TRANSLATION OF BOOKS FOR CHILDREN FROM THE LANGUAGES OF PEOPLE OF USSR: BIBLIOGRAPHIC STATISTICS (1918–1984)

Abstract

Like Soviet literature as a whole, Soviet children’s literature has been institutionally and symbolically constructed as multinational. Unfortunately, the national structure of Soviet children’s book publishing has been mostly neglected by contemporary researchers. The article presents statistical data on the scale and dynamics of translations of children’s books from the languages of the RSFSR and the USSR into Russian. The data comes from the bibliographic indices “Children’s Literature” which covers 1918–1984 years. The data allow to answer the questions: What share of the total resources of Soviet children’s book publishing was allocated to the publication of translations from the national languages of the USSR? How these resources were distributed among different languages? What was the genre composition of works translated from these languages? The bibliographic data indicate that a significant share of the resources of Soviet children’s book publishing was allocated to translations from the languages of the USSR. Meanwhile, in terms of genre composition these translations differed markedly from translations from higher status Western European languages.

Keywords: literature of the peoples of USSR, bibliographic data, translations