Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature by Ainsley Morse (review)

Abstract

The introduction, "Living Backward: The Childlike in Unofficial Poetry," and prologue, "The Dictionary as a Toy Collection: The Avant-Garde Origins of the Childlike Aesthetic," provide a definition and explanation of the childlike aesthetic, noting that its origins can be found in "well-established modernist and avant-garde interest in primitivism: children were appreciated … for their apparent ignorance … and for their apparent proximity to the mythic origins of human perception" (7). Chapters 4 through 8 each provide a case study featuring a single significant poet and children's writer—Vsevolod Nekrasov, Leonid Aronzon, Igor Kholin, Oleg Grigoriev, and Dmitri Prigov—who published children's literature but also wrote unpublished poetry that utilized the childlike aesthetic. In her conclusion, Morse argues that poets have long been attracted to the childlike aesthetic and that "by the end of the Soviet period, a near century of back-and-forth exchange between experimental poetry and children's books had generated a recognizable childlike aesthetic that has carried into the post-Soviet period" (194-95).