Disciplinary poetics and its limits: Agniia Barto, 1928–1936

This article examines how Agniia Barto’s poetry organised normative expectations for children across changing Soviet educational and publishing settings between 1928 and 1936. Rather than treating didactic verse as inherently disciplinary, it introduces disciplinary poetics as a bounded analytical category: conduct enters disciplinary address when it becomes socially evaluable and is placed in a normalising or corrective relation to an expected standard; disciplinary closure is a stronger represented outcome in which the subject anticipates evaluation and adjusts conduct accordingly. A chronological reading of Little Brothers (1928), “Me and Tamara” (1933), “Chatterbox” (1934), and Toys (1936) shows no linear intensification of discipline. Little Brothers is primarily identificatory; “Me and Tamara” stages public testing and limited self-recognition; “Chatterbox” provides the clearest disciplinary address while withholding closure; and the selected Toys poems organise attachment, vulnerability, retrospective self-appraisal, and collective agency outside the same evaluative-corrective structure. Poetic form can carry and amplify normative scenes without determining their disciplinary character. For historians of education, this distinction makes children’s literature usable as evidence of historically situated normative relations while keeping textual affordance, documented mediation, and measured effect distinct.