A Soviet Critical Collection on Writing for Young Readers
A Collective Critical Volume
Children’s Literature (Russian: Detskaia literatura: kriticheskii sbornik) is a Russian-language critical collection edited by Anatoly Lunacharsky. It gathers critical articles on Soviet children’s literature and includes a preface by Lunacharsky. The title identifies both subject and form: the book is a critical collection about children’s literature, not a work of fiction for children. Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People’s Commissar of Education and an active critic and essayist, appears here as editor and author of the introduction.
The Critical Framing of Children’s Literature
The volume treats Soviet children’s literature as a field requiring critical assessment. Its contents are articles of criticism, and Lunacharsky’s preface introduces them. The preface is one of Lunacharsky’s texts on children’s and youth literature that have been treated as evidence of his work as a critic of both contemporary and classic writing, and of his attention to how such literature is produced and received. In the book, that critical framing gives the collection its purpose: writing for young readers is presented as a subject for literary judgment.
A Composite Work and Its Editorial Design
Children’s Literature is organized as a collection rather than as a single sustained argument. Lunacharsky edits the volume and writes the preface, while the body of the book consists of critical articles by contributors. This composite form makes the book a record of collective critical attention to Soviet children’s literature. Its significance lies in that combination: a leading Soviet cultural figure introduces a set of critical articles on writing for children and youth, placing the topic within the literary-critical work of the period.
The source gives the volume’s imprint as Leningrad: GIKHL, 1931. Lunacharsky’s preface is listed at pages 4–8. A 2025 translation by Mariana Caruso Vieira and Clara Drummond de Andrade Magalhães of two Lunacharsky prefaces on children’s and youth literature appeared in RUS, volume 16, number 28, pages 213–226; the second preface, dated 1931, introduces a collection of critical articles on Soviet children’s literature.
