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 Emerita and Professor of Russian Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her scholarship focuses on historical and theoretical aspects of twentieth-century Russian children’s literature. She is the author of numerous articles in English, German, and Russian. She served as editor and co-editor of 12 volumes, most recently Hans Christian Andersen and Russia (2020) and The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for 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.

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).