Tales of the Past: Russian Children's Literature Abroad Between the Two World Wars

Based on a quantitative analysis of the publishing repertoires that produced Russian-language literature in Europe between 1920 and 1939, this article examines the children's book market. Children's literature exhibited a hierarchy of genres and writers, dominated by the fairy tale genre and two leading authors in this field — Alexander Pushkin and Hans Christian Andersen. Pushkin's works were published largely due to the establishment of Russian Culture Days and the tradition of including his fairy tales in school anthologies. Andersen’s popularity is linked to the embodiment of Romantic aesthetics and philosophical worldview inherited by Russian émigrés. The fairy tale emerged as the leading genre, driven by aesthetic, pedagogical, and pragmatic goals. Despite the substantial number of texts and critics' attention to new children's authors, émigré children's literature continued to be regarded as a lower-tier genre, and the status of the children's writer remained precarious within the literary community. As a result, children were offered canonical texts and folkloric imagery traditionally associated with the essence of the people. The reissuing of works by classic authors and canonical texts of Russian literature formed the cornerstone for transmitting and preserving national cultural traditions and shaping the national identity of children in emigration.