Is a Children’s Author Needed? (On the Formation of Soviet Children’s Literature)

Abstract

Svetlana Maslinskaya's article focuses on the process of Soviet children’s literature formation. This topic is viewed in its socio-historic context. Central to the discussion is the establishment of the concept of “children’s writer” as an agent of the general literary development process and the creation of typologies of children’s writers. The second focus of this article is on the status of children’s literature and its critique in both pedagogical discourse and literary debates in the 1920s — early 1930s.   Keywords: children’s writer, a writer for adults, children’s literature criticism, control through pedagogy, the theory of literature