Alisa Poret’s illustrations for How the Revolution Was Won
«The era hymned by this exhibition came to an end, Ahmad argues, in 1934 when the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers adopted socialist realism as the only tolerable aesthetic style. Non-objectivism? Constructivism? Suprematism? Surrealism? Primitivism? All these isms, which had been so important in the flourishing of children’s illustration in the previous decade and a half, were deemed inimical to the Soviet state.
By then, censorship and greater state control over publishing was becoming more intense. For instance, El Lissitzky’s Yiddish-language book The Only Kid became one of the first titles to be destroyed following renewed state censorship in the 1930s of the leading language of Russian Jews.
Increased censorship prompted the exile of many avant garde artists who had revolutionised children’s illustration during the previous decade and a half. Russian emigrés Nathalie Parain and Feodor Rojanovsky, for instance, went to France where they created the beloved Père Castor series of illustrated children’s books. Other artists, such as Marshak and Lebedev, stayed and tailored their work to fit the new Stalinist order.
The excitement of the early years of the Soviet experiment in children’s books may have been over, but it had an important afterlife. Soviet books brought to Britain inspired the creation of the Puffin Picture books in 1940. And now there is this exhibition, the first of its kind in Britain, to remind us of that scarcely conceivable, utopian moment when children’s books were a place for avant garde experiment and revolutionary political struggle»
