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Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Alexsandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series by Erika Haber

2021; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mat.2021.0037

1536-1802

Jill Terry Rudy,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Alexsandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series by Erika Haber Jill Terry Rudy (bio) Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Alexsandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series. By Erika Haber, University Press of Mississippi, 2017, 259 pp. Erika Haber accomplishes adept archival, biographical, and transnational scholarship in her compelling study of how L. Frank Baum’s American fairy-tale series of Oz became the popular Russian Magic Land series by Alexsandr Volkov. Along the way, Haber convincingly portrays why and how both authors and their fantasy series deserve more critical attention and academic [End Page 398] recognition than they have received. With this book, she affords readers rich insights into life situations and institutional forces that brought Baum’s work into Volkov’s trajectory, leading to books that have delighted children over generations and geopolitical spheres. A striking takeaway from Haber’s study involves how children’s (and adults’) enjoyment of a marvelous story expands the desire and ability to tell a variety of related stories. This book serves fairy-tale scholars and teachers well in their efforts to appreciate the durable malle-ability of wonder tales. The book’s chapters tack back and forth from Baum to Volkov, from the United States to the emerging Soviet Union, with a central chapter contextualizing the relationship of fairy tales and children’s literature. The transnational elements of Haber’s study extend around the globe. Grounded in archival research at Syracuse University and Tomsk State Pedagogical University, the introduction and chapters 1 and 2 establish the fascinating relationship, and similarities, in the meandering paths that led Baum and Volkov to write children’s literature and create incredibly popular and long-lasting book series. Baum, she writes, led an imaginative childhood and experimented with several career paths. Volkov loved reading from an early age and studied to become a teacher and school director. He also started writing poems and plays, eventually moving from Siberia to Moscow to complete graduate study in mathematics and teach at the university level. Haber’s attentive scholarship highlights crucial contexts and important questions that have been overlooked for many decades, especially relating to how Baum created an American fairy tale that Volkov then promoted throughout the Soviet bloc. Chapter 3 contextualizes the Oz and Magic Land series by examining how fairy tales and fantasy stories relate with the emergence of childhood, romantic nationalism, and mass literacy in Britain, Russia, the United States, and the Soviet Union from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. Especially in the United States and Soviet Union, teachers, librarians, and government officials sought to control the publishing industry and what children should read. Baum’s story failed to appear on reading lists and syllabi because of the fantasy themes and its colloquial writing style and popularity that encouraged sequels, making it too commercialized for many librarians and teachers. Haber suggests an ideological pendulum in attitudes toward fairy tales, generally. While collecting and publishing tales became favorable in Russia and Europe in the nineteenth century because of heritage and language, fairy tales seemed frivolous in hard-working and practical United States. By the turn of the twentieth century, Baum advocated pleasing children in the introduction to his first Oz book, but the pleasure of wonder tales merited serious condemnation from Soviet educators who later found such stories “distracted children from reality with their make-believe and petty bourgeois elements” [End Page 399] (90). A decade or so later, however, Maxim Gorky linked the fairy tale and other imaginative genres with the important socializing tasks of helping children think and create. This set up Volkov’s publication of Wizard of the Emerald City in 1939. In chapters 4 and 5, Haber demonstrates that both authors were attuned to children as attentive fathers. While critics condemned Baum’s books, children clamored for more, leading the series to continue longer than anticipated, even years after Baum’s death. Baum himself produced musical plays and movies related to his Oz stories. Volkov responded to Gorky’s call for imaginative literature by working to translate and publish Baum’s charming book, shared with him by a colleague to encourage his reading English. Retaining references...