Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature

Join us for a talk and discussion with special guest and UNC Alumna Ainsley Morse – scholar, literary translator, and Carolina alumna – on her newly published book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature. Dr. Morse joins us from Dartmouth College, where she is Assistant Professor of Russian.

Ainsley Morse teaches in the Russian department at Dartmouth College and is a translator of Russian and former Yugoslav literatures. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, particularly unofficial or “underground” poetry, as well as the avant-garde and children’s literature. She also works on and translates contemporary Russian poetry.

Word Play traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books throughout the twentieth century. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, wacky humor and other avant-garde trends. After Stalin’s rise to power, experimental writers went underground, but they continued to author children’s books (which were often more appealing than adult literature of the time). I argue that the avant-garde traces evident in Soviet children’s books are only half of the story: just as these writers found ways to “sneak” forbidden aesthetics into print through children’s literature, the childlike aesthetic found its way into much of their writing “for adults.”