Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (1574 - 2010)

Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (1574 - 2010). By Ben Hellman. Series: Russian History and Culture; 13. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 588 pages. ISBN 978-90-04-25637-8.

Following his survey of Soviet children's literature in Swedish (Barn- och ungdomsboken i Sovjetryssland. Från oktoberrevolutionen 1917 till perestrojkan 1986 von 1991) and his article on Russian children's literature in Peter Hunt's International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (2004), Ben Hellman now offers the most extensive English-language history of Russian children's literature to date. Spanning 588 pages and covering almost five centuries, it is a huge accomplishment in several respects. Previous overviews of Russian children's literature focused on specific time periods (such as Russian Children's Literature and Culture, 2008, edited by Marina Balina, which looks at the twentieth century) or were simply not available in English (such as the seminal work by Irina Arzamasceva Detskaja literatura, 2009/2012).

In the twelve chapters of the present study, Hellman chronologically works his way through the centuries of children's literature. Not surprisingly, the twentieth century takes up the lion's share since it witnessed the strongest development and unfolding of children's literature. Like general Russian literary histories, Hellman structures his narrative according to literary periods up to the October Revolution (Romanticism, Realism etc.). For the Soviet decades, he shifts to a political framework, considering literary developments against...