Two Worlds: Yet Another Piece of Genius Social-Realist Propaganda

This week the blog features a new post by Polina Popova, our guest expert on Russian- and Ukrainian-language children’s books, on a picture book for Ukrainian children published in the early 1930s.  Her series of pieces bringing to light these unusual and strikingly illustrated books demonstrate the breadth and depth of the collection’s holdings.

One of the few children’s books in Ukrainian from Cotsen’s collection is 1933 Dva Svity (Два Свiти) – “Two Worlds.” A similar children’s book with disinformation and propaganda against the spread of real news about Holodomor – the Great Ukrainian famine, which was, as many scholars believe, orchestrated by the Soviet central government. Another similar piece of propaganda for children of Ukraine from 1932, Za Vladu, Rabotu, Khlib has already been explored in this blog.[1] “Two Worlds,” with a poem by the Ukrainian poet Pavel Usenko, offers a similar perspective and even more striking rhetorical and aesthetical dichotomy of the “two worlds” (pun intended) – the communist Soviet and the Western capitalist ones.

The book is very distinctive in that it was illustrated by a very famous Ukrainian socialist realist artist Dmitrii Shavykin whose most prominent work of the 1930s was design for the carpet depicting Klement Voroshilov, Soviet Red Army commander and Stalin’s supposed “right hand” at the time, created by the Ukrainian weavers.[2] First, the book invites its young readers to witness the tragedy of working-class people in the capitalist western countries: a picture of the prematurely aged adults with extremely skinny children, or a police state with gendarmes guarding the factory from workers organizing a strike. Later, the book shows a demonstration of workers with slogans in German in commemoration of the anniversary of the October Revolution. This march of solidarity is brutally shut down by the police.Illustration 2 above shows a hungry family of the working man in the West – a family of five having to share a piece of bread for dinner. The obviously well-dressed fat capitalists (“gentlemen”) who supposedly were enriched by the working-class people who are “surprised to see” factory workers being beaten by the gendarmes (“На ранених i побитих Роздивляються пани.”) are shown in the third illustration below..In contrast to that grim image of the hungry people of the West (presumably in Germany), the book continues, workers in the Soviet Union are not only well-fed and content, but they also have opportunities for education, and social mobility. Another aspect unique to the Soviet experience, Shavykin implies, is its internationalism. In Figure 4 below, Soviet male and female workers, among whom an Uzbek man can be easily identified in the foreground by his long striped coat, a khalat and the fez on his head are marching together towards a building marked the ”Technological Institute” past the “Palace of Labor” (Palats Truda)  The woman in that illustration is holding a book by Lenin, Shavykhin’s shorthand to demonstrate her (socialist) moral education and imply the workers’ collective striving toward enlightenment. And even though Shavykin chose not to change his dark pastel color palette, the aesthetic contrast of the book’s illustrations went along the line of the dichotomy, reflected by Usenko’s poem. However, what is most fascinating is that Shavykin was well-known in Soviet Ukraine as the classical socialist realist painter, yet his illustrations for this early 1930s books were still rather avant-garde, more in line with the 1920s Soviet Suprematist aesthetics.

Overall, the book was clearly made for very young children as it has many illustrations and reads easily. It is intended to not only hide the fact of the brutal famine going on in Soviet Ukraine but more so to accessibly and clearly contrast the two worlds: “us” and “them.”[3] Though full of modern cars and skyscrapers, the “West” (see illustration below of the archetypical big Western city – a place that looks like the 1930s New York City), unlike the Soviet Union, according to the book, disjoins and alienates its citizens. A family of (possibly) working-class immigrants who all look more like skeletons rather than actual living people (in contrast with the vitality of the rich bourgeois). The evil and somewhat genius hypocrisy of the book in its entirety was that in reality millions of Soviet Ukrainians of the time (those who were able to survive the brutality of the 1932-1933 famine) looked more like skeletons – though they were not living in capitalist Germany or the US.[4]

By Polina Popova

[1]“Death from starvation threatens every working man:” A Soviet book about hunger but not the Ukrainian people,” Cotsen Children’s Library Blog, April 15th, 2022,      https://blogs.princeton.edu/cotsen/2022/04/death-from-starvation-threatens-every-working-man-a-soviet-book-about-hunger-but-not-the-ukrainian-people/.

[2] See, for example, his work in the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Folk Art in the Moscow Nekrasov Central Library’s digital books’ collection here: https://electro.nekrasovka.ru/books/6150794/pages/33

[3] When millions of peasants, including many children, dying from starvation in the countryside, often came to the big cities like Kharkiv (the capital at the time), Kyiv, and Odesa, to search for food only to perish on the streets there.

 

[4] The author would like to thank friend and colleague Ismael Biyashev for help with editing of this text.

 

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Banning YA Books

The clashes between  my mother and a librarian over access to potentially objectionable books sound impossibly quaint now. My mother’s observation to me that the books in the children’s section weren’t challenging enough was a directive to explore the adult section of the Manhattan Beach Public Library.  I sneaked  past the circulation desk to avoid the disapproving Mrs. Brown and slithered into the W-Zs of adult fiction. The authors’ names on the spines were unfamiliar, but “Wodehouse” on a top shelf caught my eye and I pulled out one of the misadventures of Bertie Wooster, complete with gaspers,  cocktails, and morning-after cures.  I was allowed to check it out, but then I hadn’t handed over The Portrait of Dorian Grey.  Another time Mrs. Brown refused to let me have a book from the adult section until she spoke with my mother, who coolly confirmed that I had her permission. Mrs. Brown pulled a sour face while the transaction was completed.

I have no idea what Mrs. Brown would have made of the new policy of the Hamilton East Public Library in Indianapolis to relocate sexually explicit YA books to which parents have objections to the adult section. In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal,  Daniel Lee looked at this “culture-war skirmish,” which John Green, a beloved Indianapolis writer whose acclaimed YA novels  Looking for Alaska and The Fault Is in Our Stars were targeted, denounced  the move as “political theater of the lowers and most embarrassing order.”

Green’s novels, which feature young characters struggling with class conflict, dysfunctional families, terminal illness, and chronic depression, who also chain-smoke, experiment with sex, binge-drink and drive,  Lee suggested, would not have resonated with Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, whose Hoosier boyhood in the early twentieth century was unmarked by any trauma more devastating than surviving cotillions.  Penrod, says Lee, “knew which bathroom to use.”    He continues:

Yes, some young people today are in terrible situations.  But it seems profoundly pessimistic—and ideologically loaded—to think most kids don’t live lives much like Penrod’s and worse, that they lack parents who are eager and competent to help when trouble comes.

Unfortunately, coverage of book bannings in public schools and libraries often contain glib comparisons, which score points at the expense of oversimplifying the difficulty of judging the contents of books in contention.  Lee’s description of Penrod suggests he didn’t read Tarkington very carefully or he might have noticed that this once classic American novel about boyhood contains any number of awkward situations similiar to Tom Sawyer or Peck’s Bad Boy that don’t involve precocious sexual activity.

The cotillion episode, which Lee considered anodyne, is a good example of Penrod acting on impulse for purely selfish reasons.  The day of the cotillion he discovers a basket of expired medicines, dentifrices, hair oil, condiments gone off, etc. in the stable put out for the trash.  After he and his friend Sam set up a drug store to fill prescriptions, Sam mixes up some small pox medicine using the contents of the basket and part of a bottle of licorice water to make it look palatable.  Penrod’s dog Duke the tester can’t keep it down, inspiring dreams of administering a dose to Professor Bartlett, which would cause the cotillion to be cancelled.  Instead their frenemy Maurice Levy saunters by.  Penrod resorts to a desperate measure to take out Maurice, so he, with two left feet, can squire around as the adored Marjorie Jones and hand off his partner Baby Rennsdale to Sam, whose partner has had to send regrets.  Maurice is invited to drink as much licorice water as he can in one pull and the bottle of small pox medicine is substituted.   He swallows it all, has a smoke, and heads home without exhibiting any ill effects to change for cotillion.

Left unsupervised to an extent unimaginable today, eleven-year-old Penrod has acted on enough ideas like this one to have earned the reputation as the worst boy in town.  His family worries that he is headed for the penitentiary.  The ladies in town tut-tut about the ineffectual Schofields when his  mother and sister aren’t present.  Certain families forbid their sons to associate with him.  His peers, on the other hand, take vicarious pleasure in his antics like talking back to the teacher and managing to temporarily elude punishment by saying the outburst was due to weariness from comforting his distraught aunt, who  has taken refuge from her drunken, abusive husband with the Schofields.   A tall tale  inspired by the silent film he watched when he should have been in Sunday school.

If Penrod’s reputation was affected by his friendship with the Black brothers, Herman and Verman, who live in the nearby alley, Tarkington didn’t come out and say so.  What stirkes us now are the ambiguities of the power dynamics between the white boy and two “darkies.”  Verman suffers from ankyloglossia and his words have to be translated by his older brother Herman.  Herman is missing a forefinger, because his little brother chopped it off with an axe when told to as a joke. The boys’ father is in jail term for stabbing a man with a pitchfork.  Penrod finds  Herman and Verman so fascinating that he immediately proposes to Sam they could be the star attractions of a show.

Equally troubling  is the Rupe Collins episode.  An older white boy from the wrong side of town comes around to play, which means he bullies and tortures Penrod and Sam.  Verman whacks Rupe with a board to make him stop and gets called the N-word.  Herman tells Rupe to lay off his brothers and his friends, setting off a terrific fight, in which the rules of fair play are suspended, while Penrod and Sam watch on the sidelines. Verman opens hostilities by striking Rupe with a rake because in “his simple, direct, African way, he wished to kill his enemy…and to kill him as soon as possible.”  The brawl comes to an end when Herman grabs a scythe and threatens to cut out Rupe’s gizzard and eat it.  It was probably just trash talk, but Penrod and Sam are too shaken by the brothers’ “unctuous merriment” after victory to say thank you.

Tarkington’s Penrod can’t be characterized as a book written back in the good old days when children were still innocent a hundred years ago.  Daniel Lee’s assertion in the Wall Street Journal that in the novel still reflects the circumstances of many children’s lives today, was an oversimplification supporting the comforting illusion that classic books are alternatives to contemporary problem YA novels whose authors want to hold up a mirror to contemporary teenagers” lives.  However the excessive realism is defined, the line where crosses over to the exploitative is always being redrawn in contemporary discussions. But the analysis will be more productive, the more carefully the books in question are studied.

Yes, critical race theory is integral to George M. Johnson’s manifesto-memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue. The author’s search for a meaningful, fulfilled sex life as a gay man is too, but that account, which is not overly graphic, occupies far fewer pages than you might expect, given the book’s notoriety.   What the book’s critics neglect to say (probably because they haven’t read it), is that it’s also a warm, loving tribute to the Black family that had his back while he was growing up painfully conscious of being different and unsure where he belonged.  The book is worth reading just for the portrait of his Nana, with whom he was very close, or his memories of jumping Double Dutch with the girls, to mention just two passages.  Don’t damn a book without giving the author a chance and don’t praise it without a detailed sense of how the strengths and weaknesses may be intertwined.  Regardless of when a book was written, it is probably more complex than its reputation.