The Forest Newspaper : Depicting Nature and Animals for the Soviet and Post-Soviet Child

This article focuses on republications of Soviet nature writer Vitaly Bianki’s The Forest Newspaper (1924) and asks what artistic and publication practices have been deployed to make this text of an ideologically and ecologically distant period speak to the Russian post-socialist child reader. Nature writing was an important genre for the Soviets because it supported a scientific and anti-religious worldview. If Bianki’s Forest Newspaper satisfied these state goals in the first years of its publication, its new iterations in the 2000s speak to a preservationist and ecological agenda, and I show how this transformation was accomplished using visual, paratextual and, most recently, patriotic strategies.