Erich Kästner’s Playful Characters in the Cultural Space of Stagnation

Abstract

Erich Kästner is considered to be a modernizer and “dean” of German children’s literature, but his popularity transcends the national cultural borders.  Kästner’s first novel for children, Emil and the Detectives (1929), quickly became an international bestseller. It was translated into many foreign languages, adapted for the screen several times, and it marked the beginning of a successful career for the young author. Kästner was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature four times, without ever winning it, but and received the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1960. However, despite his world-wide recognition and popularity, his works for children were not known to Soviet readers until the late 1960-s, and Emil and the Detectives, in Lilianna Lungina’s translation, saw its first publication only in 1971. This article examines why Soviet publishers shunned Kästner’s works for so long and how the culture of Brezhnev’s stagnation offered the possibility to insert new characters and themes into children’s literature, compared to earlier times.

 Key words: Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives, Arkadii Gaidar, politics of translation in children’s literature, period of Brezhnev’s stagnation, tricksters, children’s detective stories.