 62.1 (2010): 103-129. Print.
Morgan, Pierr. The Turnip: An Old Russian Folktale. New York : Philomel Boks, 1990. Print.
Nikolajeva, Maria. “Russian Children’s Literature Before and After Perestroika.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. 20.3 (1995): 105-111. Print.
Polacco, Patricia. Babushka Baba Yaga. New York: Philomel Boks, 1993. Print.
– – – . Luba and the Wren. New York: Philomel Boks, 1999. Print.
Putnam , G.P. The Language of Birds . New York : G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Print.
Sis, Peter. The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain. Canada: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 2007. Print.
Thompson, Kay. Eloise in Moscow. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. Print.
Tolstoy, Aleksei. The Gigantic Turnip. Brooklyn : Barefoot Beginners, 1998. Print.
Yelchin, Eugene. Breaking Stalin’s Nose. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011. Print.
Yolen, Jane. The Flying Witch . China: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2003. Print.
[i] Most picture books are unpaginated.