Preface
In 2015, Tara Books hosted an exhibition of children’s books illustration from
Soviet Lithuania (1940–1990) at Book Building, Chennai. This exhibition had originally featured at the Bologna Children’s Bookfair in 2011 and was offered to us by the Lithuanian Culture Institute. Working on the exhibits, we realised that they were part of a larger global history of the children’s picture book – and which had to do with publishing initiatives in the Soviet Union. We decided, therefore,
to work with Lithuanian author and curator, Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, to reimagine this history, both conceptually and in visual terms.
This book examines the global impact of the Soviet children’s picture book.
The latter travelled across the world, as an ambassador of ‘communist’ goodwill and was read and relished in countries across South and South-East Asia, China,
parts of Latin America, West Asia and Africa. It also circulated within the Soviet
Union, where its form and content were refashioned and subverted in subtle ways.
Another History foregrounds the ‘international’ reach of the Soviet picture book as well as its ‘regional’ expressions. It begins by examining the reception of Soviet children’s books in India – with the Indian experience standing in for similar ones in other parts of the world. A longer and detailed section presents a history of the children’s picture book in Soviet Lithuania – through a reading of the illustrations that featured in them.
From the 1970s Indian children read hundreds of fairy tales, science fiction,
science education texts and contemporary adventure stories from the Soviet Union.
These were available to them in English translation and in their many vernacular languages. Diverse in content and featuring startling and exotic art, Soviet books were brought to many a town and city through special publishing efforts. They were sold in mobile stores, made available in special retail places and known not only to children from left-leaning, middle class families, but also to children from working class homes.
The Lithuanian instance is valuable for what it tells us about the progress of publishing in the Soviet Union, and how local circumstances and histories proved germane in the creation of literature and art for children. Lithuania was initially
Publisher’s Preface annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940 and decisively after the end of World War II.
Its writers and artists had to engage with the reality of Soviet rule and adopted a range of strategies to remain creative. In the event, they produced rich and layered literature and art for children. Soviet Lithuanian children’s books tell a remarkable story, of aesthetic imitation, adaptation, dissension and innovation – and throw the larger Soviet experiment into both shadow and relief.
Taken together, Indian and Lithuanian experiences help us rethink the global culture of the picture book: they focus on developments that are not often recounted in standard picture book histories, or even in scholarly literature. Existing accounts of the history and aesthetics of the children’s picture book, particularly in English language publications, examine developments in the United Kingdom and North
America in detail, but do not go beyond these contexts. Specialist publications that address particular publishing cultures point to a wider range of texts that picture book histories have to reckon with: they pay attention to revolutionary Russian developments, refer to the Polish and Czech avant-garde and take in important moments in children’s book publishing in Germany, Sweden and Norway. Another
History suggests that we need to look further and in unusual places and come up with a more comprehensive and connected global history of the children’s picture book.
V. Geetha and Gita Wolf
Tara Books
