Yet
another unlikely British author, significantly more famous in Russia
than in his home country, was Donald Bisset. Bisset was an actor at
the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as in a
large number of profoundly forgotten movies and some TV shows,
including Dr Who.
But he also published numerous children's books with self-explanatory
titles such as Anytime Stories (1954),
Some Time Stories (1957),
Next Time Stories (1959),
This Time Stories (1961),
Another Time Stories (1963),
as well as a more imaginative Talks with
a Tiger (1967). Bisset's stories are
very simple, almost devoid of plots, conflicts or morals. They
feature anthropomorphised animals and animated objects and machines,
including a minibus, a raisin bun, and a birthday. They are perfect
for bedtime reading, and Bisset indeed read them on the radio, as
well as adapted them for stage.
Again,
I can only guess why several of his books were translated, but the
translator was also a legendary editor at the central Children's
Literature Publishing in Moscow, who was perhaps in a position to
translate and publish what she wanted. We know that Bisset visited
Moscow in 1969, so it is likely that the first translation was the
result of this visit. Unlike the common practice in Russia, the first
publication kept Bisset's original illustrations. Most subsequent
editions were illustrated by Russian artists. A dozen tales were made
into short animations. Today his stories are available at several
sites for downloading or online reading.
In
my upper teens, everybody in Russia, old and young, loved Bisset's
stories, and one reason may be that they are in a way reminiscent of
Hans Christian Andersen's tales, tremendously popular in Russia, but
without Andersen's dark undertones.
One
of the stories is
about the rivalry between St Pancrass and King's Cross. I read the
story long before I knew that these places were real, and little did
I know that King's Cross would one day become my most visited railway
station. Not to mention that it would also become world famous thanks
to a certain J.K.
The
last book in this series of reflections is The Questers, by E.
W. Hildick, from 1966, published in Russian in 1969. Again, a book
you have hardly heard about, by an author essentially forgotten,
although there are very short entries both in the Oxford
Companion to Children's Literature and the
four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. E.
W. (Edmund Wallace) Hildick (1925-2001) was educated at Leeds
Training College and worked as a teacher until he became a full-time
writer. Extremely prolific, he wrote several series of school novels,
detective and adventure novels, but as far as I know is completely
forgotten today. He also wrote a number of books about children’s
literature, including Children and Fiction: a critical study in
depth of the artistic and psychological factors involved in writing
fiction for and about children (1970), to my surprise available
at Homerton College Library. (Was it possibly included in the syllabus of one of those early children's literature courses?) The Questers is one of his less known
books, followed by two sequels: Calling Questers Four (1967)
and The Questers and the Whispering Spy (1968).
Why
would this obscure writer be translated into Russian, when so many
significantly more famous writers were not? I have not managed to
find any relevant information, but my guess is, just
as with Leila Berg, that he either visited the Soviet Union some time
during mid-1960s or was among the hosts for a visit from
Soviet writers. Hildick was a working+class
writer, his books set in working-class environments of Yorkshire,
Stevenage, and Southern London. Writers with a working-class
background who wrote about working-class children were acceptable and
therefore attractive in the Soviet Union, unlike suspicious Christian
Oxbridge types such as C S Lewis.
In
1969, I was seventeen and entering university, so strictly speaking
this book was not part of my childhood reading, but at that point I
already knew that I wanted to study children's literature
professionally, even though there were no accessible resources. Every
translated book was an event, and I still had an illusion that if a
book was translated it had to be a masterpiece by a famous writer.
There was no way to find any information about the author or to set
the book in a context. By that time, I had read Winnie-the-Pooh,
Peter Pan, Mary Poppins and other genuine classics of British
children's literature, and I knew that fantasy rather than realism
was its strongest aspect. The Questers puzzled me because I
could not understand what made it a great book it was supposed to be.
Unlike
The Adventures of Chunky, this book does have a chronological
progression and a problem in the beginning, partially solved in the
end. It is quite interesting in the light of today's disability
studies. The main character, Peter, is bedridden with an unnamed
disease – possibly polio – that he has little hope of being cured
of. And he isn't, but there is a technological improvement of his
situation that must have been truly radical in the mid-60s. The plot
revolves around obtaining the technology – a walkie-talkie – that
would enable Peter to participate in his friends' outdoor adventures
and pastimes. As a side comment, a walkie-talkie
was to us something from science fiction and would be considered
illegal in the Soviet Union.
While
planning for the treasure hunt in the local
park that will win them the coveted prize, Peter's friends are also
engaged in a number of other activities, including ice-cream eating
competition, pet show and talent contest, all with disastrous
outcomes. These episodes are not particularly funny or engaging, and
the characters quite flat, so I am not surprised that the book has
gone into oblivion in the UK, but in Russia, in the absence of
hundreds of similar stories, it filled, and probably still fills a
gap. Unlike classic Soviet gang books featuring brave and virtuous
young communists, The Questers is devoid of any ideology or
morals, apart from Peter's friends' genuine desire to support him.
There are no lessons learned from disasters and no serious
consequences either. All adults are nice, and the overall atmosphere
benevolent. Even Peter's disability is presented in a positive light.
When
I was writing my book From Mythic to Linear, that I still view
as my major contribution to scholarship, I considered books such as
The Adventures of Chunky and The Questers within my
theoretical framework, in which I examined the temporal conditions of
children's narratives in three main patterns: prelapsarian,
carnivalesque and postlapsarian. Both fit into the first category,
since nothing significant happens to the protagonists, and they are
not in any way, not even temporarily, introduced to linearity and
thus the central aspects of adulthood, such as growing up, death and
power hierarchies. It can of course be argued whether it is
legitimate to view the temporal structure of realistic stories as
mythical, but this will take us to a discussion of the concept of
realism and mimesis. Muffin the Mule, although featuring
sentient animals, is also an example of Arcadian fiction: a narrative
without linear progression, with characters trapped in eternal
present. I am not questioning the value of
such stories; on the contrary, they are essential to provide young
readers with a sense of permanence and stability before they are
ready first to explore and interrogate the world through carnival and
eventually leave Arcadia in a linear progression toward imminent
adulthood. What I find fascinating is that Soviet publishers, at
least in the 1950s and '60s, clearly prioritised prelapsarian
narratives in their choice of British books to translate.
I
want to conclude this series of blog posts with an event that became
a turning point in my career and that most probably eventually
brought me to Cambridge. In 1975, after I had finished my
undergraduate degree and had a job as far away as imaginable from
children's literature, British Council brought a large exhibition of
children's books to Moscow. The venue was perhaps odd, a bookstore
rather than a library. The nature of my job enabled me to dispose of
my time as I saw fit, and for the duration of the exhibition, probably
a couple of weeks, I spent day after day there, reading books and
taking notes. This was my first encounter with The Borrowers,
Tom's Midnight Garden, The
Children of Green Knowe, the Narnia Chronicles and
many other books that would become central in my research. Then the
exhibition was closed and the books gone. And the glossy 12-page
exhibition catalogue would for many years remain my only source of
information about British children's literature.
The End
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