FROM ENLIGHTENMENT RHETORIC TO PRAGMATIC EXPLORATION: DEPICTIONS OF ETHNIC TERRITORIES IN A SERIES OF POPULAR SCIENCE BOOKS FOR CHILDREN (1927–1929)

Abstract

The article analyzes the portrayal of the newly established Soviet state’s territory in a series of popular children’s books published from 1927 to 1929 under the general subtitle “How They Live and What They Do,” dedicated to the peoples of the USSR and their respective territories. Recommended for general schools’ study, this series of books contributed to geographical imagination of schoolchildren in the 1920s. The paper examines the principles on which the image of the geography of the new Soviet country was built, contrasting it with the representation of the Russian Empire’s territory in similar pre-1917 literature, and analyzing the specifically Soviet unity between the territory and the ethnicity. The model of geographical structure constructed by the books divided into the central, ethnically unmarked part and the national peripheries, a hierarchical construction in which the privilege of seeing and speaking belongs to the subject in a semantic and geographical center. The article explores the complex dialectics of ethnographic and pragmatic perspectives on territories characteristic of the book series: from the sites of ethnic ways of life to spaces of industrial modernity and the economic resource for the state.

Keywords: imaginary geography, geography of the USSR, popular ethnography, educational children’s literature of the 1920s, Nikolai I. Leonov