Overview
The French themselves are not happy with their record. Writing in the late 1940s, critic Jean de Trigon, in Histoire de la littérature enfantine, de ma Mère l’Oye au Roi Babar (Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1950) said: “The French have created little children’s literature. They have received more than they have given, but they have assimilated, adapted, transformed. The two are not the same thing, for one must love childhood in general if one is to please children other than one’s own.” In 1923 Marie-Thérèse Latzarus tolled the passing bell in La littérature enfantine en France dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris; Les Presses Universitaires de France): “Children’s literature, more’s the pity, is dying.” And in 1937, in their introduction to Beaux livres, belles histoires, the compilers Marguerite Gruny and Mathilde Leriche wrote: “Children’s literature in France is still poor, despite the earnest efforts of the last decade.”
Surely Trigon was too severe. Even more surely Mlle Latzarus has proved a false Cassandra. As for the compilers, the very decade they scorned saw at least three magnificent achievements. The first was Jean de Brunhoff’s. Equally talented as author and artist, in 1931 he gave the world that enlightened monarch Babar the Elephant, one of the dozen or so immortal characters in children’s literature. The next year saw the start of Paul Faucher’s admirable Père Castor series, imaginatively conceived, beautifully designed educational picture books for the very young—not literature, perhaps, but historically comparable to Comenius. Finally, in 1934 appeared the first of Marcel Aymé’s miraculous stories about two little girls and the talking animals whose adventures they shared. These grave-comic fantasies were later collected as Les Contes du chat perché (1939; Eng. trans., The Wonderful Farm, 1951; Return to the Wonderful Farm, 1954), and, along with de Brunhoff and Faucher, were enough to make the decade great.
But there are no other decades to match it. There does exist a disproportion between French literary genius as a whole and the children’s literature it has been able to produce. The explanation is uncertain. Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, an adventurous 18th-century lady who wrote over 70 volumes for the young, thought that children’s stories should be pervaded by “the spirit of geometry.” It is possible that the blame for France’s showing might in part be laid on a persistent Cartesian spirit, reinforced by rationalist and positivist philosophies. The Cartesian does not readily surrender to fancy, especially of the more wayward variety. And so, even counting Charles Perrault, the later Charles Nodier, and the contemporary Simone Ratel and Maurice Vauthier, a dearth of first-rate fairy tales may be noted. Cartesians would tend to be weak also in children’s verse, in nonsense of any sort, in humour (despite Babar), even in the more imaginative kind of historical novel exemplified by Hans Baumann in Germany and Rosemary Sutcliff in England. Perhaps French children’s literature has been restrained by a Catholicism or by a Protestantism that continued to insist on the edifying when mainstream literature had already freed itself from explicit moralism. It may not even be true, as Trigon thinks, that the French have fruitfully assimilated the children’s literature of foreign countries. Alice has more or less bewildered them; Huckleberry Finn has never been digested. The child’s cause was not much aided by the triumph of a post-Napoleonic bourgeois cast of thought—or by the wave of post-1871 nationalism.
It is a complicated problem. But perhaps the heart of it lies in the value the French set on maturity. For them childhood at times has seemed less a normal human condition than a handicap. The children themselves have often seemed to feel the pressure, which may account for the fact that they absorb French adult books precociously. The French came much later than did many other countries to the discovery of the child as a figure worthy of the most sensitive understanding; that is what makes Père Castor so important. One is not surprised to note the comparatively recent date (1931) of a study by Aimé Dupuy, translatable as The Child: A New Character in the French Novel.
History
If one skips Jean de La Fontaine, whose Fables (1668; 1678–79; and 1693), though read by the young, were not meant for them, French children’s literature from one point of view begins with the classic fairy tales of Charles Perrault. These were probably intended for the salon rather than the nursery, but their narrative speed and lucidity commended them at once to children. The fairy tales of his contemporary Mme d’Aulnoy, like many others produced in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, are hardly the real thing. With a Watteau-like charm, they taste of the court, as does the Télémaque of François Fénelon, a fictionalized lecture on education.
Rousseau, as has been noted, did make a difference. Émile at least drew attention to what education might be. But the effect on children’s literature was not truly liberating. His disciple, Mme de Genlis, set a stern face against make-believe of any sort; all marvels must be explained rationally. Her stories taught children more than they wanted to know, a circumstance that endeared her to a certain type of parent. Sainte-Beuve, to be fair, called her “the most gracious and gallant of pedagogues.” One of her qualities, priggishness, was energetically developed by Arnaud Berquin in his Ami des enfants. Berquin created the French equivalent of the concurrent English bourgeois morality. In effect, he unconsciously manufactured an adult literature for the young, loading the dice in favour of the values held by parents to be proper for children. Yet one must beware of judging Berquin or his equally moralistic successor Jean-Nicolas Bouilly by today’s standards. Children accepted them because they were the best reading available; and Anatole France’s tribute in Le Petit Pierre (1918) shows that they must have exerted some charm.
The didactic strain, if less marked than in England or Germany, persisted throughout most of the 19th century. To it, Mme de Ségur, in her enormously popular novels, added sentimentality, class snobbery, but also some liveliness and occasional fidelity to child nature. Her “Sophie” series (1850s and 60s), frowned on by modern critics, is still loved by obstinate little French girls. Sans Famille (1878), by Hector Malot, a minor classic of the “unhappy child” school, also continues to be read and is indeed a well-told story. But the century’s real writer of genius is of course Jules Verne, whose first book, Un Voyage en ballon, was originally published in 1851 in a children’s magazine, Le Musée des Familles.
The period was lively enough. Production was vast. Children’s magazines flourished, particularly the remarkable Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation, brilliantly edited by Jules Hetzel. Writers of the stature of George Sand, Alphonse Daudet, and Alexandre Dumas père were not too proud to write for children. Much worthy, though transient, work was produced along with a mass of mediocrity, as was the case also in England and the United States. But on the whole, as the century drew to a close, French children might have been better served, even though one critic sees the apogee as occurring between 1860 and 1900.
The 20th century
From the turn of the century to the close of World War II, a number of superior works were produced. The books of de Brunhoff and Faucher have already been cited. A remarkable picture of prehistoric life by J.-H. Rosny (pseudonym of J.-H.-H. Boex) appeared in 1911 and has proved so durable that in 1967 an English translation, The Quest for Fire, appeared. Patapoufs et filifers, by André Maurois, a gentle satire on war, has lasted (Eng. trans. Pattypuffs and Thinifers, 1948; reissued 1968). His fantastic Le Pays des 36,000 volontés is almost as popular. The famous dramatist Charles Vildrac has done much to advance the cause of French children’s literature. Two pleasant stories of his, remotely descended from Robinson Crusoe, L’Isle rose and its sequel La Colonie, appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1951 his now-classic comic animal tale Les Lunettes du lion won immediate success (Eng. trans., The Lion’s Eyeglasses, 1969). On a high literary level, not accessible to all children, was Le Petit Prince (1943, both French and English, The Little Prince) by the famous aviator-author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The very vagueness of this mystical parable has lent it a certain magnetism. Finally, it is necessary to mention a field in which the French proved incomparable: the comic strip combining action and satire, conceived on a plane of considerable sophistication. Hergé’s Tintin started in the 1930s and sold over 25,000,000 copies. Also successful was the later and even more unconventional Astérix series.
Production after 1945 so multiplied that to single out names is bound to involve some injustice. A few, however, by reason either of the originality of their talent or the scope of their achievement, stand out. One is Maurice Druon, whose Tistou of the Green Fingers (1957; Eng. trans. 1958), a kind of children’s Candide, demonstrated how the moral tale, given sufficient sensitivity and humour, can be transmuted into art. Perhaps the most original temperament was that of Henri Bosco, author of four eerie, haunting Provençal novels about the boy Pascalet and his strange involvements with a gypsy companion, a fox, and a dog in a shifting, legend-shrouded natural world. It may be that time will rate these books, like those of the English writer Walter de la Mare, among the finest of their kind. Bosco’s L’Enfant et la rivière (1955; Eng. trans., The Boy and the River, 1956), Le Renard dans l’île (1956; Eng. trans., The Fox in the Island, 1958), and Barboche (1957; Eng. trans. 1959) are notable.
Sound, realistic novels, almost free of excess moralism, were written by at least a dozen reputable authors. Among them Colette Vivier (The House of the Four Winds), Paul-Jacques Bonzon (The Orphans of Simitra), and Étienne Cattin (Night Express!) were distinguished. The domain of the imaginative tale was well represented by Maurice Vauthier, especially by his Ecoute, petit loup. Among those noted for their prolific output as well as the high level of their art two names emerged. One is Paul Berna, who has worked in half a dozen genres, including detective stories and science fiction. His Cheval sans tête (1955) was published in England as A Hundred Million Francs and in the United States as The Horse Without a Head and was made into a successful Disney film. A “gang” story, using a hard, unemotional tone that recalls Simenon, it may be the best of its kind since Emil and the Detectives.
The death of René Guillot removed a deeply conscientious and responsible artist. Guillot, though probably not of the first rank, was not far below it. He left more than 50 widely translated novels for the young and about 10 nonfiction works. For his entire body of work, he received in 1964 the Andersen Prize. His finest achievements in the adventure novel, based on his experiences in Africa, include The White Shadow (1948) and Riders of the Wind (1953).
Children’s verse has at least one delightful practitioner in Pierre Gamarra. His Mandarine et le Mandarin contains Fontainesque fables of notable drollery and high technical skill. The Belgian author Maurice Carême also has some repute as a children’s poet. In summary, contemporary French activity seems a bit lacking in colour and versatility. But one solid achievement must be registered: the 19th century’s legacy was decisively rejected, and at last a natural child prevailed in the imaginative work of the best French contemporaries.
Russia/Soviet Union
Here history breaks cleanly into two periods: pre-1917 and post-1917. In pre-Revolutionary Russia may be observed a most dramatic illustration of the disproportion that may exist between a children’s and a mainstream literature. Beyond question the latter is one of the greatest of the modern world. But Russia’s pre-1917 children’s literature is anemic. It does include the fables of Ivan Krylov; a great treasury of Russian folktales (skazki) assembled by A.N. Afanasyev; the epic tales (byliny) sung or told to children; the classic by Pyotr Yrshov, Konyok gorbunok (1834; English adaption by Ireene Wicker, The Little Hunchback Horse, 1942); and other stories and poems enjoyed by young Russians but not originally designed for them. To this folk material should be added the McGuffeyish moral tales that Tolstoy wrote for a series of graded readers. There is also the poet-translator Vasily Zhukovsky, praised by the respected critic Vissarion Belinsky as one of the few poets of the century, part of whose work was dedicated to children.
On the whole, however, pre-Revolutionary Russia could make only a few feeble gestures toward the creation of an independent children’s literature. The submerged peasantry relied on the fireside tale teller. The middle class, while far stronger than is generally recognized, was in no position to stimulate or support a literature for its children. The privileged class looked to the West: the children read Mme de Genlis. Thus it came about that the child was recognized later in Russia than in other parts of western Europe. The critic and children’s writer Korney Chukovsky speaks of the “indifference” with which “early childhood was regarded in the past.” He then points out that attitudes have changed, so that now the child is “an adored hero.”
The Revolution was the watershed. After 1917 Soviet children’s literature developed more or less in accord with the necessities of the state. This is not to say that it became identical with Soviet propaganda. Indeed one of the finest teenage novels, Vadim Frolov’s Chto k chemu (Eng. trans., What It’s All About, 1965), is quite untouched by dogma of any kind. Soviet children’s literature, and especially its vast body of popularized science and technology for the young, however, was in general governed by the ideals of socialist realism, the idolization of the “new Soviet man” (as in the widely read works of Boris Zhitkov and Arkady Gaydar), the exaltation of the machine over the irresponsible furniture of fairyland, and especially a revised version of the pre-18th-century miniature adult view of the child: he now had become a potential Soviet citizen and architect of the Communist future.
Juvenile fiction and biography naturally tended to cue themselves into the crucial episodes of Soviet history. But the theory underlying this basically nationalist literature (suggesting similar developments in Italy and England in the latter half of the 19th century) is by no means clear-cut. The most influential thinker was Maxim Gorky, who during the 1920s called for “creative fantasy,” for children’s stories “which make out of the human being, instead of a will-less creature or an indifferent workman, a free and active artist, creator of a new culture.” He asked for books that would encourage the child to become “a knight of the spirit.” Gorky’s essays are a curious, endearing mixture of Marxist doctrine (with a utopian slant) and quite standard Western humanistic ideas. It is in Korney Chukovsky’s remarkable book Malenkiye deti (1925) or Ot dvukh do pyati (Eng. trans., From Two to Five, 1963), however, that the opposition of two familiar forces, entertainment and instruction, can be sensed most clearly. The tension is typically expressed in Chukovsky’s account of the Soviet war over the fairy tale, the opposition to which reached its high point in the 1920s and ’30s. “We propose,” wrote one journalist in a Moscow magazine in 1924, “to replace the unrealistic folktales and fantasies with simple realistic stories taken from the world of reality and from nature.” Chukovsky, himself a writer full of humour and invention, opposed this view, as had Gorky before him.
Though rich in folklore drawn from its many peoples and languages, Soviet culture remained weak in the realm of fantasy. A fairy play such as Marshak’s Krugly god (Eng. trans., The Month Brothers, 1967) seems (at least in English) fatally heavy-handed. That Soviet children’s literature was vigorous, varied, and motivated by a genuine concern for the child is undoubted. However, there certainly existed no Soviet “Narnia” series, a Soviet Borrowers.
It is not difficult to see that contemporary children’s literature in Russia is lively, copious, and probably enjoyed. It is much more difficult for those who have no Russian to judge its value. Occasionally in translation one will come across something as superb as the beautiful nature and animal tales in Arcturus the Hunting Hound and Other Stories (1968) by Yury Kazakov. But one can only record, without judging, the vast production of such popular children’s writers as Samuil Marshak, Sergey Mikhalkov, Lev Kassil, and N. Nosov. Especially notable is the popularity of poetry, whether it be the work of such past generation writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky or that of the contemporary Agniya Barto. Apparently Russian children read poetry with more passion and understanding than do English-speaking children. The mind of the Russian child is carefully looked after. He is provided with books, often beautifully illustrated, which many Western countries may find hard to match. “Demand from them as much as possible, respect them as much as possible,” says Anton Makarenko, the theorist of children’s literature.
Clifton Fadiman