Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series by Erika Haber

Author:Erika Haber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2017-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

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OZ BECOMES MAGIC LAND

To make sense of the remarkable story of why Volkov came to adapt Baum’s American fairy tale and to understand the significance of how he managed to get his version published during some of the most harrowing years in Soviet Russia, it is essential to know the political and literary circumstances under which he wrote. Both the writing and publication processes operated differently in the Soviet Union from those in the United States, since the literary culture was controlled by the state rather than by the free market. The popularity of an author or book did not guarantee publication or determine the size of print runs. Moreover, during the thirty years of Stalin’s regime, writing and publishing were fraught with risk, and navigating the minefield of Soviet literary culture proved challenging even for established writers. As a novice author, Volkov experienced a long, rough road to publication, and on a much larger and potentially more serious scale than Baum had, since the volatile political climate in the Soviet Union in the thirties could mean professional and personal ruin for those whose works did not conform to the established artistic method and required socialist themes.

THE LONG ROAD TO THE EMERALD CITY

The speeches of Maksim Gorky and Samuil Marshak at the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934 had a powerful impact on Volkov, who at the time was finishing his advanced degree in mathematics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Volkov welcomed Gorky’s assessment of the meager state of Soviet children’s literature and found encouragement in Marshak’s renewed call for people from all walks of life to consider writing for children. Volkov had helped educate his two sons and had worked as a teacher and school administrator; thus, he considered himself a qualified candidate to answer the call to create a new era in Soviet children’s literature. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote that he felt he had a good idea of what children needed and liked to read; in fact, he had even begun drafting his first children’s book (Galkina 2006, 95).

Already in 1931, Volkov had commenced researching historical sources and reading literature on the reign of Tsarina Elizabeth I (1741–1762), as background work for his Wonderful Balloon (Chudesnyi shar), a historical tale for older children about the first flight of a hot-air balloon in Russia. Unlike his reworked version of Baum’s story, Wonderful Balloon represented a completely original work celebrating early Russian science and technology. Due to the convoluted politics of Soviet children’s literature in the early thirties, and the fact that Volkov was a complete newcomer to the field, without a sponsor or connections, he could not get anyone to take a second look at this manuscript, even though its plot celebrated Russian history and achievement. He completed a full draft of the story in March 1936, but it did not appear in print until 1940, a full year after the publication of his Wizard of the Emerald City. That he could publish a reworked version of an

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