“He ate the priest, and all the people” (Children’s Literature’s Adult Fears)

Abstract

Valerii Viugin in the article “He ate the priest, and all the people” (Children’s Literature’s Adult Fears) addresses the specific discourse from the history of Soviet art for children, on which this contribution focuses, has been stimulated by a broader interest in anthropophagy as a topos and in cannibalistic discourses in 20th century Russian culture as a whole. The author examines here a specific quality of children’s literature and cinema that manifests itself in peculiar forms of representation of evil, cruelty, and violence and, as a result, in unique appropriations of the emotion of fear. This opens up a discussion of certain rhetorical aspects of the Soviet politics of horror from the transcultural perspective. The author’s attention has been concentrated on the several significant literary works of the 20th-century writers, both from Russia and from West Europe and the USA (S. Marshak, K. Chukovskii, A. Tolstoi, H. Lofting, C. Collodi, R. Dahl, etc.), and on their screen adaptations.   Keywords: Russian and foreign children's literature and cinema of the 20th century, evil, cruelty, violence, Soviet politics and the rhetoric of fear, intercultural perspective, a discourse of cannibalism