Soviet Russian Children's Picture Book Collection

These illustrated works for children from the USSR represent a unique era in book design, which emerged from contradictory impulses in early Soviet society. Education for children was seen as crucial for creating the new “Soviet Man,” the perfect representative of socialist ideals. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, and Deputy Commissar of Education, declared that children’s books were “weapons,” to be deployed in the revolutionary struggle against bourgeois thought. Children’s books became the tools to remake the world.

At the same time, a fascinating paradox emerged in the 1920s: Soviet children’s literature was expected to conform to ideologically correct content that glorified the new socialist society (although still with relative freedom in comparison to the repressive 1930s), while illustrators were given free rein to employ radically avant-garde techniques. The illustrator also became a significant figure in his or her own right, an equal contributor to the book’s whole. Illustration served as a key means of educating illiterate readers, with brilliantly colorful designs influenced by avant-garde painting, posters, icons, and popular prints. These tensions revolutionized the treatment of form, space, and figure in children’s literature, and led to a unique and paradoxical “Golden Age” of children’s book illustration.

The leaders of this movement were Samuil Marshak (1887–1964) and Vladimir Lebedev (1891–1967), who collaborated as an author-illustrator team. Marshak, one of the most beloved Soviet writers of children’s literature, has been dubbed the Russian Lewis Carroll, while Lebedev is widely regarded as the preeminent designer of children’s books of his era. Their masterworks embodied a radically new approach to children’s book design, integrating Cubist-Constructivist technique with children’s rhymes and Soviet satire. The Penn collection includes their most innovative works, some of which were just added to the collection in 2024.

Many of their seminal masterworks were published by Raduga (“The Rainbow”), a renowned publishing house founded in 1922 (later shut down by the Soviet government in 1930). In 1924, Marshak and Lebedev took charge of the Children’s Literature Department at the Leningrad Division of Gosizdat (State Publishing House), located atop the famous Singer Building on Nevsky Prospect. As literary editor and artistic director, they served as mentors to an entire generation of artists and writers, often collectively referred to as the Leningrad School of Children’s Books. Many of them are represented in the Penn collection, such as Vladimir Konashevich, Vera Yermolaeva, Evgeniya Evenbakh, and Mikhail Tsekhanovsky.

The radical experimentation of these works flourished throughout the 1920s, until Stalinism eradicated avant-garde impulses. Artists and writers were pressured to conform to the strict ideological rules of Socialist Realism, which was officially introduced in 1934 at the First Congress of Soviet Writers. Marshak and Lebedev were attacked in the press for being either too “formalist” or not Socialist Realist enough. Many of their colleagues were imprisoned during the Stalinist Terror. In order to survive, both Marshak and Lebedev changed their ways. Vera Yermolaeva’s death in the Soviet Gulag is one of the most prominent examples of how Stalin snuffed out this unique Golden Age in children’s literature.