A new exhibition at the University of Chicago Library gives visitors the chance to view the former Soviet Union through the eyes of its youngest citizens. “Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary,” which opens Aug. 22 at the Special Collections Research Center, features rare Soviet children’s books and other graphic art from 1927-1948.
The works in the exhibition demonstrate the singular role of children in the Soviet Union, said Robert Bird, associate professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and the College. Bird, along with Matthew Jesse Jackson, associate professor in art history, visual arts and the College, and nine UChicago students, helped to organize the exhibition.
Following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, “children were seen as the first recipients of this way of doing things, but also the pioneers in building this new world,” Jackson said. “They were being asked, from the very beginning, to live in a world that did not yet exist.”
Exhibition highlights include imaginative picture books like North, South, East, West, which unfolds to reveal information about each region of the Soviet Union; andTsepplin, in which a young boy imagines a hybrid Zeppelin-linotype machine that creates newsprint in the sky.
The books and posters featured in the exhibition also draw attention to the broader changes in the regime. As Soviet political ideology became more entrenched, the playful and experimental mood of the early period gave way to “a much more narrative and realistic mode of expression,” Bird said.
Bird was the first to call attention to the collection of children’s books and systemically study them. Some of the children’s books highlighted in the exhibition were given to the library as part of the R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. Training Library archive, while the origins of others remain uncertain. In addition, the exhibition highlights several rare Soviet-era posters donated by E.M. Bakwin.
The “exhilarating” discovery of the archive occurred as Bird was preparing to teach a 2006 course on Soviet culture, and he included study of the books as one of the required activities for students. “I wanted to instill an appreciation for the moments of discovery we have as scholars,” Bird explained.
In collaboration with Bird and his students, Library staff began to review and catalogue portions of the collection, only to discover the materials were rarer than they had realized. “All of these books are scarcely held. We were holding the only copy of many of them,” said Alice Schreyer, director of the Special Collections Research Center. Thanks to the cataloguing effort, “we’ve let the scholarly community know in a much more robust and detailed way that the books are here for them to use.”
As they delved more deeply into the collection, Bird, Jackson and their students developed the idea for an exhibition in Special Collections. That idea grew to include a web exhibition and a print catalogue, which the Library published and the University of Chicago Press distributed.
They found an enthusiastic partner in Schreyer. “We always want exhibition projects to not only feature marvelous materials in the collection, but also be an opportunity [for students and faculty] to perform research and present that work to a larger audience,” she said.
“Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary” is part of the Soviet Arts Experience, a 16-month, citywide effort to showcase art created under the Soviet regime. The exhibition runs Aug. 22 to Dec. 30 at the SCRC. For more information, please visit http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/curex.html or call 773-702-8705.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
