Transcript
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Marshall Poe:
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and you're listening to an episode in the Grinnell College Artists and Authors Podcast. Today, I'm very happy to say we have Kelly Herold on this show, and we'll be talking about a book that she co-authored with Andrea Lanoux and Olga Bukhina. I did that right, didn't I?
Kelly Herold:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
I got it right, the accent right. Yeah. Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens from 1991 to 2017. Kind of tragically timely book, I think, as all the listeners will know given what's going on in Russia and Ukraine generally. But let's welcome Kelly to the show. Welcome, Kelly.
Kelly Herold:
Thank you. Hi, Marshall.
Marshall Poe:
Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Kelly Herold:
Uh-huh. Sure. I've been teaching at Cornell for 23 years in the Russian department and in the linguistics concentration. I teach Russian language at all levels and also I'm sort of the primary teacher of literature in translation. I teach the novel, the short story, Tolstoy, Nabokov, and I want to do a new course on Chekhov in the future.
I began my career in the late 18th to early 19th century writing on memoirs, memoirs written in French, and I'm a Californian by origin.
Marshall Poe:
So you're loving the Grinnell weather?
Kelly Herold:
I can't. Even after 23 years, I have my happy lamp in my office. I barely survived till May, but usually the fall is nice here.
Marshall Poe:
Well, when I was at Grinnell, I graduated in '84. John Mohan.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. I have taken over a lot of his courses. Yeah. So.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I took the Tolstoy course from him and it was really wonderful. I should also say that I'm still in touch on Facebook with people who took that course.
Kelly Herold:
That's wonderful.
Marshall Poe:
Practically a daily basis.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. Yes.
Marshall Poe:
I'm in contact with many of them who were in that wonderful course. I didn't take the Dostoevsky course, but I took the Tolstoy [inaudible 00:02:20]
Kelly Herold:
Another colleague teaches the Dostoevsky course.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. A little bit too dark for me.
Kelly Herold:
Well, I teach Dostoevsky in the novel, but I could not do a whole semester of him. It's not...
Marshall Poe:
But Chekhov sounds great. I'm [inaudible 00:02:33] fan.
Kelly Herold:
I am, too.
Marshall Poe:
Those things are brilliant. Yeah, absolutely brilliant. Or maybe we should go for Gogol. I don't know. Is Gogol still considered Russian or is he Ukrainian now? Or is there a big fight over this?
Kelly Herold:
That's a really good question that I don't know the answer to.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Well, let's not even go there.
Kelly Herold:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. He was the inventor of modern satiric...
Kelly Herold:
Absolutely.
Marshall Poe:
... surreal comedy. I always think of him as Woody Allen before his time.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. That's a nice analogy. When I teach the short story, we of course read a lot of Gogol. Students always really respond to his stories.
Marshall Poe:
That's good. What's it like teaching at Grinnell? I guess you enjoy it because you've stayed for 23 years.
Kelly Herold:
I love teaching at Grinnell. I've stayed here despite the weather and despite living in a small town for this many years. I love working with our students. They're a good group.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. That was my experience as well. I came from Kansas and went to Grinnell, and I thought, "Wow, I'm surrounded by smart people. That's great." Not that the people in Kansas aren't smart, they're plenty smart, but they were most tremendously..>
Kelly Herold:
Yeah. No. Actually, my parents are from Kansas.
Marshall Poe:
Oh, is that right?
Kelly Herold:
I always say they're Kansashian, which I know is not the right adjective.
Marshall Poe:
Adjective for them. Yeah. Kansan...
Kelly Herold:
Yes. Kansan.
Marshall Poe:
... I think is where that... That's what I am. Anyway, so let's turn to the book. Why did you write Growing Out of Communism, and what were you hoping to accomplish with it?
Kelly Herold:
Well, it started out almost as a general interest. Andrea Lanoux and I are very close friends. We went to graduate school together. We both spent a lot of time in Russia in the 1990s. My first trip was in '92. I think hers was... She still managed to visit the Soviet Union, but I was unable to when I was in college. '92 was my first trip, and we would be back every single year throughout the 1990s.
We started noticing, all of a sudden, these books outside metro stations and children's books, and we were both drawn to different aspects of these. She was really interested in this influx of branded literature. At the time, it was brands that had lost popularity in the US. So, Barbie was on the downswing in the 1990s. It has since recovered a little bit. My Little Pony had practically disappeared in the US but in Russia, it was a big deal. I was really interested in which translations were coming into Russia and how Russians were translating middle-grade or young adult fiction.
We just were conversing with each other about it in the early 2000s and started giving conference papers mid-2000s. Every time we would talk about it, I gave a few papers on Harry Potter translated into Russian and various sort of scandals around the translation of Harry Potter, as well as multiple fan translations of Harry Potter. It was interesting to me, what did Russian translators, who have sort of a different approach to translation than we do, and what were they doing with these works? She was giving presentations on how Barbie was perceived or presented in Russia.
When we would give these papers at ACs or ATSEAL or even Children's Literature Association, we would get questions, like, "But since the Soviet Union, there isn't any good Russian children's literature. There's no new Russian children's literature." Somewhere starting in... I think she, in 2010, went to Russia and began looking at that question. I followed in 2011 and started interviewing people. What we saw was there was a story here, that little by little, there was being born a new Russian children's literature that was different from translated literature, although that was very influential. It was different from the Soviet past, which has a very prominent and important children's literature canon, really. It's unshakeable. Everyone read the same texts. Print runs were in the 5 million copies. All children read the same books. They all know Chukovsky's Telephone, which we still teach in Russian language classes at Cornell.
Then I followed the next year in 2011 and started interviewing these new publishing houses that were not Western publishing houses, not big Russian ones, not former Soviet publishing houses, new small publishing houses that were producing original work. Essentially, we followed these texts, the writers, the communities, the publishing houses for eight, nine years, while writing on them at the same time.
Sometime around 2014, 2015, we brought in Olga Bukhina, who is formerly from Moscow. Most of her family is still in Moscow, but lives in New York City now. She is one of the most well-known translators of American children's literature and British into Russian and knows every single person in the community. So between the three of us, we were able to describe what was happening. This story, this book emerged of this, essentially, the birth of a new literature.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm. I want to take a step back, just for the listener's sake, to 1991. I was there in 1991. I actually saw the flag come down.
Kelly Herold:
Wonderful. Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
I saw it. You mentioned subway stops. For Americans, this is going to be very strange because, in 1991, subway stops is where all commerce was done.
Kelly Herold:
That's right.
Marshall Poe:
As far as I can tell.
Kelly Herold:
That's right.
Marshall Poe:
Everybody had a stall.
Kelly Herold:
Everyone had a stall. People were selling their old... Some of there... I see the Chekhov, Polimya, Sabranya, the full works of Chekhov behind me that I bought it a subway station in 1992.
Marshall Poe:
There was a huge number of new titles, just enormous number of new titles appear. I remember my Russian friends were just shocked by what was available that had been brought out of the basement or wherever they had them. Suddenly, they were on sale, things that would not have been on the market, let's say, in the Soviet Union. But it was all there and very suddenly. There were tons of translations very, very quickly.
Kelly Herold:
Very quickly.
Marshall Poe:
Lots of things. I remember Detective. Detective books were hugely popular, being translated in their thousands.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. And also Harlequin, which was Harlequin romances were, by 1992, '93 outside the metro station in translations.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah. So since then, I suppose they've probably moved into bookstores.
Kelly Herold:
They've moved into bookstores. Yes.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. That's probably good. So babushka doesn't have to stand outside in the cold and...
Kelly Herold:
No. Babushka's not outside.
Marshall Poe:
... sell books. That's excellent. I wanted you to set the stage a little bit for us. I'm going to ask you about what children's literature was like in the Soviet Union. I understand this is a very broad question because the Soviet Union changed a lot. But I happen to own a book that was published in about 1930, and it's a primer for, I would say, probably third or fourth graders. This thing is full-blown Marxist Leninist. It's got lots of class struggle in it and good guys and bad guys. It's very didactic, extraordinarily propagandistic. Probably had a print run of 10 million or something. I still own this book, as I say, and it really kind of shocked me. But then again, I imagine things have changed a lot, after 1953 especially. Could you talk a little bit about children's literature in the Soviet epoch? Are there generalizations that can be made?
Kelly Herold:
Absolutely. The first chapter in the book, which was primarily written by Andrea Lanoux, basically chronicles what happens in the Soviet Union and what was this canon that everyone knew. What's interesting about Soviet children's literature is, at least in its beginnings, it was very innovative. Poetry was the primary genre or method. There were a lot of writers who couldn't write adult fiction who were able to write children's literature or to translate. So, lots of wonderful poetry, less didactic from a Soviet point of view, although the goal was to create a good Soviet citizen. So if you look at Chukovsky's work, there's a lot of focus on good guys and bad guys, how to be a good Soviet citizen, how to be clean. But they're also really fun.
After Stalin, and in the 1930s when the Soviet writers were unionized, essentially, things take a turn. Prose becomes more predominant. Books like the one you're describing become very widespread. Nevertheless, there are still some adventure stories that have an element of fun to them. Although, at this period of time in the 1930s, a predominant sort of idea comes into Soviet children's literature. That is the notion of the happy childhood.
So, every child should have a happy, even magical childhood. The darkness can't really be a part of it in any real way, which is not true of the works in the 1920s. This happy childhood really persists into the post-Soviet Union. You might have kids going on adventures in these books at the 1930s and until the war, but they all take place maybe in the forest or on a hiking trip. There may not be any parents around. But the threats are all ones that they can deal with by working as a team, as working as a group of children together. The communal wins in these books. There's always a happy ending.
In the war period and in the post-war period, Soviet heroes become the primary narratives. In fact, right now, the three of us are putting together a two-volume set of translations for an English-speaking audience of Soviet and then post-Soviet children's literature. We had a hard time selecting texts that would be entertaining enough for an English-reading audience. Lots of them are about young teens who joined the war efforts and are victorious. But the prose is all... It's pretty boring. I'm trying to think of a nice way to say it. Yes. They're just pretty dull tails.
Then, of course, after Stalin dies, and during the thaw, we do start to see again a sort of lighter touch in children's literature. This holds until the 1980s where darkness starts to creep in. This is also really the first time where we see some attention paid to what we call in the book adolescent literature as opposed to young adult literature, because it's not quite the same as American young adult literature in many ways. But you'll see things like Chuchala Scarecrow, where the focus is on kind of a terrible bullying in school, and it doesn't quite have a happy ending. So, you start to see the darkness of the end of the Soviet period and the uncertainty showing up in children's texts as well, especially ones for older children.
But the main thing about the entire Soviet period is that, again, like the book you had the print run in 5 million, is that there were certain works like Timor and His Gang, that every child knew, so much so that they even formed their own societies of Timor rites or whatever we want to call them in English, where kids would sort replicate what these children did in the books. Yeah. So every child read the same books.
Marshall Poe:
I was very interested in what you said about the happy magical Soviet childhood, and I'll make a ridiculous generalization here. Every one of my friends, most of whom probably grew up in the '50s and the '60s, were adolescents in the '70s. They described their childhoods as nothing but wonderful.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. Absolutely.
Marshall Poe:
Nothing but just the greatest thing ever. That wasn't my childhood, I can tell you that.
Kelly Herold:
Right. I think children's books had a lot to do with it. There was actually, as you know, a whole system of activities just like all the same books that all children did: the summer camp experience. For a month, you were sent away, or spending your whole summer at the dacha with your grandmother just wandering around the countryside. Some people even fondly remember Kartoshka, the weeks where you had to go dig potatoes.
Marshall Poe:
I did that.
Kelly Herold:
Did you do that?
Marshall Poe:
I did that, yes.
Kelly Herold:
Yeah. My ex-husband always ran away. He didn't like that. But I have friends now who recall that fondly. You're out there with your 13-year-old girlfriends picking potatoes and not sitting in a school.
Marshall Poe:
Or like the subbotniks where you go and give your labor away for free to the Soviets. I did that, too. It was quite fun, I got to tell you. So, let's move a little bit past the Soviet Union. Who published books in the Soviet period? And just very briefly, let's kind of lay the terrain there.
Kelly Herold:
After the 1930s, there was basically only one major publishing house, called Ditkes, primarily based out of Moscow, but also in St. Petersburg. They published everything. In the 1920s, there were still independent publishing houses, but beginning around 1931, that was all over. So, yes.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. The reason I ask this question is to, again, set the stage for the next question, which is how did publishers emerge? This was a very monolithic publishing environment.
Kelly Herold:
Right.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. How did new publishers emerge in 19... I mean, how would you even do it? I'm just interested in that.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. In the 1990s, with privatization, and especially with the new laws that allowed for private or jointly held enterprises, people started forming publishing houses out of their apartments. The two biggest publishing houses in Russia today, at least until February 24, 2022... Or is it the 23rd? 24, I think.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
Kelly Herold:
In any case, are Eksmo and Este. When I say the largest, between the two of them, they have 30 to 40% of the market, which is of course not like the Soviet era where Ditke's had 95% of the market, let's say. It was just in one case, two people, in another case, three. They created these publishing houses and publishing houses were built in the early '90s, mid-90s on translations. That's where they earned their money. That's how they could make money fast.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I was going to interrupt you there. That leads directly to my next question, and that is this is kind of the low-hanging fruit, the translation play.
Kelly Herold:
That's right.
Marshall Poe:
I was wondering how they picked the books they would translate, how they translated them. Did they bother with copyright? There are all kinds of questions here when you want to translate Harry Potter or Barbie or whatever it is.
Kelly Herold:
Right.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I'm wondering how they negotiated that.
Kelly Herold:
Okay. In the very beginning, what they did was basically fill a pent-up demand for books that were not allowed to be translated in the Soviet Union. A lot of those were in the public domain. So, they did not have to get rights. In fact, I wouldn't say it was until the late 1990s that rights negotiations really began in an international way, where Russians were doing or conducting publishing business in the same way as everywhere else, where you obtain the rights at a rights fair or just directly negotiating. Before then, they just published what wasn't allowed to be published. Orwell, or, you know.
Marshall Poe:
Right. I remember this.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. It was Enid Blyton was published in children's literature just immediately into great monetary success. You think of how many books Enid Blyton wrote. I don't know. 100, maybe. Those were all out there for free. Agatha Christie, I think, was brought in as well. Maybe she came in pre-Soviet. But this ability to publish things that were already available but not allowed in the Soviet Union was where the first money-making … This is what built these publishing houses.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm. And there was a great hunger for these, what Russians would say is Western texts. [inaudible 00:22:54].
Kelly Herold:
Absolutely. You mentioned the detective novel for adults and also for children. These became things that people who had been journalists, and writers of other kinds, began writing in the 1990s as well. Genre fiction that could be written fairly quickly. But already in a Russian setting as opposed to a Western setting, these were some of the first works that were original.
Marshall Poe:
Right. There is an endless stream of children's, and YA, as we call it, books available. Eventually, they found Russian authors, right?
Kelly Herold:
That's right.
Marshall Poe:
There were probably were a lot of people that wanted to write these things.
Kelly Herold:
Absolutely.
Marshall Poe:
[inaudible 00:23:42] pent up. This is a pent-up supply.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. We see this actually first in a group of poets called the Black Hen Collective, who some of them were still writing in the Soviet era, but they banded together and published a manifesto just like poets did in the 1920s. "This is what our poetry is going to do for the world." They were some of the first original writers in children's literature. They took, like on the early Soviet poets, a playful tone, but they made an explicit statement in their manifesto, which was, "We are going to treat children differently. There's going to be a new adult-child relationship, one in which we respect the child's point of view. We're not going to tell them, 'You need to do this; you need to do that.' We're going to respect the child for who the child is." That was a completely different idea of child agency and their relationship to an authority figure.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm.
Kelly Herold:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
I'm wondering how they dealt with certain themes in Western children and YA literature. I'm thinking of a specific book, and I don't know how to classify it. Watership Down. That is a dark book.
Kelly Herold:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
That book is dim, man.
Kelly Herold:
It is very dim.
Marshall Poe:
I'm wondering, did they cotton onto these books? Were they afraid of them? Because a lot of Western children's literature is dark. Again, I have a 13 and 14-year-old, and I'm telling you some of the things they read, I'm like, wow. Even something like The Hunger Games, it's kind of dark.
Kelly Herold:
Children took to these books, but some of their parents did not. Already, by the end of the 1990s, parents and some educators were saying things like, "We want the Soviet classics back. That's the only place there is good children's literature. This stuff from the West, it's [Russian 00:25:54]. It's..."
Marshall Poe:
[Russian 00:26:04]
Kelly Herold:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
I could say other words, too, but I won't.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. Exactly.
Marshall Poe:
I'm not.
Kelly Herold:
But let's say it's dark nonsense. Let's call it that, that it's not suitable for our children.
Marshall Poe:
A lot of American conservatives say that.
Kelly Herold:
That's true. That's true. That is also true. Although I don't think they read Watership Down.
Marshall Poe:
No, I don't think they do either. They don't even know what Watership Down is. A great book, by the way.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. It is a very good book. Maybe suited more to adults, but... Yeah. So yes.
Marshall Poe:
You mentioned the classics. Again, I'm going to make ridiculous generalizations here. Literature with a capital L has a different status in Russia than it does in the United States. I don't know about Europe, but it just... This notion of classic literature is a real thing. They can identify it. It's not complicated to them. I'm wondering how they squared their understanding of classic literature with the capital L with all of these new books.
Kelly Herold:
They did not square at all until very, very recently. This is, in a way, what we describe in this book. Everything that was sort of written between, let's say, until about 2013, was seen as bad literature. This is not what we want our children to read with the exception of some of those early poets I mentioned in The Black Hen Collective, that this has nothing to do with the children's literature we grew up with and we know. Again, you mentioned Russians have this idea about literature. But children's literature has this additional thing in every country and in every culture where parents want their children to read what they read and what was important to them. So, it tends also to be kind of a conservative, slow-moving field of literature for that reason.
Marshall Poe:
Was there pushback against these books? I mean, would you find people writing [inaudible 00:28:08]
Kelly Herold:
100%? Oh, radio programs, in newspapers, Parents with one another. Then by the end of the '90s, as the internet grows hold, you can find endless, endless Live Journal posts, especially because Russians, at least, again, till a month ago, continue to use Live Journal as a blogging platform on LiveLib, which is Russia's version of Good... What is it? GoodReads?
Marshall Poe:
GoodReads.
Kelly Herold:
GoodReads. Yeah. Parents, teachers, other journalists, and educators, talking about how this new literature is harmful to their children.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Well, this goes all the way back to Plato corrupting the youth.
Kelly Herold:
Corrupting the youth. It's not giving them, again, the notion of a happy childhood and/or a happy ending. That's one thing that they, particularly these early readers latched onto, which is how can you give a child a book that doesn't have a happy ending?
Marshall Poe:
Yes. I mean, I...
Kelly Herold:
That's our role.
Marshall Poe:
None of the YA books that my kids read have really happy endings.
Kelly Herold:
Oh, no.
Marshall Poe:
I keep using this word dark, but
Kelly Herold:
They're dark.
Marshall Poe:
… those books are grim. And they love them.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. Yeah. Yes. That's what I find so interesting about children's literature and YA literature in other cultures is that they really do take on the mores of a given culture, whatever that is. American YA tends to be, although this has changed in the last two years, and this is off the topic, but American literature tended to be highly individualistic. It is about you, the teenage individual, who has to solve your own problems in the face of extreme adversity. The last couple years, that's changing a little bit.
Marshall Poe:
Is that right? That's interesting.
Kelly Herold:
Yeah. Yeah. There's some more sort of communal social justice element to really recent American YA.
Marshall Poe:
Are there any particular titles, and I don't want to put you on the spot, but there may not be. Are there any particular titles that really enrage these Russian... I want to call them conservatives, but that's not even right in this context. But they're like, "Harry Potter is going to be the end of our youth." Or...
Kelly Herold:
I will say...
Marshall Poe:
"The Hunger Games is going to be the end of our youth."
Kelly Herold:
Actually, Harry Potter is relatively well received. Unlike with American conservatives, the magic doesn't throw Russian parents. They like that element. Philip Pullman's, his dark materials, also seen as good literature with Russian parents. Honestly, it is detective fiction horror which has become quite popular, and really cheap Western picture books about... We discuss one that's about shopping, for example, about sort of consumerism. Those are the ones that are really upsetting to parents. Barbie. There have even been like anti-Barbie events in Russia.
Marshall Poe:
Really?
Kelly Herold:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Wow.
Kelly Herold:
That this is not who we are.
Marshall Poe:
I might join that.
Kelly Herold:
Yeah. Yeah. I know. Exactly. I'm not making a case that Barbie belongs in Russia.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I'm not either. No. I... Yeah.
Kelly Herold:
But I would say it's a combination of, for the younger children, this sort of bright consumerist kind of cheap things that parents find tacky and not offering anything of worth to their children. Then for the older kids, series fiction, genre fiction, novels they see without literary qualities.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Right. Literary merit. Yes.
Kelly Herold:
Those are kind of the two sort of areas of. When you walk into a bookstore since about, I don't know, 2012, 2013, you go into the children's section, it's huge. It's something you couldn't even imagine in the Soviet period. It looks like the Barnes and Noble now. The ones that draw your attention are exactly these types of works. I think it's really hard for both children and for their parents to find more of this real quality Russian children's and young adult literature that's being written at home...
Marshall Poe:
Is...
Kelly Herold:
... amongst all of that.
Marshall Poe:
Right. Are the Soviet titles being republished now? And are there people pushing them?
Kelly Herold:
100%. Yes. Some with new, beautiful illustrations and with quality materials. So...
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I don't want to get too deep into this, but part of what's going on right now is a kind of culture clash. People I very much esteem and love in Russia look at some aspects of Western culture, and they are scratching their heads.
Kelly Herold:
Right. Right. 100%. But however, they do prefer the paper quality, the binding quality of hardback books of the type that we have in the US, right?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
Kelly Herold:
All the Soviet classics are, if you look at a top 10 list of what is sold for children, the authors are all the same. Chukosvky, Marshak. It's like a top 10 of Soviet children's literature. Then there might be one other Russian, new Russian name in there. There's a very, very popular fantasy writer called Natalia Sherba, and her books are also very well sold.
Marshall Poe:
Right. Well, I'll be honest with you, as a parent, I don't pay a lot of attention to what my children are reading. I don't think that's true of Russian parents.
Kelly Herold:
No. It is not true.
Marshall Poe:
I think they pay a lot more attention to what their children are reading.
Kelly Herold:
They pay a lot of attention until children are about 13. I mean, they pay attention to it, but it's harder now. They read on their phones. They read on other devices, and they get recommendations from their friends.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. One of the thing I've noticed about my middle daughter, she's 13, is fan fiction. Is there a lot of that? Has that taken off in Russia? My daughter loves fan fiction.
Kelly Herold:
So, so much. So much fan fiction. In a way, the first translation of Harry Potter was an online activity where multiple people did translations of it into Russia. You know J.K. Rowling is very litigious. She sort of forced the Russian marketplace to do an official translation because unofficial translations existed in many varieties and teens were reading them. I have lost track of your question.
Marshall Poe:
No. That's all right. Is there a Russian equivalent of J.K. Rowling? Is there somebody that a Russian parent would go, "Oh, yes. That this author here? This one is..."
Kelly Herold:
I think Natalia Sherba is the Russian equivalent at this point. Her first publication, I think, was in 2013. So it was relatively late.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm. Again, this may be kind of an unfair question, but has... Well, I'll put it most directly. Has Putin had anything to do with this? Because in Russia, the state is often involved in things. Let's just put that.
Kelly Herold:
And that's the weirdest part of this story, is the Russian government paid no attention to children's literature from 1991 until 2013.
Marshall Poe:
Uh-huh. And what happened in 2013?
Kelly Herold:
In 2013, the law on the protection of minors came into force. I think it was written in the year before. But basically the law says that you cannot promote homosexuality or alternative lifestyles in any way to children.
Marshall Poe:
That's all my children are interested in.
Kelly Herold:
I know, of course. It even took a couple of years until the government started turning to certain works, certain writers, interviewing them. There's one of the few Russian YA novels or adolescent novels that has been translated into English in the US. In English, it's called Playing the Game. It features the young protagonist who's questioning his sexuality, but his mentor is a young, openly homosexual man. It takes place in a puppet theater, which is a little unusual...
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Right. Yeah. That is a Russian context, too.
Kelly Herold:
... to an American. Yeah. Yes. In the end, his mentor leaves the country. But not only does this teen not really know who he is, but his best friend is a girl who goes by the name Shashok, and she presents herself as almost a non-binary character.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Shashok. You don't know what that is in Russian. Exactly.
Kelly Herold:
Exactly. That author no longer lives in the country. While it manages to still be published, it has to be published with these big, almost like the British cigarette packets, that have a big label on them that says 18+.
Marshall Poe:
So, this was done by the Ministry of Culture?
Kelly Herold:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
I forget the guy's name. Meronov? What is it? I...
Kelly Herold:
I think it... Maybe it is. I don't remember. But there...
Marshall Poe:
The only reason I know about the Minister of Culture is that he plagiarized my dissertation.
Kelly Herold:
Seriously.
Marshall Poe:
Well, a book I wrote. He plagiarized the book I wrote. Yeah. My friends in Moscow wrote me and said...
Kelly Herold:
As his dissertation?
Marshall Poe:
Yes.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. That's another...
Marshall Poe:
I always say that he didn't plagiarize it enough, because he got a lot of criticism. My book is good. He needed to take more of it. [inaudible 00:39:14]
Kelly Herold:
I'm very sorry, but yes. Yeah. It wasn't really until '15, '16, '17 where actual writers were called in for the content of their work, or certain performances at book fairs, which are a very important thing in Russia, were censored or shut down.
Marshall Poe:
Is there a new Samizdat? Are these books truly banned? Are people passing them around?
Kelly Herold:
No. They're not. People are passing them around. They are not banned. They're just published as for adults.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I see.
Kelly Herold:
One of my favorite stories is a recent novel that's written by a wonderful Belarussian couple who write in Russian and travel to Moscow all the time. I've met them at several different conferences. They wrote in the introduction to their book, "This book is marked 18+. And that is because the heroine is a lesbian. Now that you know that."
Marshall Poe:
Enter at your own risk.
Kelly Herold:
Exactly. Parents and teens, it's up to you. Right?
Marshall Poe:
Wow.
Kelly Herold:
So yes. But again, sometimes I wonder, is this book a closed circle? Did we just describe a real flourishing of new texts for children and teens that presents a new reality for them? They have a different agency than they had in Soviet books. They have a new sort of identity as a child. What does it mean to be a child? It means to be a thinking person who is separate from your authority figures. Is it over now?
Marshall Poe:
Well, that leads exactly to my next question, the penultimate question, actually. That is: Has Russian children's literature escaped its Soviet past?
Kelly Herold:
Yes and no. Which is where the title comes from, Growing Out of Communism. To some degree, it has escaped its Soviet past in that the texts are more global. They resemble more of what's written throughout the world and know in that some of the themes remained, some of the themes of... Whereas American texts are very individual, an adult may or may not be able to help you. In Russian texts for teens and older children, the community remains important. Adult figures remain important. So it's a kind of two-way street. Yes, they have. But no, they're still part of that Soviet.
Marshall Poe:
That's such an interesting juxtaposition or contrast because there are many, as you know, many children's books that were written in, I don't know, there are '40s, '50s, '60s books that I might have read when I was growing up, that now are kind of... They have stereotypes in them and themes that we don't really want to go there anymore. Don't read that.
Kelly Herold:
Yeah. 100%. I teach a course on American young adult literature at the college, and I have to begin the course with, "You are going to see some things that you are going to find offensive, but they are part of the development of this genre."
Marshall Poe:
Even something like Babar [inaudible 00:42:59]. Or what's the... Not asterisks, but Tin-Tin.
Kelly Herold:
Oh, yes.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. In some of those, you look at them and you're just scratch your head, like, wow.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. 100%. Yeah. My colleague, Raquel Green, teaches a course on American picture books in the 20th century, and she begins with a lot of these texts that are so overtly racist that...
Marshall Poe:
They really are.
Kelly Herold:
... it's hard to even believe.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I shouldn't be laughing because they really are. So now those are kind of being weeded out. It's tough to explain to kids exactly what's going on here in these books. You kind of have to teach them to be historians, like, "Well, people thought different things back then." It's complicated for a kid who just wants a story about a troubled adolescent who...
Kelly Herold:
That's right.
Marshall Poe:
... happens to be an elephant.
Kelly Herold:
That's right. Again, that's what makes children's literature hard, because grandparents remember reading Babar. And they don't want to let it go. The same thing is true in Russia. But what is also true about children's literature is that there's always good new books.
Marshall Poe:
There really are. We have a children's literature channel on the NBN now, and I...
Kelly Herold:
Oh, you do?
Marshall Poe:
... get to see them regular. Yeah. We do.
Kelly Herold:
I'll have to check...
Marshall Poe:
We have a lovely guy in Israel, who, he loves children's books. He's actually a biochemist, and he interviews people who write children's books. There's always a great number of them coming out. It is terrific to see all the new titles.
Kelly Herold:
That's right. In other words, the racist texts can be replaced.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. We don't particularly...
Kelly Herold:
I truly believe that. Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I think you're absolutely right about that. That's good. Well, anyway, we've taken up a lot of your time. Thank you very much for being on the show.
Kelly Herold:
It was wonderful to talk to you.
Marshall Poe:
We have a traditional... Yeah. We have a traditional final question on the New Books Network. That is, what are you working on now?
Kelly Herold:
Okay. I mentioned the two-volume translations that we're working on. So I'm doing that. But my next project may or may not happen. I've always, as you can see with... I've always been interested in, and maybe this is because of what you said about Russians know what literature is, I've always been interested in text related to literature. I started my work on memoir literature. In teaching Russian literature and in doing work in late 18th, early 19th, I've been interested in the French governess, the French teacher in Russia. I've always wondered what their lives are like. So, I'm beginning a project that the first chapter is on the Russian governess or teacher in 19th century Russian literature, kind of 19th. We can include Nabokov at the end with his short story or chapter in his memoirs about his French governess, which is a very sad tale. But essentially, these people... And it's an interesting power dynamic. What culture does Russia respect more than its own? There's only one, I would think. And I think it's France, right?
Marshall Poe:
I think that's right.
Kelly Herold:
Yes. So these rich Russians, the aristocrats would bring a French teacher into their home. They are at once an employee, but also respected for their culture. These people also lived out who knows where on a Russian estate, where they saw no other French person for nine months at a time until...
Marshall Poe:
[inaudible 00:46:35].
Kelly Herold:
... the season when they go to Moscow or St. Petersburg. Any case, I'm going to be looking at letters and memoir fragments written by these teachers from France, Switzerland, and Belgium. That's the other thing, too, is that almost none of them are from Paris. These are not prominent French people who became these governesses and tutors. I want to write...
Marshall Poe:
It's interesting you mention this. My dissertation adviser, to go back to my dissertation, Nicholas Rezinovski...
Kelly Herold:
Yeah. Oh, I...
Marshall Poe:
... he had a French governess.
Kelly Herold:
Oh, my goodness.
Marshall Poe:
Yes, he did. They were chased out of Moscow, probably, and ended up in Harbin. They were Harbinsee. They took French governess with them.
Kelly Herold:
Do you know I took a Russian history class with him in Berkeley when I was...
Marshall Poe:
Did you?
Kelly Herold:
... an undergrad? Yes. He was a very old man then. And he still maintained his habit of chewing snuff while...
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I don't... Wonderful person. But yes. I mean, I remember I walked into his seminar room one day and he was speaking French, and I was like, "Jesus Christ, how many languages does this guy know?" He explained to me, "Well, I grew up, I had this French woman, she lived with us. They taught me French." Because all civilized people know French, right?
Kelly Herold:
That's right. That's right.
Marshall Poe:
And you don't?
Kelly Herold:
Yeah. So I want to know about [inaudible 00:47:59]
Marshall Poe:
I'm like, "No. I'm from Kansas, man. I don't know."
Kelly Herold:
I want to know about these French people. Who were they and what did they experience when they were in Russia?
Marshall Poe:
Well, that's fantastic. All right. [inaudible 00:48:09]
Kelly Herold:
Starting the research in the West. We'll see if I can go to Russia at some point.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. That's sad. But anyway. Well, when you're done with the book, if it turns out to be a book, we'll have you on the New Books Network.
Kelly Herold:
All right. Wonderful.
Marshall Poe:
Okay.
Kelly Herold:
Thank you.
Marshall Poe:
Kelly, thanks for being on the show. Bye-bye.
Kelly Herold:
Yeah. Bye.
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