The Thorny Thicket of “Children's Literature”

The four articles comprising the following cluster attest to the complexity of children's literature in Soviet‐era and present‐day Russia, while also revealing certain motifs that resonate across both eras. Common to all four articles is a presiding emphasis on gender, subsuming several corollary topics: love, sexuality, and their euphemized manifestations; individual versus collective character formation and expression; the impact of historical forces on socially construed gender normativity; and the connection between adult and children's literature. Additionally, two imbricated features grounded in temporality link the texts examined in the cluster: the unacknowledged and uncontested presumption of a linear continuity between girls and full‐fledged women; and an orientation toward the future, sanctified by Soviet propaganda. All contributors examine publications centered not on small children, but on girls in their teens–in other words, on a notoriously problematic stage of personality development that automatically precludes both innocence and paradise. Instead, pressures of ego and peer groups lead to self‐consciousness, competitiveness, insecurity, the struggle with budding sexuality, and all the psychological baggage that has earned teenagers a reputation as “rebels without a cause.”