La culture enfantine en URSS, 1917-1941 : objets, lieux et pratiques

Au début du XXe siècle, l’enfant devient un important sujet d’étude scientifique et la question de son éducation devient centrale pour les organismes publics aussi bien en Europe qu’aux États-Unis. La Russie ne fait pas exception à ce mouvement. Et dès leur arrivée au pouvoir, les Bolcheviks se donnent pour mission de prendre en charge une population enfantine toujours plus large et diversifiée : des enfants délinquants et abandonnés qui constituent l’un des grands problèmes de l’État-providence dans les années 1920 aux enfants de paysans à éduquer dans les campagnes difficilement accessibles et qui arrivent en masse dans les zones urbaines à la suite de la collectivisation, en passant par les enfants non-Russes vivant dans en Russie et dans les Républiques. Les Bolcheviks ambitionnent de créer une culture spécifiquement soviétique à destination des enfants. Cette volonté s’exprime notamment dans l’abondant discours qui se développe autour de la littérature enfantine. Mais, outre la culture littéraire et textuelle, sont aussi concernées les cultures musicale, matérielle (avec les jouets notamment), visuelle (illustration, affiches, imagerie murale fixe et mobile) et spectaculaire (cinéma, théâtre d’ombres et de marionnettes).

Notre projet entend se concentrer sur l’étude de ces objets culturels et les analyser dans leurs conditions de création, de diffusion, de réception et d’appropriation. Il s’agit de comprendre ces objets créés par les adultes pour les enfants, dans leurs dimensions pratiques et réflexives. Plus largement, nous considérons l’enfant comme un lecteur, spectateur, auditeur et aussi comme un acteur qui non seulement s’approprie les objets mis à sa portée mais crée aussi ses propres objets. Nous souhaitons ainsi analyser la façon dont les enfants s’approprient les biens culturels mis à leur disposition, les créations des enfants eux-mêmes et la façon dont les adultes, à leur tour, considèrent ces appropriations et ces créations.

Nous définirons et confronterons ainsi les projets (politique, éducatif et artistique), les formes des objets, leurs modes de médiation, les méthodes et les pratiques pédagogiques.

Nous serons amenés à préciser les spécificités d’une culture enfantine soviétique, ainsi que les représentations, implicites ou théorisées, de l’enfant que se forge une société en termes d’âges, de catégories sociales, de genre, d’origines ethniques. Enfin, nous interrogerons les fonctions de ces objets et les manières dont ils accomplissent leur travail idéologique et façonnent leur destinataire sur les plans cognitif et éducatif.

La réflexion collective se développera autour de plusieurs questions, parmi lesquelles : Comment interviennent différents acteurs et différentes professions dans l’élaboration de ces objets ? Quels sont les principaux débats autour de leur conception et comment ces réflexions s’articulent-elles avec la création de ces objets ? Quelle est la part des transferts culturels dans la forme même de ces objets ? Dans quels lieux et quels contextes ces objets sont-ils diffusés (école, bibliothèque, organisations parascolaires, cadre familial, etc.) ? Comment sont-ils utilisés et par qui ? Que nous apprennent les formes de ces objets sur leurs auteurs et leurs destinataires ?

L’étude des objets culturels se situant à la croisée de l’histoire politique, sociale, culturelle, de l’histoire des arts, des sciences et de l’éducation mais aussi de l’anthropologie, ce projet a vocation à réunir des spécialistes de différentes disciplines dans l’optique d’un travail à la fois pluridisciplinaire et interdisciplinaire. Nous porterons une attention particulière à l’histoire transnationale et aux circulations des personnes, objets et concepts, afin de comprendre la situation russe et soviétique dans ses connexions avec d’autres formes de régime et d’autres mouvements historiques comme par exemple l’avènement des sociétés de loisirs et de consommation. Enfin, ce projet vise à interroger de façon nuancée les ruptures et continuités traditionnellement élaborées par l’historiographie entre le passé impérial et le régime soviétique d’une part et, d’autre part, entre les années 1920 et le début de la période stalinienne, comme en témoigne le choix de ses bornes chronologiques.

System of disciplinary action involving children’s collective is a widely recognized characteristic feature of Soviet school pedagogy. A common form in which a disciplinary pressure was channeled through the children’s collective was shaming academically unsuccessful and misbehaving children by children’s collectives (young pioneers and komsomol). In the official history of Soviet pedagogy, this form of involving children’s collective in the disciplinary action is traditionally and unequivocally understood as Anton Makarenko’s pedagogical invention. Contrary to this traditional view long before Makarenko conducted his experiments and became popular among Soviet pedagogues (early 1930s - late 1940s) there existed structural conditions supporting the appearance and reinforcement of disciplinary practices involving other children in the punishment of their peers. To understand these structural conditions, it is necessary to turn to the history of the regulation of the school discipline in the first decades of the Soviet power.

The determinative moment is the official abolition of all punishments in school in the decree of 1918. In Soviet pedagogical discourse the necessity to explain how order could be maintained in school without explicit forms of coercion has led to the dissemination of the idea of “conscious discipline” whereby a child disciplines herself. However in everyday practice of the schools the abolition of punishments meant not the introduction of the new “conscious” disciplinary practices, but only the prohibition of the old ones.

In my view, the key insight into the transformations that school discipline has undergone during first decades of Soviet power is that the abolition of punishments has undermined the legitimacy of the disciplinary practices of the teachers. In other words, teachers’ disciplinary practices has lost approval of the State. Schools needed other foundation for legitimacy of the discipline, and this foundation has been found in 1920s. One of the practical adaptations found by the schools in this situation was to delegate disciplinary functions to those agents that were not featured as disciplinary agents in the pre-revolutionary school, and thus were not in the focus of the prohibitive decree. Students’ self-government and new children’s organizations – young pioneers and komsomol – turned out to be the most convenient new agents of school discipline.

Stalin’s school reforms of the 1930s resulted in the official restoration of rules of conduct and punishments as disciplinary instruments in Soviet schools. But the punishments returned in a modified form and returned into the disciplinary system that was already expanded and structured in a different way. The mechanisms for involvement of other children and their parents in the school’s disciplinary action were already well developed. The transformation of the official view of Soviet school discipline was complete by early 1950s. By the same moment forms of disciplinary pressure of children on their peers looked like a fully-formed system.

The history of material culture is a very special object of study for Soviet Union during the period between the two world wars because since the late 1920s the planning of economy strongly influenced consumption of the Soviet population’s and its social behavior and practices. Despite of the classless society described by the propaganda discourses, the access to material goods and objects was not equal for all the citizens.

The purpose of this contribution is to study school notebooks as particular objects of material culture, that is their consumption and use, in order to seize their double material and symbolic values front the point of view of the function they really had but also from the point of view of the role they played for the propaganda through the illustration of the covers. Indeed, from one side they have a material aspect, linked to the planned production and distribution of this particular support for the diffusion of literacy, from the other side they play a symbolic role, linked to the iconographic message of the cover. Furthermore as material mean of literacy they present a content that was related to the learning of the different school subjects.

For this reason this contribution is constituted of 3 parts. The first part will analyze the very material aspect of the production of this object of consumption through the reconstruction of both the central legislation for the production and the distribution of school notebooks to the different areas of the country, and of the internal structure of the paper notebook with rows and trunks for different school subjects. The aim is to understand whether the notebooks have become an object of mass consumption or if they were a limited support for some privileged school of the urban areas. The second and third aspects concern the analysis of the contents of the notebooks from the point of view of their symbolic value, namely the evolution of their covers as a propaganda tool and of their content as “written space” of literacy practices.

The choise of exercise books found in various collections (from different Russian National Archives: RGASPI and GARF, and personal collection of the author), will be analysed from the point of view of the evolution of the cover (the illustration of the cover, the quality of the paper and the message of the propaganda) and from the point of view of the content illustrating a big variety of teaching practices: first-grade and second grade exercise books from the 1920s and from the 1930 concerning different school subjects.

Obviously, the learning of reading, writing, and various school subjects (literature, history and natural sciences) has undergone an important evolution in the history of Soviet school in the interwar period. For the conference I’ll present the three level of analysis, but as part of a broader project, these particular sources – that constitute one of the main sources of the history of school –, will be put in relation with other documentation (such as text books) in order to reconstruct the didactical practices of the school.

The conclusions will underline the significance of these sources for the history of the material culture of literacy, will show in which way the government organized the production and the distribution and the way in which they can be considered the mirror of didactical practices of the soviet school. Indeed, the history of the materiality allows to write an history from below of the school practices and culture and to highlight the real level of literacy and diffusion of soviet literacy and schooling during the Twenties and the Thirties.

Sur l’exemple des textes autobiographiques de Lev Kassil, nous observerons comment les objets du quotidien scolaire des élèves de la Russie du début du xx^e siècle sont récupérés par l’imaginaire de l’enfant visant à « réparer » la réalité des adultes, perçue comme abusive et arbitraire. Nous verrons comment les objets de punition et de persécution disciplinaire (konduit) sont transformés en chronotope idyllique (Chvambrania), pays imaginaire de l’enfance qui, à son tour, sera finalement supplanté par la « réalité » réparée de la nouvelle ère soviétique.

Taking the example of Lev Kassil’s autobiographical texts, we will see how characteristic objects of the everyday school life of Russian pupils in the early twentieth century are recovered by the child’s imagination to “repair” the reality of adults, perceived as abusive and arbitrary. We will see how objects of punishment and disciplinary persecution (konduit) are transformed into an idyllic chronotope ( Chvambrania), an imaginary land of childhood which, in turn, will eventually be supplanted by the repaired “reality” of the new Soviet era.

The magazine Zateinik (“Inventor”) came out in 1929-1941 years. Its direct purpose was to promote the organization of children’s leisure and the development of children’s creative performances. The kids loved this magazine, teachers and leaders appreciated it. The journal content was very diverse. There were games, scenarios of holidays, carnivals, demonstrations and debates, songs with music, dance lessons and lessons of magic tricks, plays, short stories, poems for recitation, riddles, charades, crossword puzzles, fun pictures, descriptions of handicrafts and much more. The development of all spheres of Soviet culture of childhood can be traced through the journal issues.

The independent activity was a good way out of a difficult situation with the organization of children’s leisure. The school and the family have loosened control over out-of-school life of students, and professional institutions of culture for children (children’s theatres, book printing, radio and cinema) were in need of significant resources and appropriate employees. Zateinik offered many interesting activities for boys and girls, to satisfy any interests and inclinations, it supported literature, theatre, radio and cinema. Some materials have published before the October revolution. Most materials were created by contemporary authors, who actively created the world of Soviet childhood – cheerful-upbeat, energetic-active, creative-inventive and, of course, Patriotic. The magazine was published under the auspices of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, what was the key to the unity of the childhood and youth cultures. Zateinik has attracted such authors as V. Mayakovsky, L. Kassil, S. Marshak, A. Barto, A. Zharov and others. Creative way for young artists, future classics of Soviet children’s literature started here. For example, Nikolay Nosov published his first short story “Zateiniki” (“The Entertainer”, 1938), and he recalled the magazine in the story “Victor Maleev in school and at home” (1951). Zateinik did a lot of propaganda: it told the children about the five-year plan, claimed a new school – Polytechnic, denounced the Nazis and the bourgeois world.

Those engaged in the systematic study of children are likely to be interested in what children produce or create, either spontaneously or under instruction (as part of guided play, educational exercise, labour activity, medical therapy or scientific experiment). What has been studied most typically are children’s art and craft, creative writing, and sometimes performance. However, what precisely is collected as the output of children, how such artefacts are classified and interpreted, how children’s production is framed epistemologically or ideologically, is not self-evident, but depends on the context in which such research is conducted. This means that the scientific study of children’s “outputs” needs to be situated and analysed historically.

This paper will examine how different kinds of outputs produced by children were studied by those who during the first couple of decades of the Soviet era identified with the discipline dubbed “pedology” (child science). The paper will identify some of the roots of pedology’s interest in the output of children in the pre-revolutionary child study movement, but its focus will be on research carried out during the 1920s-30s.

Given that Soviet pedology was a heterogenous field, which assembled a diversity of occupational and disciplinary priorities and theoretical and methodological frameworks, the study of children’s outputs was not a monolithic enterprise. For some, the collection of such artefacts represented a subdomain of pedological research with its own purpose and coherence, usually as part of the study of children’s subjectivities or as a contribution to an ethnography of childhood. For others, children’s outputs were merely a function of charting child development or the development of the mind more specifically, with reference to different, competing theoretical frames – reflexological, psychoanalytic, defectological, cultural-historical, etc. Children’s creative production was also used to assess levels of development or to channel development in a particular direction (e.g. as part of the improvement of the deviant or the culturally backward). One must also bear in mind the significance of politically-relevant framings of such artefacts (e.g. as examples of the ideologically valorised notion of “labour”, or as the culturally distinctive output of a Soviet ethnic minority).

The paper is not envisaged as an exhaustive analysis of this sub-area of Soviet pedology; its ambition is to sketch some of the axes of interest in children’s outputs across the 1920s-30s. Its purpose is to enable us to grasp some of the historical complexities of this domain of the study of children and childhood. Part of the aim of this is to historically both differentiate and connect the interest in children’s creativity that was typical of child scientists of the early 20^th century with the one that typifies childhood studies today.

Cette communication se propose de prolonger l’article publié sous ce titre dans le numéro 33 de la revue en lignehistoire@politique. Celui-ci étudie les discours des Bolcheviks, psychologues, pédagogues, médecins et artistes soviétiques concernant la définition de l’image pour enfants au moment du Premier plan quinquennal. Les diverses fonctions attribuées à l’image pour enfants renvoient aux différences de priorité accordées par les professionnels et ouvrent sur des propositions formelles variées. L’article prend aussi en compte la polyvalence des artistes comme élément dans l’étude des débats interprofessionnels et dans celle des stratégies d’adaptation des acteurs au système culturel soviétique. Ici, on s’intéressera particulièrement aux formes de ces livres et à leur réception critique.

This paper seeks to develop the article published with this title in the n° 33 of the online review histoire@politique. This article examines the discourse between the Bolsheviks, Soviet psychologists, pedagogues, doctors and artists concerning pictures for children during the First Five Year Plan. The various functions assigned to the images for children refer to the differences of priority granted by professionals and open to various artistic forms. The article also takes into account the versatility of artists as an element in the study of inter-professional debates and of people’s adaptation strategies to the Soviet cultural system. Here, we will focus on these books forms and the critical discourse.

Publishing for children in the second half of 1920s was a complex system of multidirectional trends. Rising modernism and vanguard introduced playfulness that was not a priority to children’s literature before. At the same time, educational officials and pedagogical community requested new Soviet books for children that should be realistic in content and as close to the everyday Soviet life as possible. These conflicting trends in many respects defined the character of Soviet children’s literature of 1920-1930s.

Simultaneously, experiments with new ideas in book design triggered a notable transformation of the children’s book as an object, especially of the book addressed to the young children not yet able to read. The toy book became a field for the experiments in optical, auditory and tactile perception of a book. Books-building blocks, books-ribbons, books-folding screens, pop-up books became a topic for the artistic search for vanguard book designers.

Soviet pedagogues regarded toy books primarily as an educational tool, emphasizing its cognitive and developmental functions. They downplayed the entertaining function of such books that was strongly associated in their eyes with the pre-revolutionary entertaining publishing industry descending from European, and especially German tradition. Soviet book illustrators who were in the orbit of the artistic experiments of the Soviet vanguard art had to engage in futile dialogue with the utilitarian pedagogical approach to the children’s toy book. In my paper, I will examine how toy book of 1920s and 1930s became a battlefield for pedagogical and esthetical claims.

La création de Soyouzmoultfilm (1935), le studio de films d’animation qui allait marquer un tournant dans le développement de cet art en Union soviétique, ne doit pas grand chose à une volonté politique ayant ses logiques internes. Cela faisait des années que les départements d’animation, éternels parents pauvres du cinéma soviétique, sous-équipés et peu valorisés, végétaient dans les studios moscovites et léningradois. L’impulsion vint dans ce cas de l’extérieur et est directement liée au choc provoqué l’année précédente par un film que Walt Disney avait offert à l’Union soviétique. On propose de revenir sur les premières années de ce studio, en éclairant d’une part les enjeux institutionnels de cette fondation et ses enjeux techniques liés à la mise au point d’une Multiplane (banc-titre à plusieurs étages), d’autre part, ses enjeux esthétiques, en plein débat sur le réalisme socialiste. La fortune en URSS du réalisateur américain Walt Disney, ou plutôt celle de ses personnages et de son style, constitue en effet un aspect paradoxal de l’histoire de l’art soviétique des années 1930 (et 1940), qu’on abordera en analysant ses différentes implications : justification du conte comme ingrédient à part entière de la culture enfantine, choix des sources à privilégier (populaires russes et/ou étrangères), traitement graphique des personnages et du milieu, interprétation idéologique.

The creation of Soyouzmoultfilm (1935), the animation film studio that would mark a turning point in the development of the art of animation in the Soviet Union, owed little to a political will with its internal logic. For years, the under-equipped and undeveloped animation departments in Moscow and Leningrad film studios had languished, the eternal “poor relation” of Soviet cinema. The impulse in this case came from the outside and was directly related to the shock wave that had been created the previous year by a film that Walt Disney had given to the Soviet Union.

The present study retraces the first years of this studio, shedding light on the institutional issues of its foundation and on the technical issues related to the development of a Multiplane (multi-plane camera creating the illusion of depth) on one hand, and on the other, the aesthetic stakes, caught up in the debate on socialist realism. The fortunes of American director Walt Disney in the USSR, or rather those of his characters and his style, constitute a paradoxical aspect of the history of Soviet art of the 1930s (and 1940s), which will be approached by analyzing its different implications: justification of the tale as an integral ingredient of child culture, choice of preferred sources (popular Russian and/or foreign), graphic treatment of characters and surroundings, ideological interpretation.

Le but de cette communication est d’analyser la nature et l’ampleur des transferts culturels dans les deux principales littératures enfantines de la République socialiste soviétique de Biélorussie (BSSR) depuis sa fondation jusqu’à la fin des années 1930. Cette république, qui reconnaissait quatre langues officielles et encourageait le développement des cultures nationales biélorusse, juive, polonaise et russe, constitue un laboratoire pour la création de cultures enfantines originales, étant donné la jeunesse des littératures biélorusse et yiddish, ainsi que pour les échanges entre ces cultures en formation. Il s’agit d’identifier les domaines privilégiés et directions des transferts ; les agents de ces transferts culturels ; et les principales périodes pour comprendre si et quand chaque culture enfantine s’est nourrie d’emprunts à d’autres cultures enfantines. On utilisera un corpus de livres pour enfants en yiddish et en biélorusse illustrés publiés en BSSR entre 1921 et 1939.

On se concentrera sur quelques cas aspects particuliers des transferts culturels. 1) La périodisation. Les débuts de la littérature enfantine yiddish en Biélorussie soviétique se sont caractérises par un effort de traduction du biélorusse et de familiarisation du public juif enfantin avec les contes et la littérature biélorusses. C’est ensuite la littérature enfantine russe qui a été traduite massivement en yiddish. La littérature biélorusse enfantine semble avoir emprunté indifféremment aux corpus yiddish, polonais et russe tout au long de la période étudiée. 2) Les agents de transferts. Nous nous intéresserons au cas des frères Plavnik qui ont été les principaux traducteurs de la littérature yiddish en biélorusses. 3) Les illustrations. Les illustrations semblaient constituer une sphère de transferts plus fluide que les textes. Nombreux furent en effet les artistes d’origine juive qui illustrèrent aussi bien les livres en yiddish qu’en biélorusse et en russe. On verra si cette mobilité a produit une circulation des styles (voir Boris Malkin par exemple) non seulement entre littératures « nationales » à l’intérieur de la BSSR mais aussi entre les républiques de l’URSS.

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the nature and extent of cultural transfer in the two main children’s literatures of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) from its founding until the end of the 1930s. The BSSR recognized four official languages and encouraged the development of Belarusian, Jewish, Polish and Russian national cultures. It thus served as a “laboratory” for the creation of original child cultures, given the youth of the Belarusian and Yiddish literatures, as well as for the exchanges between these budding cultures. Our aim is to identify the privileged areas and directions of these transfers, the agents of these cultural transfers as well as the main periods, in order to understand if and when each child culture was enriched by borrowing from other child cultures. A corpus of illustrated Yiddish and Belarusian children’s books published in the BSSR between 1921 and 1939 will be used.

We will focus on a few specific aspects of this cultural transfer. 1) Periodization. The beginnings of Yiddish children’s literature in Soviet Belarus were characterized by an effort to translate Belarusian and to familiarize the young Jewish public with Belarusian stories and literature. Next, it was Russian children’s literature which was massively translated into Yiddish. Belarusian children’s literature seems to have borrowed indifferently from the Yiddish, Polish and Russian corpora throughout the period studied. 2) Agents of the transfer. We will examine the case of the Plavnik brothers who were the main translators of Yiddish literature into Belarusian. 3) Illustrations. Illustrations seem to represent a more fluid sphere of cultural transfer than text. Many artists of Jewish origin illustrated books published in Belarusian and Russian as well as in Yiddish. We will examine the extent to which this mobility produced a circulation of styles (see Boris Malkin, for example) not only between the “national” literatures within the BSSR but also among the republics of the USSR.

Ancêtre de Pif ou de Vaillants, Mon Camarade est un organe de presse pour enfants créé en 1933. D’abord édité par la Fédération des enfants ouvriers et paysans en collaboration de l’AEAR, il est repris par les Éditions sociales internationales à la fin de l’année 1934 (Léon Moussinac). Avec Georges Sadoul à sa tête, le journal va profiter du contexte du Front populaire pour élargir son lectorat en tentant d’offrir une alternative à la presse enfantine de masse et à la presse catholique. Entre 1933 et 1939 où le périodique est interdit de parution, c’est 198 numéros (la périodicité augmente entre 1933 et 1936) et des dizaines de petits « Livrets de Mon Camarade » qui paraissent. Si son parcours est déjà connu (travaux de Mathilde Lévêque et Valérie Vignaux), nous voudrions reprendre son histoire, en tentant d’analyser les circulations et les transferts soviétiques qui sous-tendent une publication qui affiche ouvertement son ancrage dans la société française.

Ancestor of Pif and Vaillants, Mon Camarade (My Comrade) was a press organ for children created in 1933. First published by the Fédération des enfants ouvriers et paysans (Federation of working-class children) in collaboration with the AEAR, it was taken over by the Éditions sociales internationales at the end of 1934 (Léon Moussinac). With Georges Sadoul at the helm, the periodical took advantage of the context of the Popular Front to expand its readership by trying to offer an alternative to the mainstream children’s press and to the Catholic press. Between 1933 and 1939, when publication of the periodical was banned, 198 issues (periodicity accelerated between 1933 and 1936) and dozens of small “My Comrade” booklets appeared.

The history of the development of the periodical has already been examined (see the work of Mathilde Lévêque and Valérie Vignaux); in what follows we would like to take up a particular aspect of its history, analyzing the circulation and the Soviet transfers that underpinned a publication that openly claimed to be rooted in French society.

L’Exposition internationale des arts industriels et décoratifs modernes à Paris en 1925 est la première occasion pour le jeune pays URSS de présenter à l’échelle internationale l’éventail de ses productions en matière d’architecture, de théâtre, d’édition, mais aussi d’objets artisanaux et industriels réalisés en porcelaine, en bois, en textile ; de faire le bilan de l’enseignement artistique depuis la révolution bolchévique de 1917, d’exposer les marqueurs visuels du nouveau régime (affiches, timbres, billets de banque). Si la littérature a retenu les expériences des avant-gardes comme éléments saillants de cette participation – le Pavillon de l’URSS et les kiosques de vente de Konstatin Mel’nikov, le Club des ouvriers d’Alexandre Rodtchenko, les maquettes théâtrales constructivistes ou celle du Monument à la III^e internationale de Tatline –, la délégation soviétique avait, quant à elle, accordé une importance plus grande aussi bien dans ses publications que dans la présentation spatiale au Grand Palais, à l’art dit « paysan », aux productions des koustari et à l’alliance quasi-naturelle qu’ils opéraient entre les exigences de l’art et celles de la vie quotidienne. Parmi celles-ci, le « Monde des jouets » constituait une section à part, présentée au Grand Palais, remarquée et appréciée par le public, défendue dans les textes de Nicolas Bartram, directeur du Musée de l’Enfant et du Jouet de Moscou après avoir dirigé, de 1906 à 1917, le Musée d’art koustar. Il s’agira dans cette communication d’analyser la façon dont était pensé et présenté le jouet dans ce contexte et à ce moment pivot qu’est le milieu des années 1920, d’en décrire les différentes formes et de réfléchir au statut pour le moins paradoxal que lui conféraient les textes accompagnateurs : à la fois modèle exemplaire d’un « art paysan » revendiqué comme originellement russe, et élément de formation et d’éducation engendrant l’avenir. Autrement dit, quel monde projetait ce « Monde des Jouets » ?

The International Exhibition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts held in Paris in 1925 was the first occasion on an international scale for the young USSR to present a range of its creations in the fields of architecture, theater and publishing, but also craft and industrial objects made of porcelain, wood and textile. The Exhibition afforded the opportunity to take stock of artistic education since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and to expose the visual markers of the new regime (posters, stamps, banknotes). Although the literature has retained the experiences of the avant-gardes as the noteworthy elements of this participation--the USSR Pavilion and the Konstatin Mel’nikov sales booths, the Alexander Rodchenko Workers’ Club, the constructivist theatrical models or that of the Monument to the Third International (“Tatlin’s Tower”)--the Soviet delegation itself gave greater importance both in its publications and in terms of the spatial presentation at the Grand Palais, to the art termed “peasant” art, to the productions of the kustari and to the quasi-natural alliance they operated between the demands of art and those of everyday life. Among them, the “World of Toys” was a separate section, presented at the Grand Palais, noted and appreciated by the public, defended in the texts of Nicolas Bartram, director of the Moscow Toy and Children’s Museum after having directed the Koustar Art Museum from 1906 to 1917. The purpose of the present study is to analyze how toys were conceived and presented in this context and at this pivotal moment of the mid-1920s, to describe the various forms of the toy and to reflect on the highly paradoxical status of the toy as expressed in the accompanying texts: at one and the same time an exemplary model of a “peasant art” celebrated as originally Russian and an element of training and education generating the future. In other words, what exactly was the world projected by the “World of Toys”?