A Review of Marina Balina, Sergei Oushakine (eds.), The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children. Toronto; Buffalo, NY; London: University of Toronto Press, 2021, XX+548 pp.

Abstract

The reviewed book The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children, edited by Marina Balina and Sergei Oushakine, is dedicated to Soviet children’s book illustrations of the 1920s–1930s, which had an ideological function. The introduction and sixteen chapters written by different authors demonstrate a variegated picture in which there is a place for avant-garde artistic experiments, educational projects and discussions about children’s books. Illustrations for books that were not related to politics did not come into the focus of attention of the authors of the collection, but nevertheless the coverage of the material is very wide. Different chapters examine how paper, nature, electricity, vezdekhodnost (goeverywhereness), time, the death of Lenin, the Red Army, the proletariat, and “Americanism” were represented in children’s illustrations. Due to involvement of many researchers, the book presents different approaches and methods of visual analysis borrowed from visual studies, art criticism, and history. Not all the authors are convincing in their analysis, but the publication of this collection is undoubtedly an important event in this field of study, even though illustrations for children of the 1920s and 1930s are well-studied.