Boy Meets Tractor

While reading Evgeny Steiner's book on Constructivist children's books Stories for Little Comrades, I had a wonderful realisation that, rather than looking at pretty pictures of stylised, faceless mini-people on tractors for fun, what I was actually involved in was research! Hurrah for academia. This book elucidates an area where the youth are instructed in important subjects, such as how trains work, the joy and complexity of technology and revolutionary war, rather than milquetoast petit-bourgeois subjects like dragons and castles.



The International Institute of Social History has lots of reproductions of said books. Steiner's book, though rather too tainted by the Boris Groys line that Constructivists were all evil Fordist proto-Stalinists, is fascinating for the comments from actual child audiences from the books at the time- 'why are these people all broken up?', most poignantly. Mainly though they just wonder why people don't look realistic, and seem rather annoyed by it. Certainly I remember thinking like this- I couldn't understand why Quentin Blake was allowed to draw like he did, for instance. I could do that! (the moral of this is that children, contra the situationist idea that they're all little nascent abstractionists, are in fact aesthetic reactionaries.)