Evgeny Shteiner's recent study of early Soviet children's books from the 1920s to the early 1930s revisits and augments the material he examined in Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children's Books (1999), in English, and its Russian republication, Avangard i postroenie novogo cheloveka: Iskusstvo sovetskoi detskoi knigi 1920 godov (2002). Steiner's earlier work proved pathbreaking in raising awareness about Russian avant-garde children's books as a phenomenon worthy of popular and scholarly attention, as did the illustrations and full-page plates in color and black and white in his 1999 book. Chto takoe khorosho revisits materials from this period with a wider lens, taking a more encyclopedic approach to the categorization of leftist children's books of the period. It includes sixty-eight black and white illustrations, and in these and in its analysis consciously draws attention to lesser-known materials.

Over twenty years some of these materials have become more accessible through exhibitions and the digital archives of worldwide libraries. Meanwhile, Russian children's literature research has grown tremendously in past decades, and scholarship in Russia and abroad has paid more attention to these materials from a variety of scholarly perspectives. Shteiner's 2019 book thus enters a different scholarly environment, one to which his work contributed, but which also has developed in new directions. Chto takoe khorosho rightly engages with later scholarship on relevant topics, including new research on Russian children's literature, radical children's literature, and modernist infantilism. It also expands his study both in time and in scope, rather than focusing on the avant-garde in particular. In so doing, it gives welcome scholarly attention to less-examined materials and lesser-known figures.

The book aims to consider innovative early Soviet artists and authors and focuses particularly on the “production” books that Shteiner argues dominated children's literature in this period. A preface and introduction contextualize the books for children produced in the 1920s and 1930s in the context of an ideologically-motivated call to create the “New Man” through children's literature. Three body chapters then discuss a wide range of materials from 1918 to 1936. The first chapter highlights significant moments from the origins of early Soviet children's books from 1918 onward. The second chapter focuses on production books about manufacturing, professions, industrial phenomena, mass kitchens, and machines such as the steam engine. The third chapter particularly showcases the locomotive as an apotheosis of the new world, as well as flying machines. A conclusion reflects on the political changes that spelled the end of leftist experimentation. Following the conclusion, a new, fourth chapter serves as a “coda,” expanding the focus by considering similar radical experiments in children's books in the west, particularly in Germany, France, and the United States. Throughout the book, Shteiner historicizes the material from a post-Soviet perspective and notes the ultimate fate of artists and writers, who often faced imprisonment or death unless they adapted their aesthetics to intensifying ideological pressure.

By not confining its focus to the avant-garde and the most aesthetically significant or influential materials of the time, the book strives to be more comprehensive in its range, but in the process its claims lose some specificity. Some terminology might be better defined or theorized, such as “avant-garde,” “stereotype,” or “constructivism.” The thematic organizing principle of the material, largely retained from 1999, offers some advantages, in identifying the symbolic significance of the locomotive, for example, but the categorizing approach also presents limitations. Like the avant-garde itself in its excesses, it has a somewhat totalizing effect that overlooks the diversity of voices in the period. Indeed, the celebration of production, machines, and manufacturing to which Shteiner attends did not necessarily stop in the 1930s as socialist realism took hold; rather, it was the aesthetic approach to these subjects that had to change. Such ruptures and continuities might be considered more closely. Although the thematic organization, categorical approach to analysis, and significant extension of the third chapter may leave something to be desired in terms of structural organization (as does the addition after the conclusion of a new chapter that goes beyond the outlined scope of the book), the augmented material and added final chapter do offer valuable material for comparative scholarship.

Apart from the evident value of including a variety of lesser-known materials in his analysis, it is when Shteiner moves beyond categorizations to place the significance of key works, figures, and moments in context, or to analyze the significance of patterns in greater artistic or theoretical depth, that his work makes its most significant scholarly contributions. In sum, Shteiner's updated and expanded work Chto takoe khorosho makes a valuable contribution to the study of early Soviet children's literature that will be of considerable interest to researchers of Russian children's books, radical children's literature, picture books, art history, and the avant-garde.