Chapter 4. Soviet socialist su(pe)rrealism for children

Abstract

This chapter posits a kind of Soviet Surrealism, or “su(pe)rrealism”, in photo-illustrated Soviet children’s literature of the interwar period. The techniques of manipulating photo-images that carried out the montage in a single frame were widely employed in photo-illustrated children’s books published in the late 1930s. Unlike earlier Soviet children’s books, which mostly employed photography toward “capturing real life” and promoting mass education, these late-1930s photobooks conjured a fairy-tale wonderland in which reality is somewhat bracketed and objects are given visible agency. Instead of the “baring of the device” typical of the 1920s, later graphic artists sought to hide the device in order to increase the naturalistic effect of photo-montaged representations. These photographic “deformations,” effected by retouching and manipulations of scale, rendered the world of objects – the so-called “real” world surrounding children – subtly uncanny, subject to distortion and, thus, distinctively surrealist. This turn toward the surreal seems curiously at odds yet consonant with the totalizing culture of Stalinism – hence our suggestion of “super-real” as an alternative designation.