Carnival Ever After: How the Uneasy Marriage of Folklore and Early Soviet Children's Prose Built a New Ideological World Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

In the early Soviet Union, educating the future “Builders of Communism” in line with Marxist-Leninist ideology was considered to be of paramount importance. Why and to what effect on their readers’ moral psychology, then, were children’s writers permitted such latitude to experiment with pre-revolutionary fairy tales? How did their works become some of the most influential Soviet children’s texts ever written? Resolving this puzzle should not only improve our understanding of Soviet children’s culture, but also shed light on the roots of the post-Soviet Russian subjectivity and engender a more holistic understanding of the general relationship between the interactive young reader and the text. 

From the early 1920s through the beginning of Stalin’s Terror in 1936, a tenuous, largely implicit compromise existed in the early Soviet children’s literary scene that I term the socialist fantasia. Fairy-tale content coexisted with and buttressed socialist humanist form with great import for our understanding of how ideology attempted to shape the early Soviet subjectivity through art. To understand each of these three elements and the connections between them, the present work draws on Vladimir Propp’s literary formalism to read four popular Russian Soviet novels written between 1924 and 1936, for children aged seven to fifteen, and with fairy tale influences.

In the first chapter, I analyze Yurii Olesha’s novel Tri tolstiaka (1928) to develop a clear account of fantastic content as what I term the idiom of the fantastic, comprising a set of rhetorical strategies and motifs echoing fairy tales. The second explains the morality advanced by ideological form by explicating the roles and virtues of the socialist humanist hero in the context of Arkadii Gaidar’s stories “Mal’chish-Kibal’chish” (1933) and Voennaia taina (1935). In the third, I draw on Aleksei Tolstoi’s novel Buratino to detail the co-optation inherent in the socialist fantasia and the ideological interactions between its form and content. Finally, the last chapter draws on all four texts, the critic Wolfgang Iser’s Rezeptionsästhetik, and the phenomenologies of Gilles Deleuze and Edmund Husserl to theorize how the socialist fantasia situates the reader in relation to state morality and ideology. 

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction: Brave New Fairy Tales……………………………………………………………......2

0.1: Formalism and Fairy Tales in the Early Soviet Children’s Literary Scene………….....4

0.2: Structure of the Thesis…………………………….………………………………................13

Chapter 1: No Day without a Metaphor — Yurii Olesha’s Fantastic Content……………..16

1.1: Tri tolstiaka and the Setting of the Socialist Fantasia………………………………......16

1.2: The Idiom of the Fantastic…………………………….…………………………….............19

1.3: Conclusions…………………………….……………………………………………................33

Chapter 2: Arkadii Gaidar — Holding Out for a Socialist Humanist Hero……………......34

2.1: “Mal’chish-Kibal’chish” and the Hero as Martyr…………………………………..........35

2.2: Voennaia taina and the Aretaic Structure of the Hero……………………………….....41

2.3: Conclusions…………………………….……………………………………………...............50

Chapter 3: Buratino and His Merry Marionettes — The Co-optation of the Fantastic...52

3.1: Magic Naturalized in the Service of Socialist Humanism………………………..…....54

3.2: Influences of Stalinist Culture…………………………….……………………….............64

3.3: Conclusions…………………………….……………………………………………...............66

Chapter 4: Building the Builders of Communism — A Theoretical Framework……......68

4.1: The Socialist Humanist Hero’s Journey……………………………………………..........68

4.2: Utopian Hope, the Eternalized Carnival, and Narrative Gaps………………….……..78

4.3: The Once (and Future?) Ideological Lebenswelt………………………………….….....84

Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………….….........92

5.1: The End of the Socialist Fantasia and Directions for Future Research………..…....93

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….......100

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School	Emory College
Department	Comparative Literature
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Slavic Studies Literature, Comparative History, Russian and Soviet
Parola chiave	Iser Gaidar Olesha virtue Soviet Union Russian folklore children's literature Tolstoy fairy tales
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Emory University
Committee Members	Mikhail Epstein, Emory University Vera Proskurina, Emory University

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