This monograph explores how Soviet book illustrations reimagined and repurposed the Russian literary heritage for new generations of child readers between 1917 and 1953. Megan Swift provides visual analyses of six richly-illustrated case studies of Soviet republications from both the nineteenth century and new Soviet classics, addressed to children, and uses these exemplary illustrations as prisms to reflect key historical developments in the early Soviet period. Part I revisits the 1920s radical pedagogical attempts to disenchant fairy tales and the subsequent Stalinist revival of folk tradition. Swift examines the visual transformations of Aleksandr Pushkin's anti-clerical satire, The Tale of the Priest and his Worker Balda (1830), and Petr Ershov's The Little Humpbacked Horse (1834). She shows how illustrations, from early Soviet reproductions of Aleksei Afanas΄ev's prerevolutionary, hilarious depictions of Ivan the Fool to the high-Stalinist heroic imaginary by Mikhail Karpenko and others, gradually reduced the humorous ambiguity of these narratives to literal demonstrations of the victory of peasant, worker, and modernity over priest and tsar. Part II examines visual adaptations and appropriations of two adult classics, Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman (1833) and Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1878), for the public school syllabus, thus deliberately transgressing the distinctions between adult and children's literature. Swift points to a certain eclecticism in Soviet mass reproductions and the popularization of Aleksandr Benois's prerevolutionary illustrations to Pushkin's poem. The final part of the book analyzes how war-time picture books of the 1940s re-conceptualized children's literature of the 1920s first Soviet generation—Vladimir Maiakovskii's poem “Let Us Take the New Rifles” (1927), Samuil Marshak's Mail (1927), illustrated by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, and its sequel War-Time Mail (1944), illustrated by Adrian Ermolaev—for the second generation of Soviet children's books readers. This new Soviet canon contributed to the visualization of an imagined, shared past and created an intergenerational link between children at the rear and fathers at the front.

In my eyes, the main achievement of Picturing the Page is that Swift's book project opens an avenue for investigating the simultaneity of children's multilayered reading repertoire. In our retrospective attempts at periodization, we often tend to blind out that children read, look at, and listen to stories and consume book editions of different generations (and many nations) at the same time. Obviously, this intergenerational premise of literary reception is not exclusive to, but perhaps most evident in children books, retold and revived by educators and publishers, parents and grandparents to new readers. Despite all societal and political ruptures that characterize the early Soviet period, children's reading to some extent remains surprisingly undistracted by the shell shock of the new. The illustrated stories of children's books, accumulated through time, perhaps gain not only an educational-ideological, but also a protective function by creating a coherence between past, present, and familiarizing children with “the shock of the old.”

It is central to Swift's argument that “…texts themselves were fixed, but illustrations proved to be a malleable medium that could begin to imbue works with new meanings…illustrations could be the voice of today sounding from the pages of yesterday” (12–13; see also conclusion, 171). Yet, edition philologists and book historians would probably argue that any printed text, including both its visual and verbal matter, is always in flux. Textual transformations did not only result from spelling reforms, censorship, editing, and textual adaptations to child audiences. In fact, Swift makes several references to reproductions of “pictures of yesterday” that were reinserted on new pages, reproductions of popular Soviet illustrations that accompanied textual translations into other languages of the Soviet republics, and—in the case of Marshak's War-Time Mail—actual rewritings of textual narratives. A more explicit, overarching conceptual framework for approaching the image and text relation could have supported a further discussion of the changing status of illustration in both adult and children's literature between the Lenin and Stalin eras. However, this does not diminish the value of the multifaceted visual materials Swift presents in her book, which also includes many lesser-known illustrations that will interest scholars within the fields of Russian and Soviet children's literature, art history and visual studies, book and print culture.