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The Land of Oz in the Land of the Soviets

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.0.1103

1553-1201

Xenia Mitrokhina,

Themes in Literature Analysis

The Land of Oz in the Land of the Soviets Xenia Mitrokhina (bio) From the first years of the USSR's existence, its authorities aimed to subordinate culture to ideology. Literature and the arts, indeed, were always seen as one of the battlegrounds upon which the revolution would take place—in 1921 the Bolshevist Party established a Publishing Committee responsible for conducting "struggle on the cultural front." When the Soviet regime abolished its New Economic Policy in 1927, the USSR intensified the literary censorship begun in 1921, nationalized publishing houses, and, in short, asserted full control over literature, which came to be judged in large part according to its social function. Children's literature was fully involved in this process. The attention the authorities paid to this apparently marginalized part of culture was surprisingly serious. Shortly after the Bolshevist victory, one of the first party congresses to be convened under the new regime was designed "to start creating children's literature under the accurate control and leadership of the party," since the leadership assumed that "'the old literature' was able 'only to harm a Soviet child.'" In addition, the 1920s saw intense discussion of the role of fairy tale and fantasy; some critics rejected these forms as dangerously bourgeois, while others believed that they might be salvaged. The doyenne of Soviet culture, Lenin's wife Nina Krupskaya, recommended that writers "study the forms of the old fairy tale" and "fill them with new communist contents." By the late 1930s, fantasy writing had been rehabilitated to some extent, as long as it had been adjusted to fit Soviet standards for the "education of a new citizen" (see Chukovsky's chapter on the "struggle for fairy tales"). Even so, the authorities continued to mount campaigns against what were styled the "elements of unhealthy adventurism." Often what was "unhealthy" was simply what was foreign. For more than seventy years, official Soviet culture depicted itself as self-sufficient. Hence one characteristic of the official ideology was its xenophobic desire to replace alien cultural phenomena with homegrown products, thereby isolating the USSRfrom the rest of the world and establishing what Maria Nikolajeva refers to as a "'socially pure' culture" for the working class (105). But Western achievements were not invariably rejected outright; in some cases this "debris of the old world" (as it was contemptuously termed) served as raw material for the transmission of Soviet ideology. Retailored to suit the censors, certain Western children's classics were published in the USSR in the 1920s and '30s, while the original versions were suppressed. In a move typical of the governing party's desire to "protect" the citizenry by permitting only the indirect perception of information from the outside world, generations of Soviet children grew to maturity without knowing that some favorite titles had initially been penned in different form by non-Russian authors—that Alexey Tolstoy's Adventures of Buratino, or The Golden Key (1936) was a distorted version of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio (1883), or that Kornei Chukovsky's Dr. Aybolit (1925, revised 1937) had begun life as Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle (1920).1 Purged of their "unhealthy" Western associations, such texts enjoyed a vigorous life in the USSR, not only via generous print runs in a variety of the languages of the Republics but also via cartoons, movies, and stage and radio plays. Especially popular was Alexander M. Volkov's The Wizard of the Emerald City (1939, revised 1959), based on L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).2 While both tales focus on a little girl who is brought to a magical land by a tornado and must try to get back home, Volkov has made a number of cuts and insertions that have changed the meaning of the story in important ways; as he wrote in an afterword in the 1960s, "I reduced the book considerably, squeezed all the water out, exterminated the narrow-minded morals typical of Anglo-Saxon literature, wrote new chapters, and introduced new heroes" (my translation; the American edition of Volkov renders this passage innocuously as "I changed a good many things in it, and I added some new chapters" [146]). In the essay...