This ambitious book grew out of a 2016 dissertation entitled Detki v kletke: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature. It is a pity that the original title could not be retained, for the image it evokes of poets whose unpublishable work for adults consigned them to the cage of writing for children is more apt than the “Word Play” that replaced it. Word play, as the reader learns, is just one of the “[c]hildlike forms, themes, tropes and speakers” (14) at the center of Ainsley Morse's inquiry.
Morse uses the term “childlike aesthetic” to refer to two separate strands that often tug in different directions: childlike formal elements on the one hand and a “childlike lyric speaker” (8) on the other. Childlike formal elements, including rhythm, rhyme, meter, diction, and word play, grow out of children's literature and are especially prominent in the work of writers whose poetry for adults is indistinguishable from that written for children. The childlike lyric persona, on the other hand, is employed to various ends by experimental poets of many stripes, often in ways that would be incomprehensible to an actual child. Morse's title seems to promise a book about the former, but in the end, the center of gravity of the book lies with the latter.
Fully one-half of the book is dedicated to setting the stage for what is to come. This is a mammoth undertaking, covering the history of the Russian avant-garde, the institution of Soviet children's literature, and the broader Soviet literary landscape. Morse draws on an impressive range of secondary sources, but the almost complete absence of German-language scholarship is troubling, with the most glaring omission being Thomas Grob's 1994 monograph Daniil Charms’ unkindliche Kindlichkeit. The question of intended audience also arises: presumably for the benefit of the general reader Morse includes commonplaces of Soviet literary history (the arrest of Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko; the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), yet elsewhere she alludes to specialized knowledge telegraphically (initial references to the Lianozovo group).
In her chapter on OBERIU poets Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Nikolai Zabolotskii, and Daniil Kharms, Morse establishes the methodology she will apply to the later unofficial poets, comparing their children's poetry with unpublished work for adults and analyzing the “various manifestations of the childlike aesthetic” (54). She then turns her attention to four “unofficial” poets active in Leningrad in the 1960s–80s: Vsevolod Nekrasov, Leonid Aronzon, Igor Kholin, and Oleg Grigoriev. These four were chosen not because they were the best-known or most admired—they may be considered “marginal” even among unofficial poets (6)—but rather because they were “employed in some capacity in Soviet children's literature” (14). Again, Morse outlines the nature of that involvement and compares their work for children and adults, drawing on the categories of the childlike aesthetic set up earlier. Included are copious examples, both in the original and in Morse's skillful and often ingenious translations, providing a fine introduction to the work of poets whom non-specialists may be encountering for the first time.
The analyses are careful and persuasive, but the diversity of the poets under consideration makes it difficult for Morse to draw robust conclusions. Of the three OBERIU and four unofficial poets she considers in depth, some wrote skillfully and successfully for children (Kharms, Kholin, Grigoriev), while others turned out hack work (Vvedenskii, Aronzon, Zabolotskii). Some blurred the boundaries between children's and adult poetry (Kharms, Kholin, Nekrasov, Grigoriev), while others maintained them (Aronzon, Zabolotskii). Most employed experimental forms, while at least one, Aronzon, was “formally traditional” (116). The result is a kind of complex Venn diagram of overlapping affinities that defies generalization, and it is not always clear what these poets’ varying involvement with the institution of Soviet children's literature adds to the argument.
That constraint is jettisoned in the final thirty pages of the book, which includes a chapter on Dmitrii Prigov and an “epilogue” dedicated to Dina Gatina, Vasilii Borodin, Anna Gorenko, and Irina Shostakovskaia, post-Soviet poets among the last to experience a “Soviet childhood.” Childlike formal elements are examined where they appear, but the emphasis is now on the poetic possibilities offered by the weak, naïve, uncorrupted, or unselfconscious perspective of a childlike speaker. The title notwithstanding, this book is less about Soviet children's literature than it is about a “childlike aesthetic” that had its roots in the prerevolutionary avant-garde. Morse traces its complex line of descent in one end of the Soviet era and out the other, adding several important new chapters along the way.
