Course work theme: the role of russian poetry in the upbringing of children

1.2 Children’s Literature in Soviet Russia 
 

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It would be difficult to find a body of writing more deliberate, ideologically 
charged, and ambitious in its goals than the Soviet canon of children’s literature 
created between 1917 and 1991. As a means of educating and socializing future 
citizens, the Soviet children’s literature industry grew to encompass a massive 
apparatus of publishing houses, distribution networks, school curricula, bookstores, 
children’s libraries, academic journals, and graduate programs devoted to its study, 
all state-controlled. By 1991, the Soviet Union hadbeen producing some 1,800 
children’s titles annually in average print runs of over 200,000 copies, and issuing 
between 350 and 400 million children’s books each year.3 These huge print runs, 
combined with coordinated efforts to raise children with ideological consistency 
and a population that generally valued reading and education, ensured that children 
in the Soviet Union largely read the same books and received similar messages 
about what it meant to be a citizen of the world’s first socialist state and a global 
superpower. 
As a closed society with mandatory education and a centralized school 
curriculum, the Soviet state was able to dictate which books were required reading 
and considered canonical. As a result, the Soviet canon of children’s literature 
came to function as an enormous, shared text. By “the Soviet children’s canon,” 
we do not mean a fixed set of texts purported to convey certain truths, but a 
common notion of which works were important for children to read and know, 
grounded in a textual culture shared by all Soviet citizens. Never before had such a 
coordinated effort been launched to foster a common stock of knowledge among 
children and youth through a cultural canon manufactured expressly for this 
purpose.4 By the late-Soviet period, such beloved characters as Cheburashka, 
Crocodile Gena, Doctor Aibolit, and Uncle Fedor had come to signify Soviet 
childhood, with their adventures and plots being internalized by millions of Soviet 
children. An extraordinary feature of these heroes is that they fulfilled the 
ideological requirements of the regime while also resonating widely with children 
and adults. This dual process of state sponsorship from above and resonance with 
readers from below is in large part what made them canonical. 

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The only stable source of modern poetry for the average person is music. 
However, the texts of musical compositions extremely rarely set themselves high 
poetic goals. If we are talking about pop music, its meanings come down to the 
banal “I love you, when you loved me it was good, then when you fell out of love 
it became bad.” Of course, even among frankly pop lyrics there are good verses 
(the clearest example is the Roots group with their well-thought-out multi-way 
poems), and many modern rockers have a strong poetic streak, but the bulk of pop 
lyrics are meaningless at best, and stupid at worst. This distorts audience standards, 
and not only poetic ones: love, one of the main themes of poetry, for example, is 
equated with a stupid consumer feeling of need to satisfy animal needs. Even if 
romance is preserved in it, it loses quality and turns into something banal, reduced 
to a primitive.[2] 
Poetry emotionally enriches a person, educates the spiritual world, 
influences the choice of moral guidelines. Poems and songs are a unique 
opportunity to develop imagination and abstract thinking, to learn about what 
children have never seen before, and sometimes about what it is impossible to see 
at all – except to imagine. 
Sense of rhythm 
The first poems for the youngest are descriptive in nature and have an 
element of play, fun. The main thing in them is the ability to capture emotions and 
mood thanks to the rhythm. 
"The sense of rhythm is very important," notes psychologist, author of the 
methodology for the development of emotional intelligence of children "Monsikov 
Academy", Victoria Shimanskaya. – At the heart of all the processes of human life 
and the world is rhythm. Heartbeat. Breath. Time. Minutes, hours, day, night. 
Lunar cycles. By developing a child's sense of rhythm, we help develop his 
awareness, cognition, self-perception and sense of the world." 
Even without understanding the meaning of the verses, the baby is aware of 
their mood and emotional coloring depending on the rhythm. Therefore, active and 

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playful children prefer more rhythmic rhymes, and calm and shy ones prefer more 
melodic ones. 
The process of recognizing rhythms begins at birth, and sometimes even 
earlier. Knowing which poems the child listens to with pleasure, you can even 
correct his behavior and smooth out the whims. It is enough to calmly start reading 
familiar poems, and the baby will return to the state that he usually has when 
listening. 
"Poems-educators" 
Almost every children's poet has several "poems-educators", whose heroes 
children want to be equal to or, conversely, do not want to be like at all. For 
example, reading or listening to a poem by Heinrich Sapgir, a child will wonder 
how a large animal can be so well-mannered and neat, even if it is difficult for him, 
a baby, to do this: 
"A horse came to our apartment. 
A Well-bred Horse 
I took it off at the door 
Coats and galoshes. 
She didn't hit the table on the way, 
Didn't knock over the chair. 
She approached me cautiously 
And she stretched out her hoof" 
After reading the instructive verses, discuss with the kid whether the hero is 
doing well or badly, and why is he doing it? And do others like his behavior? How 
should I do the right thing? Children empathize with the heroes of the poems and, 
talking about them, subconsciously talk about themselves, remember the behavior 
model. 
As for Grigory Oster's "Harmful Advice" and similar poems ironically 
praising unseemly deeds, then, contrary to the opinion of many parents, they also 
have an educational function. They just need to be read not by toddlers, but by 
older children who are already familiar with the concept of jokes and irony. 

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After reading it, have fun laughing together: after all, even hooligans do not 
behave so ridiculously and stupidly in life, and therefore it's just ridiculous! 
"Adult" poems and love for the world 
The daughter of the famous children's writer and author of the idea of verse 
education Korney Chukovsky, Lydia, in her memoirs recalled sea trips during 
which her father read absolutely incomprehensible poems to her and her brothers, 
the meaning of which they guessed only approximately. At that time he was 
reading Baratynsky, and did not even try to explain to the children the meaning of 
the poetic material. 
"I'm six years old. In two years I will go to the gymnasium and there, over 
the years, in geography lessons, I will find out where the city of Livorno is, and in 
history lessons – what is Elysium, - Lydia Chukovskaya shares her impressions. - 
But now, from this voice, from these poems, I learn something that is impossible to 
learn from any geography textbook, from any encyclopedia – the power of waves, 
the power of will, the vastness of the world, the allure of a foreign land and travel. 
This knowledge, except from works of art, cannot be extracted from nowhere." 
Incomprehensible words and meanings in "adult" poems make children 
listen more attentively to the speaker, ask questions, enter into a dialogue and 
move from passive listening to active cognition. In addition, the child accurately 
recognizes when parents read what they love themselves, so such experiments with 
"adult" poems will work only under the condition of this very love. The same 
Lydia Chukovskaya writes: "Perhaps if then, in a boat, he was alone with the sea, 
without listeners, alone, he would read the same poems as when we were here." 
Nurturing feelings 
Poems are able to convey feelings most accurately: the power of emotions 
experienced by the poet is keenly felt. Poetry is created by personal experiences 
and reflects the best that is in a person. 
Poetry teaches us to love and helps us to see the beautiful and unusual in a 
simple life, to look with different eyes at what surrounds us. 

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Many poets dedicated their creations to the motherland, mother, beloved 
woman. They help us to be kinder, more determined, more gentle, more 
courageous. 
Poetic works are often addressed in adolescence, when the fullness of 
feelings cannot be expressed better than in rhymed lines. Usually poetic culture 
lags far behind the desire to express themselves: teenagers choose simple forms 
and rhythms, familiar themes of love, loneliness and misunderstanding. And the 
biggest mistake of parents is to ridicule primitive, but full of feelings teenage 
poems, try to point out the shortcomings, help with the selection of rhymes. But 
the desire of parents to put a young talent on display is about as harmful. After all, 
if a teenager wants to be heard, he will publish his poems on the Internet or send 
them to a publishing house. You should treat them more like therapy – 
stichotherapy, which allows you to fully realize new, adult feelings and emotions. 
The Kinopoesia Project 
A completely unique educational and educational non-profit project 
"Kinopoesia" stands apart. This is a series of mini-films where famous actors, 
musical performers and cultural figures read the works of classics in the frame. 
The initiator and artistic director of the project – Honored Artist of Russia 
actor Anatoly Bely - hopes that his audience will be schoolchildren and students 
who would hardly be interested in poetry during their studies. A romantic hero 
rides through a night city and yearns for a departed love, just like a modern 
teenager – the feelings and experiences are the same, the landscapes are familiar, 
the actions are recognizable. What is the surprise of a child when he finds out that 
this romantic hero is Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, so "boring" in a school 
textbook. Anatoly Bely, in various interviews, says that he considers classical 
poetry to be a cure for moral catastrophe. The main thing is to interest her child, to 
show that the classics can be modern, even if the poem was written three centuries 
ago. 
A. Bely: Yes, young people absorb information in a different way, and we 
really need to take this into account. Of course, we should not completely reformat 

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under their consciousness, and it is impossible. But cultures should be vaccinated 
at the modern level. Actually, this is what the "Kinopoesia" was created for. We 
say to the young man: "If you don't want to read, look! You're more used to it. 
Watch and listen." But the ultimate goal for us is still the return of the child to the 
book. This is the primary source, verified by the whole civilization. 

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