Знакомство советских детей с Джеймсом М. Барри, или публикация повести «Питер Пэн и Венди» как акт сопротивления

In 1968, the biggest Soviet children’s literature publishing house “Detskaya Literatura” issued 50000 copies of J. M. Barrie’s novel “Peter Pan and Wendy”. The text was translated into Russian by Nina Demurova (1930–2021) and the illustrations were made by Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023). The story of the preparation and issuing of the 1968 edition, fifty-seven years after its first edition in English, is the subject of this study. It is argued that the intellectual freedom, independence and autonomy of Demurova and Kabakov not only made the publication an act of resistance but turned the book into an object of art.

The integration of J. M. Barrie into Russian culture was complicated by various reasons: political, ideological and aesthetic [Ivankiva 2019, 54]. For the first time the name of Barrie was mentioned by Isaak Shklovsky (pen name Dioneo, 1864–1935), a journalist and publicist who lived in London and wrote for the Russian magazine “Russkoe bogatstvo”. In 1911 he wrote a long complimentary article about London theatre life in which he praised Barrie as “a very talented playwright unknown to the Russian audience” [Шкловский 1912, 93]. Despite Shklovsky’s acclaim, Barrie did not attract much attention. In fact, there were only two titles available in Russia. In 1917, Barrie’s novel “The Little White Bird”

was published in six installments in the Petrograd monthly literary magazine “Letopis’”, and later issued by “Parus”, a publishing house founded by the famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky. The second edition appeared in Berlin in 1922, at the émigré Russian publishing house “Ogon’ki”. In 1918, the Moscow-based publishing house “Detskaya kniga” published “Kniga s kartinkami o Petere Pane”, a translation of the 1907 British edition of “The Peter Pan Picture Book” made by L. A. Bubnova. The original watercolour illustrations of Alice Woodward turned black-and-white in the Russian edition. It was symbolic: Russia was entering one of the darkest periods of its history and there was no place for Barrie there. In 1930, the Soviet “Literary Encyclopaedia” described Barrie as “a petty-bourgeois writer of England, the British colonies and America” and lashed out at him as “a writer detached from reality, limited and selfish, whose ideology is very close to that of the most conservative wing of the petty bourgeoisie” [Литературная энциклопедия 1930, 720–721]. Such a definition made any further translations or publications impossible. Barrie had to wait thirty-seven years to be heard of again.

Nina Demurova. Acts of (Self-)Censorship

It could have been even longer if it were not for a lucky happenstance. In the late 1950s, a young graduate of Moscow State University, Nina Demurova, went to India to work as an interpreter. On her last day in Delhi she bought two books from a local bookseller: “Pride and Prejudice” and “Peter Pan and Wendy”. Although Demurova had a degree in English literature, she had heard of neither Jane Austen nor Barrie. Demurova was so fascinated by Barrie’s story that, after returning to Moscow, she started translating the book. As it was her first translation, Demurova needed a publisher, so she started looking for one herself. As Alexandra Borisenko notes, “she was young, unknown in the professional world and – a fact both significant and very unusual – did not belong to any translators’ group or union. In the Soviet era it was extremely difficult for a young translator to get a commission and publish a translation on his or her own. The professional community was closed; the work was prestigious, reasonably well paid and, as a result, fiercely competitive. Demurova was not a student of any well-established translator, not a member of the Soviet Writers’ Union or of the Communist Party, not an original writer, and not anyone’s protégée” [Borisenko 2018, 210]. Indeed, Demurova’s position as a young translator was very vulnerable.

Unfortunately, “Detskaya Literatura”, one of the biggest publishers, rejected her manuscript. Demurova contacted a new publishing house called “Detskiy mir”. They agreed to publish the book, but soon afterwards unexpectedly lost the right to publish any foreign writers. Demurova herself suspected that this was done to punish its chief editor Yury Timofeev, who was considered too liberal by the authorities. As a result, “Peter Pan and Wendy” had to be put on the shelf.

Meanwhile Demurova started work at Moscow State University (and then at Moscow Pedagogical University), where she gave lectures on the history of British and American literature and held seminars on stylistics and translation. In one of her interviews, she admitted that she was lucky to be able to pursue continuous professional development there. But her greatest privilege was that, having work at the university, she did not depend on publishing houses at all and could choose what to translate herself. Thanks to her academic growth, work with students at linguistic seminars, and the lack of external control in her translating practices, Demurova gained a reputation both as a talented translator and as a promising researcher. In 1967, her translation of “Alice in Wonderland” was published in Bulgaria. It was highly acclaimed and became an enormous success with readers.

At the same time, the 1960s saw “a more relaxed attitude to Barrie”, as Elena Goodwin puts it, which is reflected in the “Kratkaya literaturnaya entsiklopediya” of 1962. The entry on Barrie, written by B.A. Gilenson and N.Ya. Diakonova, may be considered complimentary. The Peter Pan play was defined as “a touching fairy story”, while Barrie was praised as a writer “who knew how to combine reality with fantasy, the plausible description of everyday life with romantic intrigue” [Гилен-сон, Дьяконова 1962, 459].

Soon after Demurova’s “Alice in Wonderland” was released, “Detskaya Literatura” offered her the chance to publish “Peter Pan and Wendy”, the book they had rejected many years earlier. Their main condition was that the text had to be corrected. It may sound ridiculous now, but at that time censors did not recommend the story for Soviet children unless some changes were made. They claimed that children could not fly; that the dog nurse Nana looked unrealistic; that the little girl maid was a symbol of capitalist exploitation of children; finally, that the word “gentleman”, mentioned several times, contradicted the Soviet class system. Before she submitted the text to the publishers, Demurova had already “committed an act of self-censorship”, in her own words, when she cut certain passages that could be found inappropriate. For instance, she deleted the description of the children’s desire to remain “respectful subjects of the King” [Demurova 1995, 24]. Demurova was against any further corrections. When the negotiations with the publishers reached a deadlock, she decided to contact Korney Chukovsky, the father of contemporary children’s literature and one of the most influential figures in Soviet literary criticism.

In 1967, Chukovsky was eighty-five years old. He had lived a long life, survived and witnessed Soviet repressions. In the late 1920s his own poetry was labelled “chukovshchina” and severely criticised by Nadezhda Krupskaya. Throughout the 1930s Chukovsky witnessed numerous arrests of his colleagues and fellow writers. In 1937 the children’s publishing house Detizdat was destroyed when, within several months, nine of its editors and writers (Chukovsky’s son-in-law Matvey Bronstein among them) were falsely accused of espionage and executed, while the rest were forced to resign. Children’s literature was being physically destroyed in front of Chukovsky and other survivors. As his diaries attest, Chukovsky used his popularity to help authors persecuted by the regime. It was no surprise that Demurova chose to seek his assistance. Knowing the system inside out, Chukovsky at first suggested that Demurova retell the story rather than translate it, to avoid censorship. Retelling was a common practice at the time: before the Soviet Union joined the Universal Copyright Convention in 1973, copyright for foreign books was practically neglected, books were translated and published without any official permission, royalties were not paid, and texts were dramatically altered. Later, Chukovsky agreed to write to Vasiliy Kompaniets, the director of “Detskaya Literatura”. In his letter he praised Demurova for her translation and appealed to Maxim Gorky, who had allegedly considered publishing “Peter Pan” himself back in the 1910s in the children’s section of his publishing house Parus [Demurova 1995, 26]. Chukovsky’s letter must have played its role, and after some minor omissions (the word “gentleman” was removed) “Peter Pan and Wendy” was finally published.

Ilya Kabakov. Drawing around the Edges

But language was not the only censored element in Soviet book publishing. All the illustrations were carefully inspected, just like the texts, and almost always replaced with visuals created by Soviet illustrators. Indeed, what could have been more dangerous and harmful for Soviet children than petty-bourgeois pictures? The illustrator of “Peter Pan and Wendy” was a 34-year-old artist, Ilya Kabakov, who had been working as a book illustrator for “Detskaya Literatura” and several children’s periodicals since 1956. Although he had a classical education (a graduate of the Moscow Academy of Arts), Kabakov was more interested in conceptual art and underground exhibitions. He was one of those young artists of the 1960s who worked as book illustrators while being part of unofficial underground art: Ülo Sooster, Viktor Pivovarov, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Boris Zhutovsky and others. Boris Groys calls such a situation, in which one had to be part of official Soviet art and at the same time “engaged in the activities of the unofficial, alternative Moscow art scene”, “a kind of schizophrenic position”. Groys claims that Kabakov’s “art at that time can be read … as an attempt to bridge a more dangerous gap between official and unofficial art practices of that time, between the official cultural context and the oppositional context, which was a much more serious problem, it was a life problem” [Groys 2003].

Why did they choose children’s fiction and non-fiction? E.V. Eskina suggests three possible reasons for younger artists’ interest in book illustration and magazine cartoons: material reasons, wide opportunities for creative self-realisation and a prudential censorship regime [Эскина 2012, 103]. Indeed, work as book illustrators was a forced way for young artists to make money and survive. A thin 16-page children’s book provided the artist with an amount of money comparable to an average Soviet person’s annual salary – from 1,500 to 2,000 Soviet roubles. For example, Kabakov was paid 4,000 roubles for “The House That Jack Built”, which enabled him to build and furnish his studio [Герасименко 2013]. Groys argues that there was a strong belief that it was Soviet children, not adults, who would inherit and live the dream of communism. This idea led to a certain paradox: if children were to live in a world that did not yet exist, they could see this world in the books they read. That is why children’s reading could be illustrated by artists of the avant-garde, futurism and other non-Socialist-realist movements [Groys 2007].

Kabakov claimed that he never loved his official job. “I didn’t like this business. I didn’t like drawing illustrations, it wasn’t good for me, I was bored endlessly”, we read in an interview. He had a clear understanding of the official art hierarchy, with children’s illustration on the lowest shelf of Socialist realism. He describes it in his comments to the installation “The Untalented Artist” (1988):

We were surrounded at exhibits by a multitude of artistic production in the realistic manner, represented along the entire “pyramid” of the classical hierarchy: religious, now “revolutionary” painting with the participation of leaders like Lenin at the Podium, Stalin at the Congress. And everything else along the scale from there downward: battle paintings, historical ones. And even lower in the genre hierarchy: portraits (outstanding workers, collective farm workers, pilots, steel founders), landscapes (of the Motherland, of collective farm fields), still lifes demonstrating the abundance of Soviet life, or “Russian paintings” (dark bread, a salt-dip, mushrooms), and finally, at the lower end of the scale, there were touching, sentimental “genre” scenes of happy family life, children’s play… [Kabakov 2019].

His only wish in this situation was “to flow into this already well-articulated system and take up our own shelf in the wall unit that had been drawn above us” [Kabakov 2019].

Unlike many of his colleagues, Kabakov was honest about his principles: he tried to illustrate books in the shortest possible time and with the minimum effort. He once confessed that he made from five to eight books a year in less than two months. He also said that he had once set himself the task of creating an average, standard, beautiful Soviet edition. To do this, he isolated the typical features of Soviet book illustration and simply reproduced them over and over again.

What was his idea of a standard beautiful illustration? There are a lot of details and small figures in Kabakov’s children’s illustrations. They feature graceful vignettes, ribbons, flags, flowers, curls and ornaments. The reason for this was pragmatic: in publishing houses, each drawing was evaluated in terms of complexity and laboriousness, and the artist’s fee depended on how many figures he depicted in each picture. According to the art critic Pavel Gerasimenko, another distinguishing feature of Kabakov’s albums may be called “drawing around the edges”, or marginal drawing. The artist was more interested in composition than in the psychology of characters or landscapes. Kabakov described it thus: “All these objects, their images, exist in this white space as temporary influxes, like clouds that come from the side, and not from the depths, swam from the side and float away. The time will come, and all the depicted will float to the side and disappear, the flies will fly away, and the white light will remain undisturbed” [Кабаков 1999]. Before emigrating in 1988, he continued to create books based on the model he had once developed.

We may recognise Kabakov’s style in his Peter Pan illustrations. For “Peter Pan and Wendy” he also made headpieces in the form of small wooden-framed windows through which we see individual stories. This turns the book page into a semblance of a theatrical stage. The artist deliberately draws a border between the real world and the world of books, emphasising the make-believe nature of the depicted and the playful character of the story. Part of what is shown in the illustration goes beyond this frame, creating an effect of spatial play. Whether he loved book illustration or simply reproduced his standard illustration, Kabakov managed to grasp and convey the essence of Barrie’s meta-fantasy.

Conclusion

And so, here is the first Soviet edition of “Peter Pan and Wendy”. It took fiftyseven years for it to come to Russia, and yet that would never have happened unless many things came together. But above all, it was their autonomy. Demurova was secured by her academic work and could translate freely; Kabakov was secured by his position as a book illustrator, which enabled him to be a true conceptual artist. They were aware of the official rules and were honest about their own ambitions. Each of them used their intellect and wit to do what was meaningful to them, and eventually they were able to introduce Soviet readers to the British children’s classic with minimum damage to the original. The history of its publication is an example of how the intellectual autonomy of two Soviet people brought the book to life. And that, in my opinion, was the act of true intellectual resistance.