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.”