Publishing Russian Children’s Literature about War: From Glorification to Disbelief

• In Event: Children’s Book Publishing in the Russia-Ukraine War

Abstract

Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has left Russian children’s publishers and authors perplexed: how does one go about writing and publishing books about the current war when according to Russian law there is no ‘war’? Some publishers responded to this critical situation by reprinting relevant titles from their back catalogues and commissioning more translations of war related books, while some authors had to jump through narrative hoops to write about the war without giving themselves away. In this paper, I will explore war narratives in contemporary Russian literature for children, focusing on the inevitable genre transformations that had emerged since the beginning of the conflict in 2014.

Author

• Ekaterina Shatalova, Aarhus U (Denmark)