Lake country for an iron curtain

The book of Alexander Volkov "Wizard of the Emerald City" is one of the key works of Soviet culture. This adaptation of the fairy tale of the American writer Laimen Frank Baum about the country of Oz, published in 1939, in the midst of the most cruel repressions, awaited incredible reader success and long literary life. Erica Haber in his work explores the fate of Volkov’s fairy tale, so similar to the fate of Baum"s book, which had a great influence on the development of children"s literature in the United States. How did this story manage to overcome cultural barriers and become popular behind the "Iron Curtain"? And how did Volkov manage to create a book on the basis of an American fairy tale, built into the Soviet pedagogical model and at the same time so beloved by little readers? The author searches for answers to these questions by comparing the biographies of writers and embedding their works into the historical and political context of the era.
Erica Haber - Professor of the University of Syracuse, Specialist in Slavic languages ​​and literature, phd