The Soviet avant-garde picturebook, published for a brief period in the 1920s and early 1930s, comprised until recently a nearly forgotten body of texts. Sara Weld's An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook considers the development and swift demise of this most fascinating genre of mixed illustration and text for children within an ecological framework. As Weld explains in her masterful “Introduction” to the book, an ecological model addresses the “mistakenly simplistic assumption” that children's literature served as a “refuge from increasing Soviet censorship and control over literature and the arts” for important writers and artists, while also bringing attention to these books which have “escaped notice in the past” (17).

This “Introduction” emphasizes the importance of these texts, as well as the theoretical underpinnings of Weld's approach. She argues, “that straightforward historical or teleological models fail to describe the complex dynamics that arose from the fraught interactions of word and image, politics and art, and creativity and censorship evident in the Russian avant-garde picturebook, or Russian literature and art more generally” (5). Weld focuses on the evolution of this genre, which, “began as the exploitation of a new ecological niche or habitat characterized by certain resources and limitations that arose due to a unique constellation of circumstances in the early Soviet period” (12). First, the avant-garde picturebook thrives in its environment and evolves in the 1920s as “it exploited the new niche of mass-produced literature for Soviet children” (12). As censoring forces increase their attentions in the 1930s, “a process of antagonistic coevolution” begins, so that “censorship drove rapid and divergent literary evolution” (13). This antagonistic coevolution leads first to adaptation and, eventually, to the extinction of the genre.

Weld tracks the evolution of this very specific and transient species in four distinct parts. Part I, “Ex nihilo nihil fit: The evolution of the Russian avant-garde picturebook,” considers its beginnings and growth in texts illustrated by Alexandre Benois, Vladimir Lebedev, and El Lissitsky. “Unnatural Selection: Censorship and Ideology,” or Part II, examines the effects of increased censorship and ideological control on the evolution of the avant-garde picturebook in the 1920s. Most significantly, we see evolution in the face of these countervailing pressures in the development of Aesopian language, subtext, and political allegory, both textual and visual. In works by Osip Mandel΄shtam, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Lebedev, Iurii Olesha, and Samuil Marshak, the picturebook offers “its own subtle, if very ambivalent, protest against the censorship and ideology characteristic of this period” (130). This period of development, however, does not last long, as Parts III and IV demonstrate. First, authors of the avant-garde picturebook must further adapt their form, due to increased scrutiny of their work and their very lives by the censors and Soviet Government; and then in the 1930s, after adaptation violates the avant-garde aesthetic itself, the avant-garde picturebook becomes extinct. In these two sections concerning adaptation and extinction, Weld discusses picturebooks about contemporary America, including Marshak's Mister Twister, Maiakovskii's poetic texts, and finally, Daniil Kharms's writing for children, writing that “challenges his reader to engage in playful and subversive interpretation and transcend the boundaries that would confine him or her” (194). Kharms's picturebooks were a sort of last hurrah for the genre: by the mid 1930s, “it was if the avant-garde picturebook of the early Soviet years had never existed” (209).

In concluding her thorough and beautifully-written monograph, Weld asks if the avant-garde picturebook “survived by any other means” (210). She finds that in many ways, despite being removed from the historical record for decades, they have. First, the genre provided “not a reluctant refuge but, in fact, a privileged art form” (212) for artists who respected the genre and thrived within this ephemeral ecological niche. Second, these works shaped a new type of child reader, one who learned to interpret multiple levels of text and image, a skill necessary for further reading as a Soviet citizen. In tracing the complex evolution of a short-lived, but important selection of books for children, An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook makes a convincing argument for studying literary genres and movements within an ecological framework.