Yakovlev’s and Grigoryev’s Western careers were cut short by untimely death (1938 and 1939, respectively). Shukhaev returned to Leningrad from Paris at the invitation of the authorities to take over the ailing Kardovsky’s class. Shukhaev taught at what was then the Soviet Academy of Arts for two years before he was arrested and sent to Siberia, from which he returned ten years later, morally and physically broken.
Akimov, who had studied with Yakovlev, revered his demonic-looking mentor (he had been wildly popular with women and had had a long, turbulent affair with Anna Pavlova in the West). Akimov’s apartment faced the Neva and was filled with his many portraits of famous men and beautiful women (his friends called it the wizard’s cave); in it the place of honor was given to a drawing by Yakovlev, which had miraculously survived all the trials of Leningrad life, even the siege. It was a museum-quality drawing of large reddish hands and a huge foot.
Every self-respecting director dreams of discovering a great playwright. In the early 1930s Akimov believed he had made his discovery when he met a modest young man, the Leningrad playwright Yevgeny Shvarts. At the time Shvarts was at a crossroad. He was a successful children’s writer, but he had a quarrel with the influential poet and editor Samuil Marshak, whose word in children’s literature, then and later, was law.
Marshak and Kornei Chukovsky could be called the fathers of twentieth-century Russian children’s literature. Chukovsky had begun writing his brightly rhymed poems in 1916, and to this day children all over Russia memorize them. Before the revolution Chukovsky had tried to free children’s literature from treacly verse and goody-goody stories and afterward relentlessly fought the attempts of the Soviet authorities to turn children’s literature into an instrument for ideological brainwashing.
In those days any fairy tales that caused “harmful fantasies” in children were banned by the censors. Even traditional dolls were taken out of circulation for inspiring “hypertrophy of maternal feelings.” Instead girls were given propaganda dummies depicting fat, repulsive priests in order to elicit antireligious emotions. But the little girls, responding to their hypertrophic maternal feelings, stubbornly gave the dolls baths in toy tubs, fed them, and put them to bed.
This obvious failure did not stop the authorities from urging further ridiculous innovations. Chukovsky eventually wearied of his struggle (he bitterly described the “shameful history of my children’s books—they were stifled, persecuted, sedated, and banned by the censors”) and yielded the leadership in children’s literature to Marshak, who had not only an uncommon poetic gift but fantastic organizational skills.
The bespectacled, chain-smoking Marshak reigned on the fifth floor of the House of Books, located in the former headquarters of the Singer Company on Nevsky Prospect, over a team of writers, poets, and artists. Marshak cleared the way for the dadaist Oberiuts—Kharms, Oleinikov, and Vvedensky—into print. They produced several children’s magazines, full of vivid poems, counting games, and stories, on which several generations of young readers were to grow up.
Marshak created a new genre in Russian children’s literature: stories of experienced people—sailors, pilots, divers, geologists, polar explorers. One man he brought in was Boris Zhitkov, a navigator and engineer who had circled the world several times in a sailing ship. Marshak sat up nights with Zhitkov, prodding him to develop a new Leningrad style of prose for children.
The fifth floor of the Singer building was crowded with people bearing manuscripts and drawings and ideas for new books. The floor shook with laughter, and some visitors were so overcome with the general hilarity that they left the building staggering, holding onto walls like drunkards. Shvarts, Oleinikov, and Kharms were particularly good at comic improvisations. An absurd sense of humor was the most esteemed. For instance, Kharms talked of a trained flea that bit its master and then rubbed the bite with its tiny legs. When he was asked his telephone number, Kharms replied, “It’s very easy to remember: thirty-two, fifteen. Thirty-two teeth, fifteen fingers.”
Only one man seemed to remain totally serious and unperturbed: Marshak’s favorite artist, Vladimir Lebedev. He was one of the golden boys of Soviet culture, like Shostakovich or Kozintsev. Lebedev graduated from the Petersburg Academy of Arts and, on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, joined others in a provocative display of semiabstract compositions. As a painter and graphic artist, Lebedev quickly moved from cubism to nonfigurative experiments, creating a series of works by the early 1920s that are still considered among the cream of the Russian avant-garde.
