Delad läsekrets och dubbelt seende

Aisopiska djup i Osip Mandelstams Två spårvagnar

Abstract

Divided Audience and Double Vision. The Aesopian Depths of Osip Mandelstam’s Two Tramcars

Though a belief that children’s literature served only as a form of reluctant outlet for writers in the early Soviet period has predetermined a view of these books as mere byproducts of authorial necessity and restrictive censorship, this article argues that such books represent no mere refuge, but rather serve as a site for sophisticated subterfuge. Drawing on Lev Losev’s work On the Beneficence of Censorship, the author claims that children’s literature offered an alternative expressive outlet which Russian writers could use to encode their messages. To illustrate this point, this article exposes what sophisticated Aesopian levels coexist in a little-known artifact of this period – the renowned poet Osip Mandelstam’s picturebook Два Трамвая. Клик и Трам (Two Tramcars. Klik and Tram) (1925). Addressing multiple audiences at once, including censor, child, and adult, this book reveals ambivalence, fissures, and ruptures in its tone, which hint at its Aesopian depths and reveal a more tragic trajectory, one that the political environment and censorship precluded from being openly expressed. Ultimately, this article claims that, through its use of Aesopian language, this unique picturebook offers contextual, intertextual, and subtextual depths that tremendously enrich its system of signification and add adult sophistication beneath the apparently simple surface of a picturebook for children. Thus, the author and adult reader trained to read an Aesopian text accomplish their own communication around darker political and psychological themes as they shelter behind a falsified construction of the child.