Russian Studies in Literature

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrsl20

Feminism in Contemporary Russian Children’s

Literature, or How to Translate the Word Avtorka
into English*

Ekaterina Asonova & Olga Bukhina

To cite this article: Ekaterina Asonova & Olga Bukhina (2019) Feminism in Contemporary Russian
Children’s Literature, or How to Translate the Word Avtorka into English*, Russian Studies in
Literature, 55:3-4, 233-245, DOI: 10.1080/10611975.2019.1853434

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611975.2019.1853434

Published online: 10 Feb 2021.

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RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE
2019, VOL. 55, NOS. 3–4, 233–245
https://doi.org/10.1080/10611975.2019.1853434

Feminism in Contemporary Russian Children’s

Literature, or How to Translate the Word Avtorka into
English*
Ekaterina Asonova and Olga Bukhina

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article is devoted to contemporary children’s Russian children’s literature;
literature and the role played in it by women writers, Russian teens’ literature;
publishers, translators, illustrators, researchers, educa­ feminism; girl protagonists
tors, and librarians. Asonova and Bukhina emphasize
the role of the maternal principle both in women’s
writing and in the development of the contemporary
publishing process and explore the feminist aspects
of the many fraught issues raised within the frame­
work of the genre of social realism in contemporary
children’s writing. Asonova and Bukhina also explore
the influence of translated children’s literature on
Russian books for kids and teens published in the
last decade and note the importance of the “high
bar” set by translated literature. Authors of the article
stress the significance of girl protagonists in teens’
literature as well as of variety of the deep psychologi­
cal issues expressed with the help of these characters.
Authors of the article discussed a role of picture books
and non-fiction publications in the development of
contemporary Russian writing for children.

English translation © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text, “Feminizm v russkoi
detskoi literature, ili kak perevesti na angliiskii slovo avtorka.” Published with the authors’ permission.
Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov.
Ekaterina Asonova is the head of the Laboratory of Sociocultural Educational Practices of the Institute of
System Projects at Moscow City University. She is the author of articles and teaching material collections
and a specialist in children’s literature and children’s reading. She coordinates several research projects,
such as “Children’s Books in Adult Reading” and the bi-annual conference “Children’s Literature as an
Event.”
Olga Bukhina is a translator, an author, a children’s books specialist, and an independent scholar based in
New York City. She has translated over fifty books from English into Russian, primarily for children and
teens. She writes about children’s literature for journals, collections, and online publications, both in
Russian and in English. Her book The Ugly Duckling, Harry Potter, and Others: A Guide to Children’s Books
About Orphans was published in Moscow.
*Unlike English, Russian is an intrinsically gendered language, so the fight for appropriate feminitives
(the Russian equivalents of authoress, librarianess, and so forth) free of any diminishing connotations is
very important. In Russian, it is now an emerging practice to use avtorka (authoress) for women writers
and avtor (author) for men, although until recently, avtor did not have a feminine counterpart. For many
Russian women, feminitives like ‘avtorka’ are an expression of a desirable gender equality.
© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
234 E. ASONOVA AND O. BUKHINA

What is at the heart of today’s feminist upsurge? Feminism is nothing new:

the movement has been around for more than one hundred and fifty years.
In many European countries, people consider the ‘woman question’ to be
long since settled. That being the case, why is Norway, a land of triumphant
feminism, suddenly generating so many books on the topic? Across the
globe, women are publishing one book after another about women’s rights,
many of them aimed at young readers.1
Humanist gains, like any evolutionary gains, must be reinforced through
education, and children’s literature plays just as important a role in establish­
ing norms as classroom textbooks. Furthermore, globalization has given
children’s writers a chance to pursue their mission around the world, not
settling for consolidating norms in their own country. ‘Feminism today is
much broader than just fighting for the rights of European housewives,’ the
Norwegian writer Marta Breen and illustrator Jenny Jordahl have argued
during talks about their book on the history of the feminist movement,
Fearless Females: The Fight for Freedom, Equality, and Sisterhood, which
was recently published in Russian and covers even such specific modern
phenomena as feminist political ecology.2
Feminism in Russia has its own unique context. Over seventy years of
Soviet rule, Russian women grew accustomed to working with a jack ham­
mer, fighting in the trenches, and constantly having to ‘run into burning
buildings’ and ‘stop galloping horses’ – in short, being a bit tougher than
their male counterparts. This point was raised by someone attending
a presentation on Fearless Females when, toward the end of the gathering,
she expressed confusion over just what it was contemporary feminists were
fighting for, since their entire lives attest to the fact that women are by
definition stronger and more capable than men. ‘Does being a strong
woman make me a feminist?’ she asked.
Anyone observing the development of the children’s and young-adult
literature market in twenty-first-century Russia can see that women are
playing the predominant role in this field, not that this is reflected in
mission statements or claims that women have a special role to play in
culture. We should note that something similar is taking place in the
world of adult literature in Russia: ‘In Russian literature of the 1990s and
2000s, a paradoxical process could be observed: the formation and devel­
opment of feminist poetry without any sort of accompanying declara­
tions’ (Kukulin, 2013: p. 117). As Ilya Kukulin suggests, ‘Not only has
feminist criticism failed to come together in post-Soviet Russia – neither
have independent social movements to defend women’s rights’ (p. 118).3
As in the past, this is most striking when it comes to literary criticism of
so-called ‘women’s’ poetry: ‘Women who come into the arena to make
works of art will always be seen, if only partially and temporarily, as
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 235

women, and I put a special emphasis here on the idea of being seen as
a woman’ (Sandler, 2013: p. 174).
Over the past two decades, very different processes have been unfolding
in the world of children’s literature. To start with, we can see an important
stage in the emergence of a new literature for children: since the very
beginning of this century, a new breed of children’s literature publishers
has emerged that has been bringing translated literature to market, litera­
ture that is socially and psychologically distinct and reflects the way parents
see the world in which their children are growing up. Underlying the new
didactics of this literature is an unconditional respect for children as
people; the value of emotional closeness and mutual understanding
between adult and child; the legitimization of conflict, negative emotions,
mistakes, and delinquencies; and the idea of social inclusion. And it should
be recognized that, in Russia, it is mothers who have given birth to this
process: Irina Balakhonova, Tatyana Kormer, Alexandra Polivanova,
Ksenia Kovalenko, Marina Kozlova, and Julia Zagachin. They have pio­
neered socially-responsible publishing in Russia. Their actions are driven
by a desire to publish books their own children (and they themselves)
would find interesting: works about the sort of childhood where children
and adults can discuss difficult and ambiguous things; where adults have
the right to make mistakes and to help other adults; where the triumph of
justice and good are linked to the concepts of tolerance, inclusion, and the
defense of children’s right to a home, to be cared for, and to enjoy personal
freedom. Irina Balakhonova describes this period:
We didn’t have experience, connections, or money. The only thing we clearly
understood was the kinds of books we wanted to produce—books that we
could offer our own children. In other words, books that we liked. And then it
turned out that we weren’t the only ones who felt that the need for quality
children’s books was not being met, that there were lots of parents like us. They
became our “target audience.” I have to say that by the early 2000s, when we
were just getting started, there was a great demand for books—the market was
trying to fill a hole left over from Soviet-era shortages. The internet as we know
it today was almost nonexistent, and television serials hadn’t yet entered our
lives. Everyone wanted to read. (Balakhonova, 2018)

Julia Zagachin speaks of a similar motivation:

If I didn’t have children, as much as I love beautiful illustrations, this wouldn’t
have been interesting for me. All of my professional career I’ve been working
in equity markets, and that’s of course my first and everlasting love. But when
you see a child’s reaction to a well-published book, it’s a nice business. Some
people like to cook; I like to publish children’s books. (Zagachin, 2019)

And so came the publishers Samokat, Rozovyj zhiraf, and Mir detstva,
giving Russian readers works by Marie-Aude Murail (France); Ulf Stark,
Annika Thor, and Pernilla Stalfelt (Sweden); Maria Parr (Norway); Gary
236 E. ASONOVA AND O. BUKHINA

Schmidt (United States); David Grossman (Israel), and many other foreign
authors writing frankly for children about death, family dysfunction, incur­
able diseases, and society’s outcasts. This was a new way of caring for
children: ceasing to shield their young world from information about the
complex and fraught questions of history, culture, social relations, politics,
and psychology that have no ‘correct’ answer.
A division has gradually formed within Russian children’s literature: men
(both publishers and writers) have primarily gravitated toward wordplay,
fantasy, and magical literature, while women publishers, writers, and trans­
lators have boldly stood at the forefront of social realist and psychological
prose for children and young adults. The task of developing an informational
environment for this literature has also fallen to women researchers, critics,
educators, and librarians.4
Translators have played a central role in this process. As in many other
areas of Russian letters, the development of Russian children’s literature has
heavily depended on translations from a variety of European languages. The
French and German of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were
replaced by English in the twentieth. But as English continued to serve as
the primary pipeline bringing new global trends to Russian children’s litera­
ture, as early as the 1960s, during the post-Thaw period, a parallel channel
arose that brought Russia Scandinavian children’s books – Swedish and
Norwegian first and foremost. One of the most important Swedish writers
to break through the iron curtain from the north was, of course, Astrid
Lindgren, with her mind-of-his-own Karlsson who lives on the roof and the
unsupervised Pippi Longstocking. Behind Lindgren came ‘the mother of all
Norwegians,’ Anna Catharina Vestly, with her boisterous family of eight
children who manage to solve all the adults’ problems.
In the twenty-first century, Olga Drobot – one of the best translators
working with children’s (and not only children’s) books – solidified
Norwegian literature’s foothold in Russia. Drobot has been successfully sup­
plying the Russian children’s literature market with books that offer important
meditations on life, and, as we have already seen, often have a feminist
orientation. Drobot introduced Russian children to Maria Parr, a young
Norwegian writer who has been labeled the new Astrid Lindgren. Lena, the
female protagonist of her Adventures with Waffles is best friends with a boy
named Trille, who serves as the story’s narrator. Lena is the ultimate daredevil
and endlessly gets herself into unbelievable situations, which she usually comes
through more or less in one piece. However, madcap adventures (of which
there is no shortage in children’s literature) are not the point: Parr’s story­
telling endows children not only a new level of autonomy but a whole array of
serious problems, starting with the most serious of all: the death of a loved one.
Other Norwegian authors – such as Rune Belsvik, with his Dustefjerten
(Prostodursen in Russian) and Lars Saabye Christensen, author of Herman –
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 237

only reinforce the Russian reader’s impression of Norwegian children’s litera­

ture, yet again showing that it focuses both on philosophical contemplation
and on actively helping children with wide-ranging problems in the areas of
health, family relations, and difficulties at school. As Olga Drobot explains:

In Scandinavia, Norway in particular, a democratic literature was developing

at that time that, coming out of the experience of war, tried to write and speak
in a new way. It was important that children learn to stand up for their own
viewpoint. Children’s literature began to address topics not typical of it. Now,
it seems to me, we are lagging behind Scandinavia by fifteen years, in some
sense, but we’re catching up quickly. If we had been having this conversation
fifteen years ago, I would have told you that we had almost no young adult
novels, picture books, and graphic novels—these are important and popular
genres for Scandinavian literature. Whereas now we have all that. I think that
translations, of Scandinavian books in particular, have played a certain role—
they have accustomed the public to these genres and helped Russian writers
develop them quickly. (Drobot, 2019)

The heroines of books from the United States, England, Sweden, France,
and many other countries have also become integral parts of Russian literature
thanks to a number of female translators: Olga Varshaver, Olga Maeots, Olga
Bukhina, Maria Lyudkovskaya, Natalia Malevich, Natalia Shakhovskaia,
Nadezhda Buntman, and Ksenia Kovalenko, among others. They have brought
such well-known American women writers as Lois Lowry, Kate DiCamillo,
Jacqueline Kelly, Meg Rosoff, among many others, into the canon of Russian
children’s literature. They consistently portray their female protagonists from
openly feminist positions, but without a heavy-handed didacticism and sim­
plistic slogans. It is not that female translators go out of their way to translate
female writers – not at all. But, in their role as translators, they have created
a whole new field of children’s literature written by contemporary Western
women writers whose thoughts and actions have long since been informed by
feminism. This became particularly striking with the simultaneous entrance of
two books into the Russian market: Miss Charity by the French writer Marie-
Aude Murail (translated by Nadezhda Buntman and Viktoria Koshel) and
a dilogy by the American Jacqueline Kelly, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
and The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (translated by Olga Bukhina and
Galina Gimon). Both books are historically based and far removed from
contemporary Russian reality, however the translations gave young readers
examples of girls capable of overcoming obstacles to attain their dreams,
wherever they might be temporally or geographically located.
These female translators have remained engaged with the works that they
bring to Russian readers. They actively participate in the educational activities
organized by publishers, conduct their own research, and play an independent
role in the literary process. Not only has Olga Maeots given Russian readers
access to the Swedish writer Ulf Stark, whose philosophical books answer many
238 E. ASONOVA AND O. BUKHINA

of the oft-unspoken questions children have about life and death; she also
conducts research and educational activities focused on the history of children’s
literature and organizes meetings with foreign and Russian authors. Olga
Varshaver, in addition to translating authors like David Almond, Kate
DiCamillo, Rosemary Wells, and Gary Schmidt, adapts their works for chil­
dren’s theater and stays actively involved in staging them. Olga Drobot works to
promote the books she translates and organizes meetings with their authors.
These translators have taken on the mission of bringing important books to
readers using all available informational channels.
By creating a body of quality children’s literature, these translators have made
it hard for Russian writers – male or female – to ‘lower the bar’: young readers
now expect to be taken seriously. The first generation of post-perestroika female
writers was primarily interested in portraying situations of social dysfunction:
four out of Dina Sabitova’s five books are about orphans (Sabitova, 2011a,
2011b, 2018, 2019). Ekaterina Murashova was also mainly driven to write
about societal ills – orphancy, poverty, and children with special problems
(Murashova, 2008, 2012, 2014). The protagonists – usually girls – authored by
the next generation of female writers were very different. They are often
adolescent girls, ordinary children growing up in a nuclear family. They go to
school, participate in extracurricular activities, study languages, and sometimes
travel abroad. They may find themselves in extraordinary circumstances that
lead to trauma or crisis, but sometimes they simply live the lives of typical urban
teenagers within the confines of home and school. But it is the social engage­
ment of these books that sets the works of this generation apart.
For example, in her portrayal of very different girls, Daria Dotsuk leads
readers toward a deep psychological understanding of what her protagonists
are going through, describing, in one instance, the emotional aftermath of
witnessing a terrorist attack in the Moscow metro (Dotsuk, 2017, 2018). The
decisive yet shy protagonist of Yulia Kuznetsova’s Where’s Papa? [Gde papa?]
also finds herself in a difficult situation: her father has been imprisoned for
a white-collar crime and she, Papa’s little girl, has to make her own decisions and
grapple with problems that rain down on her one after another (Kuznetsova,
2016, 2017a, 2017b – these are only the best known of the more than a dozen
books that Kuznetsova has published). Most of the problems described in
contemporary young-adult fiction are rather commonplace – problems in
getting along with others, difficulties at school, arguments with parents and
siblings that we see Victoria Lederman’s and Larisa Romanovskaya’s young
protagonists confront – but we also find problems of gender identification and
bullying in Daria Wilke’s Playing a Part [Shutovskoi kolpak] (Vil’ke, 2013;
Lederman, 2019; Romanovskaia, 2019a). Works by Larisa Romanovskaya and
Maria Boteva emphasize family breakdown, with children growing up fatherless,
in poverty, and under difficult social conditions (Boteva, 2016, 2017;
Romanovskaia, 2019b). In literature like this, designed for readers who are no
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 239

longer really children but not yet adults, the author’s perspective as a mother is
very important. Indeed, Yulia Kuznetsova’s first novella, The Imaginary Beetle
[Vydumannyi zhuchok], is based on her own experience as a mother and tells
the story of her child’s day-to-day life when she was hospitalized for weeks with
a serious illness that demanded regular treatment.
Women writers do not necessarily express their feminist view of the world
through girl protagonists, in fact their portrayals of boys are often very
successful. One example is Nina Dashevskaya, maybe one of the best chil­
dren’s writers, who manages to capture adolescent intonation with particular
stylistic precision. Her literary explorations center on the difficulties faced by
adolescent boys who have trouble getting along with their peers – and
themselves. Another dominant theme in her books stems from the author’s
own passion: music. Dashevskaya plays in the orchestra of a children’s
musical theater, and her protagonists all have their own relationship with
music, in some cases a very close or even professional relationship, but in
others a troubled relationship bordering on hatred (Dashevskaia, 2015,
2018a, 2018b, 2019).
There is one area of children’s literature that is not, for now, developing as
dynamically as the others in Russia: picture books, especially those produced
by women artists. This uncrowded field made it easy to select artists to write
about.5 Artist Anna Desnitskaya collaborates with author Alexandra Litvina
creating books based on extensive historical research. Their works include
the colossally successful The Metro Above Ground and Underground: An
Illustrated History of Trains [Metro na zemle i pod zemlei: istoriia zheleznoi
dorogi v kartinkakh], The Apartment: A Century of Russian History [Istoriia
staroi kvartiry], and Trans-Siberian: All Aboard [Transsib. Poezd otpravliaet­
sia] (Litvina, 2016, 2018, 2019; only the second of these three has been
published in English translation). It is interesting to observe Desnitskaya’s
creative process as she produces visual narratives, which involves searching
social media for pieces of history evocative of an era – everyday objects, or,
for example, packaging designs – and then integrating them into the design
of her books. As she describes it: ‘I like digging around for details, trying to
find what this or that looked like. I like finding out how something was done’
(Desnitskaia, 2018). Desnitskaya’s books are part theater, part museum. She
uses the page as a stage, and the mise-en-scene comprising ordinary objects –
pieces of history – plays a leading role. Desnitskaya’s primary focus is the
course of history and how human fates are reflected in material objects.6
The artist Zina Surova pursues a completely different strategy in her artistic
explorations. She is interested by the world surrounding children ‘here and now’:
form, material, and opportunities to transform and use them. Surova made her
debut with the picture book The Love Boat [Korablik liubvi], a mother’s story
about love and giving birth addressed to a small child. We believe this book
represents a sort of breakthrough in the area of Russian visual children’s
240 E. ASONOVA AND O. BUKHINA

literature (Surova, 2007). Surova’s Cosmos [Kosmos] was created in collabora­

tion with Dmitry Kostiukov and published in 2012 through a form of crowd­
funding, with money for the first edition collected from ‘subscribers’ – potential
buyers (Surova, and Kostiukov, 2017). But her most interesting project is a series
of books designed to develop children’s power of observation. They are designed
to enable mothers to help their children develop their ability to observe the world
around them – ‘quest-books,’ ‘creative-task books,’ and ‘nature-map books’
(Surova and Dryzlova, 2017; Surova and Surov, 2017).
Daria Gerasimova has carried on the tradition of the renowned Soviet
fairy-tale illustrator Tatyana Marvina. In contrast with Marvina, however,
the fanciful cats, foxes, and other half-realistic, half-bizarre creatures that
populate Gerasimova’s books are amazingly contemporary, and more eye-
catching and imaginative than traditional fairy-tale illustrations. Gerasimova
is actively engaged in the educational process, creating books to teach letters
and numbers specially designed for small children (for example, Gerasimova,
2017, 2018, 2019).
Desnitskaya, Surova, and Gerasimova all prioritize children’s needs in their
approach to contemporary visual esthetics, respecting these needs not only on
the level of text, but on the level of illustration, and treating young readers not
just as passive consumers, but as active participants in their interactions with
books. Both Gerasimova and Surova hold regular classes with small children,
teaching them to create their own textual and graphic spaces.
The appearance of American books about both U.S. and Russian history in
the Russian market was soon followed by Russian books that attempted to make
a truthful account of Soviet-era brutality accessible to children. Gary Schmidt,
especially in his The Wednesday Wars [Bitvy po sredam], gave Russian readers
a glimpse into the ‘human’ side of the history of the Viet Nam war. Leningrad-
born American artist Eugene Yelchin attempted to relate – and show, through
his marvelous illustrations – the human tragedy of the Stalinist purges. The
translation of his Breaking Stalin’s Nose [Stalinskii nos] into Russian became just
the first of a series of books about the horrors of Stalinism written for children
and young adults after Russian women writers turned their attention to this
period. Olga Gromova’s Sugar Kid [Sakharnyi rebenok] is an exceptionally
realistic account of maternal love saving a little girl thrust into the savage
environment of a Stalinist camp, followed by exile in Kirgizstan (Gromova,
2018).7 Like Yelchin’s book, Yulia Yakovleva’s quadrilogy, Leningrad Tales
[Leningradskie skazki], is imbued with magical realism. Yakovleva describes
a horrifying situation, where children are left alone at first after their parents’
arrest and again after the disappearance of their uncle and aunt during the Siege
of Leningrad (Iakovleva, 2016, 2018a, 2018b, 2020).8 Gromova’s narrative and
Yakovleva’s trilogy, despite using very different literary approaches, both empha­
size the importance of motherhood and family connections for the survival of
children who fall under ‘the wheel of history.’
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 241

Alongside authors and illustrators, those actively engaged in promoting

children’s reading and literature deserve special mention here. At the top of
this list would be Marina Aromshtam, the editor-in-chief of the Papmambuk
portal for reading parents. Aromshtam’s pedagogical and parental position has
earned her a reputation as the ideologue of children’s reading in Russia. Her part
in the development of literature should not be overlooked: her When Angels Are
Resting [Kogda otdykhaiut angely] and The Shaggy Child [Mokhnatyi rebenok]
have shifted the tonality of writing for children and young adults. These works
play with time (the reader ‘sees’ the life of the mother and grandmother when the
mother was a little girl through the eyes of the son/grandson) and combine
narrative frames (with the narrative perspective alternating between teacher and
student). The books The Little Acorn [Zheludenok] and How Autumn Was
Married [Kak Osen’ zamuzh vykhodila] both demonstrate that you do not
necessarily need textbooks to teach grammar (Aromshtam, 2015, 2016a,
2016b, 2017). Aromshtam has made a major contribution to elementary educa­
tion, producing books to be used in the classroom that can be unreservedly
recommended to teachers.
The list of women deserving recognition for valuable contributions to the
development of children’s reading in Russia would also have to include Maria
Skaf, an independent scholar of visual children’s literature, a new and important
category; Olga Lishina, a blogger and ‘book fairy,’ as her admirers have dubbed
her; Masha Serbinova, a ‘book sommelier’ who compiles lists of suggested
reading that help parents navigate the jumble of children’s books; the fierce
critic of children’s literature, Ksenia Moldavskaia, who has substantially
advanced the cause of quality children’s literature not only in the media space,
but also in schools; the cultural pillars Alexandra Polivanova and Tatyana
Ryabukhina, who, in their day, made intellectual reading programs for children
fashionable; Anna Tikhomirova, creator of Bumper, a one-of-a-kind children’s
book bus that serves as a mobile bookstore/club traveling across Russia from
south to north and west to east. And the authors of this article will be so bold as
to mention their own efforts in the development of the informational and
educational space for contemporary children’s literature, both its readers and
writers.9 Our role as ‘participant observers’ enables us to point to the primary
importance of the female, maternal principle in this cultural area of Russian
society. In the twenty-first century, ‘maternal’ children’s literature demonstrates
its respect for and partnership with children by crediting them with a greater
sense of responsibility than generally attributed to them.
No doubt, the presence of women in children’s literature and their engage­
ment with both readers and the literary process overall is not unique to Russian
literature – think of Astrid Lindgren, Katherine Paterson, and Harper Lee, for
whom the realm of children’s literature became a means of protecting childhood
and parenthood and shaping new, humanist values, a mission that can be seen as
242 E. ASONOVA AND O. BUKHINA

a sort of social mandate. Writing in the 1960s, Astrid Lindgren wryly alluded to
the social mandate of children’s literature:

Take one divorced mother, preferably one working as a plumber, although

a nuclear physicist will also do—the point is she doesn’t know how to sew and
isn’t “fairer”; to one part plumber-mother add two parts dirty water and a whiff
of exhaust fumes, some countries in famine, parental pressure, and terrifying
teachers; carefully blend, then add a couple of pinches of racial discord, gender
discrimination, a drop of Viet Nam, and generous sprinkles of narcotics and
sex—and voila. Such a sumptuous dish would make Zachris Topelius himself
shudder if he ever got to try it. (Boliund, 2020: p. 226)

Since they were first written, Lindgren’s words have only grown in relevance
to Russian children’s and young-adult literature. For Russia today, social realism
in children’s literature has taken on a frank incisiveness, and this has brought its
feminist qualities into clearer focus: the fact that women are currently its
primary drivers is a function, at least in part, of the need for a revised view of
motherhood and of relations between parents and children.
P.S. In closing, we must certainly express how highly we value the role
played in the literary process by such authors as Vitalii Zius’ko, Boris
Kuznetsov, Aleksei Oleinikov, Igor’ Oleinikov, Aleksei Kopeikin, Mikhail
Vizel’, Il’ia Bernshtein, and many others, however the time when male authors
reigned supreme in the realm of children’s literature is long past.

Notes
1. For Russia, the beginning of this resurgence of feminist-themed children’s
books can be traced to the publication of Tak postupaiut printsessy, the
Russian-language edition of Per Gustavsson’s picture book Så gör prinsessor
(That’s What a Princess Does) translated from Swedish by M. Liudkovskaia
(Moscow: Mir Detstva Media, 2008). This bitingly ironic tale illustrates how
little relevance the stereotypically gendered behavior of a ‘true princess’ – who
hasn’t had to worry about being saved from dragons for a long time – has for
girls today. Today’s Russian market offers a wide array of works across age
categories that use varied approaches to introduce the idea of equality of the
sexes and relate the history of women’s struggle for their civic and economic
rights: Ketrin Timmesh, Pridumano devochkami. Istorii o vydaiushchikhsia
izobretatel’nitsakh (Moscow: Mann, Ivanov i Ferber, 2016 [Catherine
Thimmesh, Girls Think of Everything (New York: HMC, 2000)]); Zhaklin
Kelli, Evoliutsiia Kelpurnii Teit (Moscow: Samokat, 2015 [Jacqueline Kelly,
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (New York: Square Fish, 2011)]); Mari-Od
Miurai. Miss Cheriti (Moscow: Samokat, 2017 [Marie-Aude Murail,
Miss Charity (EDL, 2016)]); Andrea Beti. Roza Rivera, inzhener (Moscow:
Kar’era Press, 2016 [Andrea Beaty, Rosie Revere, Engineer (New York:
Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2013)]), among others.
 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 243

2. Marta Breen and Jenny Jordahl, Fearless Females: The Fight for Freedom,
Equality, and Sisterhood (Yellow Jacket, 2019 [Kvinner i kamp – 150 år med
likhet, frihet, søsterskap, translated into Russian as Svoboda. Ravenstvo.
Sestrinstvo. 150 let istorii bor’by zhenshchin za svoi prava]). A brief description
of an event where Breen and Jordahl met with readers at Moscow City
University can be found at: http://www.chtenije.ru/2019/07/blog-post.html
(accessed 5 July 2020).
3. Since most of the Russians mentioned in this article have publications or at
least an online presence with a particular anglicized spelling, for the
purposes of this article only we are sometimes dispensing with the
Library of Congress transliteration rules normally adhered to by this jour­
nal. – Trans.
4. Despite the fact that a lot of librarians and educators are women, appropriate
and respectful feminitives have not yet emerged for these professions in the
Russian language.
5. See Asonova’s previous contribution to Russian Studies in Literature
(Asonova, 2016).
6. In addition to the books already mentioned, she has illustrated an edition of
Osip Mandelstam’s Two Trams [Dva tramvaia] (Mandel’shtam, 2019).
7. Sugar Kid has been translated into several European languages.
8. In 2017, the English translation of Yakevleva’s The Raven’s Children was
named an In Other Words honor title for children’s fiction in translation by
the BookTrust.
9. Ekaterina Asonova is a principal organizer of several research projects, such as
‘Children’s Books in Adult Reading,’ and of the annual conference ‘Children’s
Literature as an Event.’ Olga Bukhina reviews Russian and translated books for
a broad audience of Russian readers, parents, and educators; she is also work­
ing to promote the achievements of Russian children’s literature in the United
States.

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