Every year in
school, we got a list of fifty books we were supposed to read during
the year. Yes, you heard it right, fifty books a year, plus a
separate reading list for summer. The teacher could test you randomly
on any of these. It was called out-of-the-classroom reading, so it
was on top of what we read in school.
Quite a lot were
boring books about young communist heroes and revolutionaries, but
even among these there were some books that we all loved, re-read and
talked about, so they apparently had some qualities beside explicit
ideology. It was not until much later that I noticed that there was
any ideology at all.
One such favourite
was Timur and His Gang,
about a group of young pioneers, Soviet scouts, who help old people
and protect helpless children and fight hooligans. They are all
honest, brave and clever (except the hooligans, of course), and
unlike many Western books of this kind, all adults are also honest,
brave and clever. I truly cannot understand what we liked about this
book. Many years later, a friend pointed out for me that the main
character's father is going away to war, while the book was published
in 1940 when the Soviet Union was not officially at war. So the war
must be the war with Finland, which did not exist according to our
history books. That's why I always tell my students that
understanding the context may be significant.
A very similar book
was Vasiok Trubachov and His Comrads.
Even the title is structurally identical. Another group of perfect
young Soviet citizens, this time actually caught in the war, but
mostly doing good deeds and competing with each other in virtue. I
believe that we simply ignored all this and read both books as
straightforward adventure stories.
Vitia Maleyev in
School and at Home, just what the title
promises. A boy who has poor grades in maths, but works hard and
finally succeeds. And helps a friend who has poor grades in... and so
on. There was one detail that worried me in this book. At one point,
the anniversary of the so-called October revolution is celebrated,
and the boy describes how everybody gives each other presents. Now,
whatever the authorities came up with, nobody ever gave any presents
on the October day. International Women's day, yes. Army day, yes
(equivalent of Mother's and Father's day). But October Day? That
simply wasn't credible.
The book I had
serious worries about, very high on the recommended reading lists and
highly regarded among ourselves, was called The
Fourth Height, an authentic hagiography
of a young Soviet girl, perfect in every respect. I truly loved this
book because it was full of adventures: she was a movie star and an
athlete and went to exciting places. One of the exciting places was,
as I understand now, a tbc sanatorium, but it was never spelled out,
so it sounded more like a summer camp. In the end of the book, she is
a grown-up, married and with a little baby. And she leaves the baby
and goes to war. Try as I did, I could not understand the choice. We
were supposed to admire her self-sacrifice, but I felt that a mother
should not abandon her baby. Here the official ideology and my own
beliefs went wide apart.
*Stories for little comrades is an excellent book about early Soviet children's literature.
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