Category Archives: History and biography

Vera Smirnova’s Optimistic Picture Book Komu plokho, komu khorosho (1930)

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Polina Popova, Cotsen’s roving Russian-language picture book expert, has written a new post about author Vera Smirnova and her contribution to the genre of life “before and after” the Soviets took power from 1930.  As always, her continuing interest in introducing non-Russian speakers to the wealth of Russian children’s literature is most welcome!

Today, let’s look at another rare book in the Cotsen Children’s Library—the 1930 story Komu plokho, komu khorosho  (Who Has it Bad and Who Has it Good).[1] Its author, Vera Vasil’evna Smirnova, was born in 1898 in Saint Petersburg but spent her childhood years in Skobelev (now called Fergana, Uzbekistan), where she graduated from the Women’s gymnasium and later from a teachers’ college followed by working as a teacher.[2] In 1916 she came to Saint Petersburg to attended the prestigious Bestuzhev Courses for well-born young ladies and Meyerhold’s theatre studio (a fact she would hide throughout the 1930s but later highlight).[3] Smirnova’s first literary works, poems, were first published in 1924.[4] In the 1920s, Smirnova lived in Kyiv taking care of her preschool-aged daughter Irina and two nieces. Vera had arrived in Kyiv in 1925 to help babysit her sister Alexandra’s girls while her sister and brother-in-law, both theater directors, traveled around the country.[5] During this time, Smirnova wrote short stories about life with her charges. In 1927, she published her first collection of poems, Glinianii kuvshin (Clay Jug). Smirnova moved to Moscow in 1929, and in 1931 her sister’s family moved to Leningrad but were still traveling with their theatre around the USSR.[6]

Smirnova’s book from the Cotsen collection, Komu plokho, komu khorosho (Who Has It Bad and Who Has It Good), follows the standard pattern of the late 1920s and early 1930s children’s literature, contrasting the life “before” and the life “after” the Soviets came to power, illustrated with avant-grade-style illustrations (Figure 1). One of the most famous examples of “nasty before and radiant after” was Marshak’s 1930 Vchera i segodnia (Yesterday and Today”; Figure 2). Such temporal—or thematic (such as capitalist vs. communist)—contrasts in children’s books prevailed in Russian and non-Russian Soviet books of the 1930s. Thus, for example, in 1933 in Soviet Ukraine, a book entitled Dva svity (“Two Worlds”) contrasted the lives of working men in the USA and the Soviet Union.[7]

Figures 1 and 2. Covers for Smirnova’s 1930 Komu plokho, komu khorosho and Marshak’s 1930 Vchera i segodnia.Komu plokho, komu khorosho is set in Soviet Central Asia, in Uzbekistan, where two local men are unhappy to discover that life around them is dominated by modern machines, such as cars and trains. One argues that they used to live without them and (even though badly) “yet they lived.” They keep arguing over tea in a chaikhona (tea house) about when was the better time—before or now. The two men are passing by a young pioneer girl smiling at the grumpy Mullah (Figure 3) who tells the reader his story: he used to have power over people, but now no one listens to him and his sermons. In short, in addition to the strong anti-religious message, it is very clear who lost power and status, and who was empowered by the Soviet regime and its progress: the pioneer girl “has it good,” and the angry mullah “has it bad.”

Figure 3. A happy Uzbek pioneer and an old angry Mullah.After that, we see another person who “has it good”—a student who, during his summer break, works at the field helping Uzbek peasants. The two Uzbek men ask him if his life is bad or good, but the student is simply busy watering the cotton; he does not respond but continues working, singing joyfully. Finally, the two friends meet a young Uzbek woman with a short haircut, dressed in European clothes who turns out to be an engineer (Figure 4). When she sees their surprised attitude, Khadicha (that was woman’s name) explains that before women could not work as engineers building factories, but now they can. The book stresses not only some technical advantages of life during communism vs. life before, or the social progress that Uzbek society made compared to how it used to be (controlled by power-thirsty Mullahs), but also (and importantly!) through the episode with Khadicha, Smirnova’s book makes a case for progress in terms of the gender equality. Khadicha mentions to the men that “her husband is a communist, [thus] he does not beat his wife and would never allow anyone else to beat her.”[8]

Figure 4. A female Uzbek engineer and the two Uzbek men surprised to see an unveiled woman.And that gender equality argument was stressed even more by the final episode in the book when two men see a group of preschool children bathing in the river: they are members of a collective, so they attend preschool and their mothers are freed from domestic labor (or that was at least the message that Smirnova conveyed). Students are doing well now, women are doing just as well, too, and their husbands are now good and decent, while the children are happy in schools, freeing their working parents.

The book is charming in its own way and has colorful, vivid illustrations on each page. It was probably aimed at the Soviet preschoolers, kindergarteners, and young schoolchildren to colorfully and simply demonstrate to them the drastic technological, social, economic, and political changes that had taken place in the first decade of Bolshevik rule in Central Asia. The book was among many children’s books of the late 1920s and the early 1930s which promoted the idea that there was a huge cultural, technological, and social gap between Tsarist Russia and the USSR with its stress on supposed progress and a drastic rise in the quality of life. As Stalin put it in his 1935 speech to Stakhanovites, “Life has become more joyous, comrades.”

[1] https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/9991492053506421

[2] E. Emdin, “Smirnova V.V.” (Literaturnaia entsiklopediia: V 11 t., vol. 10, Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1937), 921-922.

[3] Vera Smirnova, “V studii Meīerkhol’da” from Iz raznikh let: stat’I i vospominaniia (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 197), 600.

[4] I. Inozemtsev, “Vera Smirnova”(Detskaia literatura, Vol. 111, 197), 56; B. Brainina, “Chuvstvo puti [O Vere Smirnovoi]” (Detskaia literatura, Vol. 10, 1968), 23.

[5] Elena Boitsova, “Posleslovie” in Vera Smirnova, Devochki (Sankt-Peterburg, Moskva: Rech, 2016), 145.

[6] E. Boitsova, afterword to Vera Smirnova, Devochki (Sankt Peterburg Moskva: Rech’, 2016), 148-149.

[7] For more information on this book, see: Polina Popova, “Death from starvation threatens every working man”: A Soviet book about hunger, but not the Ukrainian people,” Cotsen Library Blog

(https://blogs.princeton.edu/cotsen/2022/04/death-from-starvation-threatens-every-working-man-a-soviet-book-about-hunger-but-not-the-ukrainian-people/, Accessed September 20, 2024).

[8] “Мой муж—коммунист, жену не бьет и другим не позволяет.”

The History of Dental Care for Babies: The Anodyne Necklace for Teething

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Frustration is trying to soothe a teething baby.  The signs are easy to spot—a bright red cheek, inflamed gums, lots of drool, a fist stuck in the mouth, fussing and more fussing.  Rubbing the gums with a lightly chilled silver spoon or a clean finger wrapped in gauze may provide some temporary relief.  No one will be in a very good mood until the tooth breaks through.  The good news is that the process will repeat over and over again the next six to twelve months until all twenty deciduous or milk teeth come in.

We have known for some time that teething is a nuisance that can be dealt with at home, except in rare cases.  Probably every tired parent today goes online questing for a miracle cure.  Amazon makes it fiendishly easy to obsess over dozens and dozens of teething aides in all sizes and shapes—redesigned pacifers, silicone chew toys, plastic freezer beads, sleek Bauhausian rings that teach how to distinguish shapes and colors, etc. most too cute and reasonably priced to resist the temptation of a little retail therapy.

It was supposed to be simpler once upon a time, but that isn’t really true. In the past, medical professionals believed that teething was an important cause of morbidity because it was supposedly responsible for so many infant ailments.  What remedies were there?  Coral sticks were the rich family’s pacifier.  The more elaborate ones were mounted in silver and  decorated with bells and a whistle, like this splendid one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the right.  Surely easy to dent, they look like a gift to be proudly displayed rather like a Tiffany & Co. sterling silver barbell rattle and teether, not sucked by a drooly baby.

Protection from illness or bad luck have been afforded for centuries by amulets of various  materials.  In England, wise women put necklaces of peony roots around the necks of teething children, a practice was well documented in early modern pharmacopias.  White peony roots, necklaces of peony wood beads or seeds are still prescribed for fever, inflammation and pain by practitioners of Chinese traditional medicine.  All these ingredients are available on the web for medicinal purposes, by the way.

In the eighteenth century, the anodyne necklace for babies cutting teeth was one of the most famous (or notorious) of the many branded placebos and quack medicines in a rapidly expanding market.  At 5 shillings, only the well-to-do could afford one. Nevertheless competition was so fierce that consumers were warned away from the counterfeits.  Dr. P. Chamberlen, the supposed inventor without credentials sharing  the same last name a distinguished family of physicians, directed customers to the only authorized retailers, jeweler and goldsmith Basil Burchell and Mrs. Randall.   Do not buy a copy unless it comes with a copy of the 8-page pamphlet, the assurance of authenticity. Pages from Cotsen’s copy are shown at the left.

Children who balked at taking a pill would accept a light-weight, pretty necklace around their neck.  It worked its magic through  “a secret friendly sympathetic quality” similar to amber, jet, glass or agate and cited the eminent natural philosophers Robert Boyle and Dr. Willis as authorities.  A token pierced with a hole could be threaded on the necklace for added efficacy. Queen Caroline and Augusta, Princess of Wales, purchased one necklace per child monthly.   The pamphlet also suggested the time-honored method of rubbing the gums with a finger dusted in pain-easing powder also available where the necklace was sold.

These “toys” sold by the thousands to superstitious mothers, were nothing but frauds, raged the physician-author of The Modern Quacks Detected (1752).  He described the case of a woman who brought her feverish baby to him for an examination.  Two teeth were nearly ready to break through, so his recommendation was to have a surgeon slit the gums to reduce the baby’s suffering.  Instead the fearful mother bought an anodyne necklace a few days later, by which time the teeth had cut.  Her claim that the necklace cured the baby was picked up by one of the agent’s scouts and doctored up as a testimonial to be included in advertisements.  “Hocus pocus,” snarled the author.  She could have hung a stick around his neck instead and claimed it was responsible for the baby’s improvement.

His protest was in vain.  Cotsen recently purchased a bill head dated January 12 1833 for Basil Burchell, son of the original “proprietor & preparer of the ANODYNE NECKLACE” still trading from no. 79 Long-Acre.  And who paid 9 shillings for a necklace?  None other than Her Royal Highness, Duchess of Kent, Victoria Saxe-Coburg-and-Gotha, the mother of the future Queen Victoria.

Before laughing at the Duchess’s credulity, stop for a reality check.  Dentists caution against allowing babies to wear necklaces, bracelets, and anklets without mentioning if they are being worn as amulets against distress during teething.  Amber teething necklaces have their advocates and there must be a fair number of them for a medical blogger address the veracity of  claims made for them.  Plus ca change, plus c’est plus la même chose….