Cheburashka in the Fog

Cancel Culture á la Russe

In late May of 2020, the world of Russian children’s literature was plunged into controversy after Tatyana Uspenskaya, the daughter of Eduard Uspensky, issued an open letter denouncing her father. Uspensky, a towering figure of late Soviet culture and the creator of Cheburashka, had departed this world two years earlier, and the Russian State Children’s Library was establishing an award in his honor. His daughter was objecting to that decision and accusing Uspensky of abusive treatment. “The name of a man who for many years perpetrated violence on his own family, including his children, should not be honored with an award in so humanistic a field as children’s literature,” Tatyana wrote.

This incident gave rise to what may be the most vociferous discussion to date of “cancel culture” in the Russian context. After all, Eduard Uspensky was not just a famous writer and television personality: his characters were integral to several generations of childhoods, and the idea of relegating the stories of Cheburashka, Crocodile Gena, Uncle Fyodor, and the cat Matroskin to the trash bin felt like a body blow to all Russians, tantamount to asking them to throw their own childhood in the trash.* Many prominent people have ardently defended Uspensky. The well-known journalist and writer, Dmitry Bykov, for example, publicly stated that he knew Uspensky to be a very good person: “I have a pretty good idea how unbearable any person can be in everyday life; there are no ideal parents.”

Several months later, the journalist Roman Super released a documentary film, This is Edik, telling the story of Uspensky’s life. The biopic covered the writer’s soaring achievements but also brought to light some rather unsavory details. On the positive side, once he became influential, Uspensky was an indefatigable fighter who helped other authors break through the censorship and stultification of the Soviet system. On the negative side, he was someone who went to court to strip Leonid Shvartsman, the artist who drew Cheburashka, of all copyrights to this world-famous image. Uspensky himself became a millionaire, while Shvartsman received no royalties whatsoever.

Most damning of all was the fact that Eduard Uspensky placed his daughter into the hands of a sect that practiced child-beating. The sect was created by the pseudoscientist Victor Stolbun, who had treated Uspensky and several other members of the Soviet elite for alcoholism. It emerged in the early 1990s and was banned in 1996. Tatyana’s emotional account, her voice breaking, of her escape from Stolbun’s sect is heartrending. As she tells it, her father felt not the slightest sympathy for his daughter and saw Stolbun’s physical violence as fully justified.

The film is quite balanced in tone and more sympathetic than condemnatory toward the writer, but a large proportion of its audience was unprepared to have their idol knocked off his pedestal. “That’s not Edik!” was the title of an online review that best captured the general reaction. Other reviews could be put into the “Leaving Prostokvashino” category (a nod to “Leaving Neverland” combined with the fictional village Uspensky created), a heading used in several articles calling for a reexamination of attitudes toward Uspensky.

It is worth noting that children’s literature is currently flourishing in Russia. Comparisons are being made to the well-known Soviet-era phenomenon of outstanding writers turning their hands to children’s literature, where there were fewer ideological constraints than in literature for adults. Censorship is of a different stripe in contemporary Russia, but there is still something to the comparison. Over the past decade, during which independent media have all but disappeared, some journalists, after losing their jobs, have indeed taken to writing children’s books or working at children’s literature publishers or for related educational projects. Alexandra Litvina, the writer and chief editor of the children’s publisher Walking into History (“Пешком в историю”), sees another factor drawing talented people into children’s literature: the field offers one of the few remaining ways of influencing political reality. “Everyone is actually fighting for their own future and sees that, at present, the only possible lever of influence is here,” she said. “This may sound a bit pragmatic, but that’s how it’s always been – throughout history, at times like this when all other avenues have been closed, efforts have been channeled into children’s literature.”

Another reason for this boom has been a reexamination of the classics, propelled by discussion of a new ethics. For example, several years ago, a post by journalist Natalya Zaitseva provoked quite a furor. Zaitseva argued that a famous collection of stories by Ivan Bunin about noble estate life, Dark Avenues, that was included in school curricula, romanticized a culture of rape, since landowners compelled peasant women to have sex with them.

Generally speaking, early Soviet ideas about equality of the sexes has long since given way to patriarchal values: in subsequent years, all that remained was a specific agenda aimed at drawing women into various professions. Meanwhile, girls have been taught to be “good little housewives” and perform traditional female roles. And now, finally, Russia has undertaken to actively make up for lost time and bring gender equality into children’s books. Forward-thinking publishers have been actively bringing out translated and Russian books about girls and for girls about how to stand up for oneself, menstruation, and other previously neglected topics. In addition to feminism, a multitude of other contemporary themes have made their way into children’s literature: everything from tolerance toward refugees to ecological problems. This trend has mostly been led by small, intellectually inclined publishers with relatively modest print runs, but new ideas are gradually permeating the mass market.

In Russia, thinking about this new children’s literature is often shaped by comparisons to its Soviet roots. The reevaluation of what children’s literature should be, which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union, yielded fruit only much later. Several decades were required before people born into a declining totalitarian system themselves became parents. This new generation, which worked through childhood trauma with the help of psychotherapy, realized that the old child-rearing methods did not suit them in the least. That also meant that the books their parents read to them didn’t suit them, creating demand for a new, fundamentally different literature.

Soviet literature was extremely didactic. It summoned readers to perform great feats and subordinate their individuality to momentous goals. Today the educator’s primary objective is helping children develop their emotional intelligence, rather than stifling individuality and the natural striving for freedom. Today’s parents are torn between the formulas they absorbed from the books of their childhood and contemporary ideas about parenting. For example, every Russian knows the poem by Agniya Barto admonishing children not to cry:

That Tanya of ours is loudly crying
Her ball’s dropped in the stream
Quiet, Tanya, stop your crying
Your ball won’t sink in the stream

Наша Таня громко плачет
Уронила в речку мячик
Тише, Танечка, не плачь
Не утонет в речке мяч.

As we now know, telling children not to cry when they’re upset is the worst thing you can do.

Then there’s the case of Kornei Chukovsky, an acclaimed genius of childhood whose works continue to be an integral part of growing up in book-loving families. The stories and images from Chukovsky’s poems are so deeply etched into our consciousness that it takes a certain effort to notice all the war, revolution, and violence they contain. Similar problems arise when any classic of children’s literature is subjected to scrutiny.

But the situation with Uspensky’s works is special. With them, as well, it is easy to find aspects that don’t fit with contemporary norms. On the other hand, he was an independent-minded writer who was, in many ways, ahead of his time: as someone with a deeply critical attitude toward the Soviet system, he created characters who were very free, something that for many years prevented him from being admitted to the ranks of official writers. How could you have a little schoolboy go live in a house in the country away from his parents? Instead of being a diligent student, obeying Mama and Papa, always telling the truth, and never taking what isn’t his, this boy befriends an unscrupulous misfit cat and sets up his own little cottage commune. A proper Soviet book would end with an edifying scene of repentance, but that is far from what readers saw in Uncle Fedya, His Dog, and His Cat, the basis for a cartoon film titled Prostokvashino. (In English translation, Uncle Fyodor has turned into “Uncle Fedya” and Crocodile Gena has become “Crocodile Gene.”) Here, it is the parents who wind up being edified when they finally pay their son a visit and have a fine time there in the country.

The biopic This is Edik even introduces the curious thought that Uspensky’s stories fundamentally changed Soviet childhood, and with it, Soviet reality: it is in fact the generation that grew up reading him that brought down the Soviet Union. In the film, Grigory Oster, another famous children’s writer, comments:

Uspensky taught his readers freedom – freedom of thought, freedom to hold their own view of the world. His works were free of the blinders and the cumbersome structure that was put into everyone’s head from childhood, including with the help of children’s literature... On the contrary: Uspensky was always drilling holes in that cumbersome, mind-constraining structure. And this freedom accumulated in the children who read his works like vitamins.

The film also shows Valentin Yumashev, a friend of Uspensky and erstwhile Putin advisor, saying that the creator of Cheburashka at some point consciously decided to pursue an objective: “Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and I – we will turn this country upside down,” Yumashev quotes Uspensky as saying.

A key device employed in Uspensky’s subversion was his way of poking fun at Soviet reality by showing it through the innocent eyes of a child. For example, The 25 Professions of Masha Filipenko tells the tale of a schoolgirl invited to visit various underperforming enterprises by a certain “Institute for the Improvement of Production.” The idea is that Masha’s ability to take an “unclouded” view of how things were being done would allow her to offer valuable advice. Looking through her eyes, readers are shown a deteriorating, stagnating world where nobody gets anything done: a sewing workshop has nothing to work with but sackcloth and a produce sorting facility puts a higher priority on having a good accordion player than on performing the task at hand.

This glaringly satirical story came out in the late 1980s, by which point its author was already famous and the Soviet Union was living out its final days. But even Uspensky’s first hit, Crocodile Gena and His Friends, published in 1966, used exactly the same technique. The world created in this story is a perfect model of Soviet society. The protagonists live according to strict rules and are required to perform jobs that seem to be just “for show”: Cheburashka decorates toy-store windows and Crocodile Gena works as a crocodile in a zoo. The story also features a certain Ivan Ivanovich, who sits in a large, brightly lit office and signs papers. Not only does this bureaucrat not care what the papers say, he doesn’t even look at them, like some bizarre bureaucratic robot. “Gena removed his new hat and placed it on a corner of the desk. Ivan Ivanovich immediately wrote on it: ‘Approved. Ivan Ivanovich,’ because he had signed the previous paper ‘Not approved: Ivan Ivanovich.’” Crocodile Gena and Cheburashka get caught up in absurd negotiations with this Ivan Ivanovich, but in the end they do manage to obtain the bricks they need to build a House of Friendship.

People’s search for friends and for their place in the world is a primary plot element in the story of Cheburashka. Cheburashka is a wanderer who doesn’t know who he is and where he’s from, an easily recognizable metaphor for postwar childhood in the Soviet Union. Uspensky was born in 1937 and was part of a generation of orphans, children who either grew up in an orphanage and did not know their parents at all or were simply deprived of parental love: people hardened by repression, famine, and war were often incapable of expressing tenderness.

This idea comes up repeatedly in Super’s film. A key theme is that underlying Uspensky’s difficult personality and his troubled relationship with his daughter was the fact that he himself was deprived of his mother’s love. Super himself was born in the 1980s, meaning that he belonged to the last Soviet generation, a generation that had to adapt its parenting to a changing reality. In his interviews, the director repeatedly mentions that his subject brought happiness to all the children of the Soviet Union, but was unable to give it to his own daughter. He makes it clear that addressing this topic was important to him as a father who has given a great deal of thought to childhood, his own parents’ mistakes, and his desire not to repeat them. But Super also emphasizes: he is happy that his son is reading Uspensky’s books: “I’m just as against censorship based on moral considerations as I am against any other kind.”

It should be said that, despite the furor surrounding Uspensky, no one seems to be proposing a thoroughgoing “cancelling” – proclaiming the author’s name unmentionable and evicting Cheburashka from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. In Russia, such extreme measures would be out of the question. Even parents who are strong proponents of the “new ethics” are not ready to give up Cheburashka. In the words of Vera Deyeva, a quality-assurance expert and mother:

When I heard that Barto was taking part in the badgering of Chukovsky, it immediately turned me off to her work. But with Uspensky I didn’t feel that way, even though I heard all the horror stories. Probably I never really liked Barto’s work that much. Then again, Uspensky’s Prostokvashino is just an encyclopedia of toxicity – the protagonist’s parents have an utterly awful relationship; I can’t imagine talking to my husband or my husband talking to me that way, or anyone else in our family interacting like that. But I’ll be reading Cheburashka and showing the cartoons to my child.

In any event, lovers of Cheburashka make up a much larger audience than readers who care about such intellectual niceties as ethical lapses. Uspensky’s characters have become a part of the cultural code, and cancelling them would be as unthinkable as erasing Baba Yaga, Dyed Moroz, or Pushkin’s fairy tales from Russian culture.

People’s attitude toward Tatyana Uspenskaya’s revelations has been central to the Uspensky controversy. As Lida Starodubtseva, a translator of children’s literature, put it:

In my view, what has been healthy in this situation is specifically discussions about the value of speaking out as such. At first there were comments along the line of “Why did she stay silent so many years, where did this all come from, aha, now the time was right,” and so forth. And then people responded by explaining the mechanism of trauma and the fact that, in adolescence, you might not be aware of things your parents are doing and justify them. And this conversation was very valuable. As for the prize, keeping Uspensky’s name does not strike me as a direct insult.

One compromise proposed was that the prize money be shared with foundations that fight domestic violence. But the State Library did not choose to make such a gesture, and the name “The Eduard Uspensky Great Tale Award” was retained. “I hope that there will be a writer who comes out onto the stage and refuses to accept a prize honoring an abuser,” children’s writer Valentin Postnikov, a family friend who supports Tatyana, wrote on his Facebook page.

“We were bound to see this story sooner or later, whether about Eduard Uspensky or someone else,” Alexandra Litvina said, summing up the situation. “Land mines like this await us at every step. But what will we be left with once the dust settles? When you look at things from a historical perspective, you immediately think of parallels – I remember how we were supposed to examine literature from a class perspective, for example. If someone owned serfs, we could not consider his ethical thinking to be valid... Yes, handing children over to a sect is impermissible, but if we name a literary prize in honor of Eduard Uspensky, does that mean we approve of it?”

Among the vast array of opinions expressed during this uproar, it is interesting to note one rather novel perspective: just how ethical is it, in principle, to name an award after someone? Isn’t this tradition fundamentally a tradition of idealization and confusing authors with their achievements, as well as a system that creates a harmful hierarchical structure in the world of art?

For now, this idea is a bit too radical to be broadly discussed in Russian society.