“The Three Little Pigs”: Evolution of a fairy tale plot in a picture book of the twentieth century

“The Three Little Pigs” is one of the most famous folk tales and has been adapted many times. The paper is devoted to the evolution of the classical narration as it was presented in picture-books in the 20 th century. The revisions examined are: Walt Disney’s book based on the animated film (1933), Russian adaptation made by Sergey Mikhalkov (1936, 1957) as well as two picture-books which were published at the end of 20 th century in USA and Great Britain and suggest new versions of the classical story — Jon Scieszka’s and Lane Smith’s “The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs” (1989) and “The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig” by Eugene Trivizas and Helen Oxenbury (1993). All the books demonstrate different variants of interaction between the textual and visual contents. The recent versions of the tale reveal important trends: visual narrative presents a substantive semantics and plays increasingly significant role in modern picture-books. The evaluation of the genre introduces multiple perspectives and challenge reader to interact, to create ambiguous meanings rather than suggest a define statement — thus making reception more complicated and inspiring.

The best of all worlds: Josef Lada’s fairy tale Kocour Mikeš as Czech idyll and novel of education

The article discusses Josef Lada’s very popular children’s book Kocour Mikeš [Mikeš, the cat] (1934–1936), which is still a part of Czech schools’ curriculum. The series was inspired by Lada’s own childhood as well as by “Puss in Boots” fairy tales. Lada had created his fairy tale by uniquely merging such literary genres as the idyll and the growing-up novel, and this article addresses the genre specifics of his story. Also it examines double function of childhood in “Mikeš, the cat” as the motif and the source of inspiration. The article gives special attention to the thesis that Lada’s fairy tale is filled with nostalgia for his childhood’ rural world, and this feeling adds to popularity of his story in industrialized Czech.

How does Cultural Transfer in Pedagogics Work? Review of the Book.: Dorena Caroli. De Amicis in Russia. La ricezione nel sistema scolastico zarista e sovietico. Roma: Carocci editore, 2020

The present review analyses a recent monograph "De Amicis in Russia. La ricezione nel sistema scolastico zarista e sovietico" by Dorena Caroli. The book is dedicated to the investigation of how the ideas of humanist school, expressed by the 19 th century Italian writer and educator Edmondo De Amicis, influenced the school system transformations in the pre-revolutionary and in the Soviet Russia. The review consequently puts into light the theoretical basis of the monograph (mostly, the theory of cultural transfer), its structure, the style of the author and the results of the research. The author puts the question of De Amicis’ ideas reception in a broad cultural context, thus the study offers a deep insight into the school system evolution in the czarist Russia and the Soviet state and a broad map of children book market at the end of the 19 th century. The monograph highlights a universal nature of De Amicis’ ideas which for amost a century through a number of translations and adaptations served as a source for the school system renovation in Russia in various social and political contexts.

Breaking Records and Silences: An Account of the IRSCL Congress 2019 “Silence and Silencing in Children’s Literature”

The theme of the Congress that was held by the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) in August 14-18, 2019, was the following: “Silence and Silencing in Children’s Literature”. This article overviews the Congress’ main themes, summarizes the presentations and the key points of discussions. The Congress’ theme sought to capture the ambivalent nature of children’s literature which allows it to simultaneously function as a discursive silencing practice and as a tool for child’s empowerment. 513 delegates from 52 countries took part in the Congress, which accounts for richer research materials and deeper research itself.

A tale? A lie? A lesson? On some quasi-literary debates about the (lack of) usefulness of a genre

During the last two decades, a series of publications drew scholars’ attention to the institutional and ideological context in which the politicization of the fantastic, animistic, and magical took place in the USSR in the late 1920s. In these narratives, «the fight against chukovshchina» is often used as an epitome for the «fight against skazka», which was orchestrated in 1928 by ignorant officials from the Narkompros and aimed at a small group of authors lead by Kornei Chukovsky. Important as it was, «the fight against chukovshchina» was a small and, perhaps, the least intellectually interesting aspect of the ongoing discussions. Debates about skazka did not start in 1928. Nor were they purely Soviet. Similar themes, arguments, and concerns could be easily found in the polemical exchanges in literary and pedagogical periodicals from the 1860s onwards. Key ideas and approaches that were articulated in the 1920s-1930s by and large repeated and repurposed the ideas that took shape long before the Bolshevik revolution. Expanding on the existing scholarship, this introduction to the archival collection «Debating Fairy-Tales» takes the scholarship on skazka beyond the institutional and ideological analysis in order to look closer at the intellectual context that shaped early soviet debates on the limits and function of the fantastic imagination. As the introduction suggests, when read this way, the debates on skazka show how this particular genre was deployed as a platform that enabled a series of fascinating paradigmatic shifts in understanding the links between national literature, on one hand, and education and imagination, on the other. By locating the early soviet debates on skazka within a much larger temporal frame, we could destabilize the monopoly of «the literary studies of politics» in order to see how skazka was conceptualized and problematized within radically different intellectual traditions — from the genetic and the functionalist to the morphological and the rhetorical. Such a diachronic approach makes visible how the original concern of the critics with the problem of skazka’s own origin was replaced by their attempts to figure out skazka’s functional purpose, it’s own internal structure, and, finally, the forms and types of skazka’s impact on it’s readers.

Bibliography of Slovenian Folk Tales in Russian (1861–2020)

The bibliography includes editions of translations of Slovenian folk tales into Russian, published from 1861 to the present.

A Visit to a Fairy Tale: Leading Western Fairy Tale Scholars Jack Zipes, Cristina Bacchilega, and Vanessa Joosen reply to a questionnaire by Detskie chteniia. Interviews were conducted by Marina Balina

This material consists of interviews with leading international scholars of the fairy tale genre. In answering questions about the particular features of the genre, traditional forms of fairy tale narrative, and new approaches to fairy tale texts, the scholars highlight various examples of the fairy tale’s place in contemporary literature and culture. In addition, the interviews touch on the topics of gender, ideology, and colonial and postcolonial practices as evinced in folkloric and literary fairy tales, and on contemporary adaptations of fairy tale stories and their place in our culture today.

Mister Workman — former newsboy, mister Workman — millionaire

This article discusses the little-known text of M. A. Gershenzon, Soviet children’s writer, translator and editor. In 1927 he translated and revised the novel by German writer H. Dominik “John Workman. From newsboy to millionaire” (1909–1925). The article examines the reasons why it was expected, considering all Gershenzon’s works, that the novel will appeal to him. The author of the article analyzes the goals and results of Gershenzon’s strategy as the translator: in this case it consisted more than in careful editing and serious alteration of the plot of the book written by an ideologically distant author. The analysis involves eleven issues of Pioneer magazine (1927), where the translated novel “John Workman” had been published and also accompanied by an avant-garde photographic design by the artist G. Berendhof. The work of M. A. Gershenzon is compared both with the original text by H. Dominik and with the translation by Y. Iwask (“John Workman”, 1933, published by Estonian Russian-language publishing house “Argonauts”).

Brothers Grimm’ fairy tales in illustrations by russian artists

The article provides a brief overview of the most interesting illustrative cycles of brothers Grimm’ fairy tales, created by Russian artists in the XX and early XXI centuries, and examines different approaches to visual interpretation of German folklore. Although some successful graphic interpretations of Grimm’ subjects began to appear early in post-revolutionary years, for a number of reasons this valuable literary material long remained outside of attention sphere of the most significant artists of children’s books. The period of the second half of the 1970s-1980s became the happiest and most fruitful in the publishing fate of fairy tales, when such remarkable masters as N. I. Zeitlin, E. G. Monin, M. S. Mayofis, G. A. V. Traugot, N. G. Golts, B. A. Diodorov, etc. took up the illustration. The second part of the article compares graphic interpretations of the most famous fairy tales of brothers Grimm: “The pot of porridge”, “The gingerbread house”, “The Bremen town musicians”, “The brave little tailor”. The author traces how the interpretations of textbook subjects change and become more complex over time, and what artistic means prove their relevance.