The objective world of Soviet everydaylife in illustrated books for children of the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The topic of Soviet everyday life is quite popular in the scientific community. The children's publications themselves are still outside the scope of research practices in the field of studying the culture of everyday life. The article analyzes the subject world in the domestic book illustration of the late 1940s-1960s. The aim is to identify markers of the everyday culture of the Soviet city, in particular Leningrad. The boundaries of the study are publications issued during the specified time period and addressed to children and adolescents. The attention was given to books about the life of a Soviet child of the Leningrad branch of Detgiz publishing house. It is established that in the children's illustrated book of the 1940s-1960s, large objects that visually defined the boundaries of everyday life, as well as elementary things for the organization of everyday life, became objects of everyday culture more often. Small interior items that have a decorative function will appear to a greater extent by the 1960s, that is, the conditions and priorities in the formation of the life of a Soviet citizen will change, and a tendency to detail the world of everyday life is formed in the book illustration. In the course of the study, a group of artists was identified who paid great attention to the depiction of everyday objects, but the illustrators did not separately show the belonging of the plot and the created space to a certain locality. They created a collective image of the everyday life of the Soviet country. Therefore, in the book illustration of the late 1940s-1960s in the subject world of Leningrad, it is not yet possible to clearly distinguish the features of the «Leningrad style», but it is possible to reconstruct the daily life of a Soviet citizen