{"id":6,"date":"2020-07-06T15:55:14","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T15:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/soviet\/?page_id=6"},"modified":"2020-07-06T18:29:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T18:29:00","slug":"home","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/","title":{"rendered":"Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is \u201cPlaying Soviet?\u201d<\/em> This interactive database of children\u2019s book illustrations draws the little-known and rarely-seen Soviet children\u2019s books from the Cotsen Collection at Princeton\u2019s Firestone Library. The featured illustrations have been selected and annotated by a diverse group of scholars and students of Russian and Soviet culture. The site\u2019s customizable data visualizations, still under construction, will map relationships among artists, image types, color, style, and publication information.<\/p>\n

Why study Soviet children\u2019s books?<\/em>\u00a0 In the selections featured here, the user can see first-hand the mediation of Russia\u2019s accelerated violent political, social and cultural evolution from 1917 to 1953.\u00a0 These conditions saw the proliferation of new styles and techniques in all the graphic arts: the diverse productivity of the Russian avant-garde, photomontage, experimental typography, and socialist realism. As was clear both from the rhetoric of the arbiters of Soviet culture \u2013 its writers and government officials \u2013 the illustration and look of Soviet children\u2019s books was of tantamount importance as a vehicle for practical and concrete information in the new Soviet regime. Directives for a new kind of children\u2019s literature were founded on the assumption that the \u201clanguage of images\u201d was immediately comprehensible to the mass reader, far more so than the typed word. Illustrators were raised as equals to the revered Russian author, bringing artists such as Alexander Deineka, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Lebedev, and numerous other graphic designers to the pages of children\u2019s books to create imaginative models for Soviet youth in the new languages of Soviet modernism.<\/p>\n

How did these books get to Princeton?<\/em> The books housed at the Cotsen Children\u2019s Library at Princeton University were the gift of Lloyd E. Cotsen, class of 1950 of Princeton University.\u00a0Mr. Cotsen began collecting children\u2019s books in the mid-1960s with the goal of creating a research collection of materials for children: books, manuscripts, original artwork, prints, educational playing cards and paper toys. He gifted the collection to Princeton between 1994 and 2006. In the years following, Andrea Immel, his private librarian and now the curator of the Cotsen Children\u2019s Library, has continued to build on the collection\u2019s strengths, increasing the number of Soviet children\u2019s books from around 1500 to 2500.<\/p>\n

The site is built on a Drupal platform. While the site is only in its initial phase, its image database will grow every year by roughly 100 images.<\/p>\n

This site has been made possible by a seed grant from the Center for Digital Humanities<\/a>, Cotsen Children\u2019s Library<\/a>, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures<\/a>, and the support of Ben Johnston at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning<\/a> at Princeton University<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is \u201cPlaying Soviet?\u201d This interactive database of children\u2019s book illustrations draws the little-known and rarely-seen Soviet children\u2019s books from the Cotsen Collection at Princeton\u2019s Firestone Library. The featured illustrations have been selected and annotated by a diverse group of scholars and students of Russian and Soviet culture. The site\u2019s customizable data visualizations, still under […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6\/revisions\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/soviet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}