I was actually digging around for digital copies of the Moomin books by Tove Jansson but instead stumbled upon this treasure trove.
- The inclusion of a child in each image and the use of direct address (“ты”) in every text personalizes the narrative: the book strays away from the dryness and objective detachment usually associated with information booklets, but instead is designed to be experienced in an interactive, almost immersive way. The child reader is primed to identify himself with the child depicted in the book, follow his journey throughout the pages, and imagine himself on a tour with an elder, who takes him around to meet various Commissars and explains with direct, familial terms: “here’s what this Commissar is doing for you.” The simple, rhythmic language of the texts evokes children’s songs or chants with catchy rhymes and cheerful tones, contrary to the dry, technical language found in some other children’s books in this collection (such as “Bread Factory”), so that the book would be comprehensible to young (even pre-school) children, to read alone, in groups, or with family members, presumably out aloud or even recited.
- Many of these commissars from early years of the Soviet Union later opposed the party majority organized by Stalin, and were persecuted for their alleged conspiracy with the Trotskyist opposition groups. Amongst the fourteen Commissars listed above, six were executed (Alexander Smirnov, Vasily Schmidt, Ivan Smirnov, Yan Rudzutak, Lev Kamenev, and Alexey Rykov), two were killed in labor camps (Grigory Sokolnikov and Mikhail Frunze), one committed suicide (Dmitry Kursky), and one fled overseas (Aron Sheinman – fittingly the Commissar for Foreign Trade).
n 1925 Leningrad’s Brockhaus-Efron published 10,000 copies of Bolshevik Tom, a 10-page booklet of children’s verses by Nadezhda Pavlovich, accompanied by Boris Kustodiev’s seventeen black-and-white drawings. As all adult Soviet readers doubtless realized, Pavlovich pilfered Tom’s escapades from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) without any acknowledgment, but inflected them ideologically in addition to dramatically altering Twain’s ending. Her goal was to deliver a political salvo against the harmful effects on children’s upbringing of an affluently indolent United States while promoting the Soviet Union as a haven for youth and, more broadly, as a land of happy, bustling unanimity. Belonging to the prolific genre of Bad Boy literature, Twain’s internationally renowned, repeatedly illustrated novel narrates in an ironic key the hooliganish activities of its juvenile protagonist, eventually transforming the inventive, irrepressible ne’er-do-well into a more sober near-adult suddenly in possession of capital. Resurfacing in several sequels, here Tom possesses the traditional appeal of the rebellious adolescent endowed with spunk and imagination who skillfully outwits adults, including the seemingly strict but affectionate aunt who rears him.