True tales: history of Russian children's literature in historical and social context

The paper reviews the monograph by the Finnish philologist Ben Hellman, Fairy Tales and True Stories: the History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People, released by the publishing house "New literary review" (Moscow) in 2016 in translation from English by O. Bukhina. The book is a systematic study of the history of Russian children's literature from its beginnings to the first decade of the 21st century. The development of each genre of children's literature is presented in the book chronologically. Special attention is paid to periodicals and children's magazines and, accordingly, to the texts of writers of the "second row", which is of a particular scientific value. The monograph also studies the problem of foreign influences on the work of Russian children's writers. The specificity of the approach in the monograph by the Finnish scholar is that children's literature of Russia is considered in historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. The periodization of children's literature is connected with the main literary movements (sentimentalism, romanticism, realism, modernism). Chapters on the Soviet period in Russian children's literature contain analysis of the socio-political discourse of the era. The monograph analyzes the impact of ideology on such levels of the artistic text as the style, image of the author, and plot. The last chapter of the book is a study of Russian children's literature of recent years (1991-2000). In this period, Ben Hellman sees the willingness of the writers to experiment in genres and their hybridization. On the whole, the monograph under review is focused on the problems of interaction between literature and socio-cultural environment, political and social discourses, offering a new look at the development of Russian children's literature.