Why has D.N. Mamin–Sibiriak Become the Most Prominent Children's Writer: On the Establishment of the Russian Children's Literature Canon

Abstract

The last part of the 19th century has seen an increasing number of writers who made children the addressees of their literary works. This process lead to the formation of a particular hierarchy among those writers. Such
hierarchical approach to literature for the young was performed by the pedagogues who discussed the values of literary works addressed at children on the pages of their professional journals. These discussions influenced the formation of the national canon of children’s literature in the 19 th century Russia. The article explores major directions in the creation of the writers’ acceptability for the children’s canon: their personal qualities, their artistic abilities, and creative styles. Special attention is given to the discursive mechanisms that assisted in constructing the writer’s acceptability into this newly formed canon, such as, for example, an exclusion of “adult” writers from it or the process of imposing specific qualities on those who happened to
write for children. There were precisely those qualities (love for children and nature, a realistic description of the world, populist values, and attention to exotic details of life in the Ural mountain region) that made Mamin-Sibiriak into the well-recognized premier representative of the Russian children’s literature canon.

Keywords: D. N. Mamin-Sibiriak, children’s literature, national literary canon, pedagogical critique of children’s literature, realism, regionalism.