At the non/fiction fair of intellectual literature held at the end of November independent publisher Ilya Bernstein celebrated a kind of anniversary: he prepared and published fifty books. Why not a reason to talk?

Ksenia Moldavskaya → Can we meet on Friday?

Ilya Bernstein ← Just come in the morning: Shabbat is early these days.

KM→ What does observing Shabbat mean to you? A question of faith? Self-awareness? Anything else that I can't articulate?

IS← Well, faith, probably, and self-awareness, and something that you can’t formulate, too.

I have a sister, eleven years older than me. In the mid-seventies, at the time of the “religious revival of math school students,” she became an observant Jew and, in general, still remains so. My sister was an authority for me in every sense - both moral and intellectual. Therefore, from childhood I was very sympathetic to her beliefs and went to the synagogue at a tender age. At first, “technically,” because I found some elderly relatives who needed, for example, help to buy matzo. Then I started going on holidays, but not inside yet, just hanging out on the street. A gradual drift, quite natural: first - without pork, then without non-kosher meat, and so on. I don’t think I’ll ever come to the “Danish” version, but I go to synagogue and keep the Sabbath.

KM→ But you still don’t wear a kippah.

IS← There is no such commandment to wear a kippah all the time. In the everyday life of an Orthodox Jew there is something that is “according to the Torah”, and there is something that is “according to the sages.” The latter is important and interesting for me, but not strictly necessary. But, in general, I often wear a kippah at home.

KM→ By the way, about the sages. When we met you, you were working at the smart publishing house Terevinf...

IS← No. I collaborated with them, both as a freelancer and as a fan and friend. “Terevinf” was first the editorial and publishing department of the Center for Curative Pedagogy, and until now its main focus is books about children with developmental disorders. When I decided to start my own publishing activity in 2009, I suggested that they expand their range. This is how the series of books “For Children and Adults” arose, and Terevinf and I became partners.

I spent many years editing books for money. I started in the mid-nineties, trained myself to be a book designer and book editor. I did the text, the design, and the layout. I wanted to become a publisher, but at the same time I was aware of my intellectual ceiling. It’s difficult for me to read complex adult books, much less understand them at such a level that I can comment on them and understand the intent as well as the author. Here's something for children and teenagers - I'm quite knowledgeable about this: I can evaluate how it's done, see the strengths and weaknesses, and I can certainly comment on it. In general, I have a desire to explain, tell, “introduce into the cultural and historical context” - such tediousness. When we sit down to watch a movie, my children say to me: “Just under no circumstances press pause to explain.” The fact that I love to explain and the fact that I am clearly aware of my capabilities led me to choose children's literature as a professional and business field.

KM→ Your “Terevinf” books are clearly from your childhood. Now it’s clear that your choice is based on something other than personal reading experience.

IS← I started making a series of books “How It Was” with Samokat, because the history of the war became part of the ideological struggle and began to be privatized by the “warring parties.” And I tried to achieve objectivity - I began to publish autobiographical war prose, commented on by modern historians. When I made the first four books, it became clear that this was, in general, a move, and now I am positioning this series as “The Russian Twentieth Century in Autobiographical Fiction and Commentary by Historians.” I have now begun to create a large product with media content around the work of art - video comments, a website commenting on the book - all this in search of ways to “explain”.

KM→ A commentary on “Conduit and Shvambrania” was written to you by Oleg Lekmanov, and now the reader is shuddering at how tragic Kassil’s book is. In childhood there was no such feeling, although it was clear that the last roll call was a harbinger of tragedy.

IS← Well, it’s difficult to speak objectively here, because we know how it all ended for these people - literary heroes and their real prototypes. And about Oska, who, in fact, main character, - emotionally accurate, - we know that first he became an orthodox Marxist, and then he was shot. This colors the text so emotionally that it is impossible to perceive it in abstraction. But the book doesn't seem tragic to me. It is reliable, it talks about a terrible time, and our knowledge of this gives the depth of tragedy that you felt. The main difference between my publication and the usual ones is not in tragedy, but, first of all, in the national theme. The scene of action is Pokrovsk - the future capital of the Republic of the Volga Germans, and then the center of the colonist lands. In 1914, anti-German sentiments were very strong in Russia and German pogroms occurred, and the book is permeated with anti-xenophobic pathos. The hero sympathizes with the insulted Germans, and in 1941 this text became completely unprintable. It was necessary to remove entire chapters and rename the remaining German heroes.

Quite a lot of Jewish stuff was also confiscated. The episode about “our cat, who is also a Jew” is the only one left. The original edition had a lot to say about anti-Semitism. Kassil had an anti-Semitic bonna, he was insulted in class... When preparing the 1948 edition, this, naturally, was also removed.

Interestingly, in the process of preparing comments, I learned that Lev Kassil’s grandfather Gershon Mendelevich was a Hasidic rabbi from Panevezys, which is already non-trivial, he headed the Hasidic community of Kazan.

KM→ According to the book, one gets the impression that the family was progressive, if not atheistic...

IS← Well, I suspect that this is not entirely true, just like Brustein. I doubt that it’s downright atheistic... Cassily was chosen social life, but are unlikely to have abandoned Jewishness. Maybe, medical education shifts thinking in a conventionally “positivistic” direction, but there are big doubts that he will start eating ham straight away. Although, of course, everyone has their own story. But Anna Iosifovna, the mother, was from a traditional Jewish family, and father Abram Grigorievich was an obstetrician, which is also a traditional (partly forced) choice of a Jewish doctor. And my grandfather was a Hasid. But this still needs to be investigated.

KM→ Will you?

IS← I don’t. During my work I come across many interesting, not yet explored things. But I’m not a philologist or a historian. With “Republic of SHKID” we actually found a topic that could turn everything upside down, but no one has tackled it yet. There is such a story, “The Last Gymnasium,” written by other Shkidovites, Olkhovsky and Evstafiev, respected people and friends of Panteleev from Belykh. It describes a completely different reality, much more terrible, much more similar to the one reflected on the pages of brochures of the 1920s, such as “On Cocaineism in Children” and “The Sexual Life of Street Children.” And the children, and the teachers, and the director Vikniksor do not fit into the images created by Belykh and Panteleev, and are even less similar to the heroes of the film adaptation by Gennady Poloka.

KM→ Will you publish it?

IS← No, she is artistically untenable. This is Rapp’s kind of non-literary literature. But I’m making “The Diary of Kostya Ryabtsev,” with a story about pedagogical experiments of the 1920s: about pedology, and about the color-tone plan, and about integrated and team teaching methods, and other non-trivial ideas. This is a personal story for me. My grandmother was a pedologist, Raisa Naumovna Goffman. She graduated from the pedological faculty of the 2nd Moscow State University, probably studied with Vygotsky and Elkonin. And in the Terevinf edition of “The Diary of Kostya Ryabtsev” I placed a photograph of my grandmother at work.

Modern parents have the idea that Soviet children's and adolescent literature is all about “children about animals” and uplifting stories about pioneer heroes. Those who think so are mistaken. Beginning in the 1950s, books were published in huge editions in the Soviet Union, in which young heroes were faced with the divorce of their parents, first loves and longings of the flesh, illness and death of loved ones, and difficult relationships with peers. Ilya Bernshtein, publisher and compiler of the Ruslit, Native Speech and How It Was series, spoke to Lenta.ru about Soviet children's literature, which many have forgotten.

“Lenta.ru”: When we now say “Soviet children’s literature,” what do we mean? Can we operate with this concept or is it some kind of “average temperature in the hospital”?

Of course, clarification is required: a huge country, a long period of time, 70 years, a lot has changed. I chose a rather local area for research - the literature of the Thaw, and even of the capital's flood. I know something about what happened in Moscow and Leningrad in the 1960s and 70s. But even this period is difficult to comb with one brush. At this time, very different books were published. But there I can at least highlight certain areas.

Nevertheless, many parents see this conventional Soviet children's literature as a single whole, and their attitude towards it is ambivalent. Some people believe that modern children only need to read what they themselves were read in childhood. Others say that these books are hopelessly outdated. And what do you think?

I think that there is no such thing as outdated literature. It is either initially worthless, dead at the moment of its birth, so it cannot become obsolete. Or a good one, which also does not become outdated.

Both Sergei Mikhalkov and Agnia Barto wrote many real lines. If we consider the entire work of Mikhalkov, then there will be quite a lot of bad things, but not because something has changed and these lines are outdated, but because they were stillborn from the very beginning. Although he was talented person. I like his “Uncle Styopa”. I really think that:

“After tea, come in -
I'll tell you a hundred stories!
About the war and about the bombing,
About the big battleship "Marat",
How I was a little wounded,
Defending Leningrad" -

Not bad lines at all, even good ones. The same thing - Agnia Lvovna. Even more so than Mikhalkov. In this sense, I have more complaints about Sapgir. He definitely fits into the frame of the intellectual myth. Although he wrote such verses. Read about the queen of the fields, corn.

What do you think of Vladislav Krapivin, who gave birth to the myth that the pioneer is the new musketeer?

It seems to me that he is not a very strong writer. Moreover, for sure good man doing an important big job. A talent nurturer - he has a bonus. As a person, as an individual, I have unconditional respect for him. But as a writer, I would not put him above Mikhalkov or Barto.

It just seems to me that this is good prose. Everything, except for the book “The Secret of the Abandoned Castle,” which is no longer even entirely Volkov’s (the illustrator of all Volkov’s books, Leonid Vladimirsky, said that the text of “The Castle” was added and rewritten by the editor after the author’s death). And this is certainly better than Baum. Even "The Wizard" Emerald City”, which is essentially a free retelling of “The Wizard of Oz”. And the original Volkov, starting with Urfin Deuce, is straight up real literature. No wonder Miron Petrovsky dedicated to him big book, quite panegyric.

After all, we generally have a bad idea of Soviet children’s literature. It was a huge country. There was not only the Children's Literature publishing house, but also fifty other publishing houses. And we don’t know at all what they released. For example, although I was already an adult, I was shocked by a book by a Voronezh writer Evgenia Dubrovina “Waiting for the Goat”. He was then the editor-in-chief of the Krokodil magazine. The book was published by the Central Black Earth Publishing House. Incredible in its literary merits. Now it has been republished by the Rech publishing house with original illustrations.

The book is pretty scary. It's about the first post-war years, mortally hungry in those parts. About how a father returned home from the war and found his grown sons completely strangers. It is difficult for them to understand each other and get along. About how parents go in search of food. It’s literally scary to turn every page, everything is so nervous and tough. The parents went after the goat, but died along the way. The book is truly terrible, I did not dare to republish it. But perhaps the best I've ever read.

There is one more important point. Modern young parents have the false idea that Soviet children's literature may have been good, but due to ideological oppression, due to the fact that society did not raise and resolve a number of important issues, the child's problems were not reflected in the literature. Teenage for sure. And the important things that we need to talk about with a modern teenager - the divorce of parents, the betrayal of friends, a girl falling in love with an adult man, cancer in the family, disability, etc. - are completely absent from it. That's why we are so grateful to the Scandinavian authors for raising these topics. But it is not so.

But if you remove books by European authors from a modern bookstore, then only Mikhalkov, Barto and Uspensky will remain from ours.

I'm not saying that those Soviet teenage books can be bought now. I say that they were written by Soviet authors and published in the Soviet Union in large editions. But since then they really haven’t been republished.

So Atlantis sank?

This is the basis of my activity - to find and republish such books. And this has its advantages: you get to know your country better, the child has a common cultural background with his grandparents. On all the topics that I have just listed, I can name more than one notable book.

Name it!

What's the most scandalous thing we've done lately? Orphanage? Pedophilia? There is a good book Yuri Slepukhin “Cimmerian Summer”, a teenage novel. The plot is this: the father returns home from the front and becomes a big Soviet boss. While dad was at the front, my mother, unknown from whom, became pregnant, gave birth and raised a boy until he was 3 years old. At the same time, the family already had a child - the eldest girl. But not the main character - she was born later. Dad said that he was ready to make peace with his wife if they took this boy to an orphanage. Mom agreed, and the older sister did not object. This became a secret in the family. The main character, who was born later, accidentally finds out this secret. She is outraged and runs away from her cozy home in Moscow. And the boy grew up in an orphanage and became an excavator operator somewhere, conditionally - at the Krasnoyarsk hydroelectric power station. She is going to this brother of hers. He persuades her not to fool around and return to her parents. She's coming back. This is the one story line. Second: after 9th grade, the heroine goes on vacation to Crimea and finds herself at an excavation site. There she falls in love with a 35-year-old associate professor from St. Petersburg, who, in turn, is in love with archeology. They develop love. Absolutely carnal, in the 10th grade she moves to live with him. The book was published by a major publishing house and is very typical for its time. This is the 1970s.

What else? Oncology? Here is a book by a good writer Sergei Ivanov, author of the script for the cartoon “Last Year’s Snow Was Falling.” "Former Bulka and his daughter" called. It's about childhood betrayal: how one girl betrays another. But another topic is developing in parallel - my dad is diagnosed with cancer. “Former Bulka” is just dad. He ends up in the hospital. And although he himself recovers, his roommates die. This is such a teen book.

“Let it disagree with the answer” by Max Bremener. This is a book published before the thaw. It describes a school where high school students take money from kids. They are covered by the school management. A certain young man rebels against this, and he is threatened with expulsion under a falsified pretext. His parents, who are frightened by the school administration, oppose him. The only one who helps him is the head teacher, who has just returned from the camp. Unrehabilitated old teacher. The book, by the way, is based on real events.

Or a story Frolova "What's what?", which I republished. Worse than Salinger. There is a strong Soviet family: dad is a war hero, mom is an actress. Mom runs away with the actor, dad drinks. Nobody explains anything to a 15-year-old boy. And he has his own busy life. There is a girl classmate with whom he is in love. There is a girl who is in love with him. And there is a classmate’s older sister who strokes him with her foot under the table. Or in tights she stands in the doorway so that the light falls on her. And the hero forgets about his first love, because the magnet is stronger here. He gets into a terrible fight with a classmate who spoke vilely about his mother, and runs away from home to find his mother. This is a story from 1962.

And such books were more a tradition than an exception.

When and by whom was this tradition started?

This is what I think happened in the late 1950s. A generation of young people who had no Stalinist experience in education came to literature. Conventionally, the Dovlatov-Brodsky circle. They didn’t have to overcome anything in themselves after the 20th Congress. They were from a dissident circle, with parents who had served time. If we talk about teenage literature, these are Valery Popov, Igor Efimov, Sergei Volf, Andrey Bitov, Inga Petkevich and others. They rejected previous experience. Remember how in “Steep Route” Evgenia Ginzburg looks at her son Vasily Aksenov, who came to her in Magadan in some kind of terribly colorful jacket, and says to him: “Let’s go buy you something decent, and from this we’ll make a coat for Tonya.” . The son replies: “Only over my corpse.” And she suddenly realizes that her son rejects her experience not only politically, but also aesthetically.

So these authors could not appear in adult literature for censorship reasons, but they did not have an education, which saved the previous generation who found themselves in their situation. Bitov told me: “Do you understand why we all came there? We didn't know any languages. We couldn’t do translations like Akhmatova and Pasternak.” There were the same editors, aesthetic dissidents, at Kostya and at the Leningrad Department of Children's Literature. They were no longer in Pioneer. Or look at the composition of the authors in the “Fiery Revolutionaries” series: Raisa Orlova, Lev Kopelev, Trifonov, Okudzhava. They published books about revolutionaries. Who were the revolutionaries? Sergey Muravyov-Apostol and others. The history of publishing and editorial activity and thought in this country is a separate topic.

Young writers were uncompromising people. Everything they did was without a fig in their pocket, absolutely honestly. Some people didn’t succeed with children’s literature, like Bitov, who nevertheless has two children’s books - “Journey to a Childhood Friend” and “Another Country.” And what these authors wrote was not the legacy of the writers of the 1920s and 30s. These were conventional Hemingway and Remarque. At this point, Kaufman's Up the Downstairs, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye were as influential on children's literature as Carlson and Moomintroll. They showed what an adult writer can do in juvenile literature. These books ended up in libraries.

But still they weren’t republished en masse?

That's not the point. Back then, even what is now an absolute classic was not reissued en masse. For decades, “Republic of Shkid” or “Conduit and Shvambrania” fell out of publishing plans. This is another important point: during the thaw, books about childhood in the 1930s, which previously could not be released for censorship reasons, were republished.

There were entire trends in children's literature that are now almost forgotten. For example, the tradition of historical novels for children, incredibly meticulously crafted. My favorite writers Samuella Fingaret or Alexander Nemirovsky worked in this genre. These people did not take the easy path - say, take stories from Plutarch and make a story out of them. They, using this as background, wrote original works from ancient Greek, ancient Phoenician or ancient Chinese history. For example, at Fingaret there is a book "Great Benin". It's about the kingdom of Benin, which existed before the Portuguese came to Africa. They discovered the secret of tin casting, and museums still contain their sculptures - the heads of their ancestors.

Or is there Sergey Grigoriev, Volga region writer. He has a wonderful book "Berka the Cantonist" about a Jewish boy sent to cantonism. The Jews had a high recruitment rate. Since they were cunning - they married their children early so as not to be drafted into the army - a whole system of cantonist schools was invented, that is, children's military schools, where children were recruited from the age of 10. They did it by force. When a person reached 18 years of age, he was sent to the army, where he had to serve another 25 years. And so Berka is accepted as a cantonist. All this is written with such knowledge of the details, with so many non-Yiddish quotes, of which there are plenty, but all the features of training in the cheder are spelled out, the topics that were discussed in religious training. Moreover, Sergei Grigoriev is not a pseudonym. He is a real Russian person.

Or there was another writer Emelyan Yarmagaev. The book is called "The Adventures of Peter Joyce". It's about the first settlers to America, like the Mayflower. I once learned from there, for example, that the first slaves were whites, that the first settlers on the Mayflower were all slaves. They sold themselves for 10 years to pay for the journey to America. These were not even Quakers, but such religious “ultras”, for whom religious freedom, independent reading and study of scripture was so important that in England at that time they were persecuted. This book by Emelyan Yarmagaev describes the details of their Quaker theological disputes. And the book, by the way, is for 10-year-old children.

All this is certainly complete Atlantis - it has sunk and is not being republished.

Galina Artemenko

Into history on the “Scooter”

The All-Russian Award was awarded for the tenth time in St. Petersburg literary prize named after S. Ya. Marshak, established by the publishing house "Detgiz" and the Union of Writers of St. Petersburg.

The winner in the category “Best Author” was Mikhail Yasnov, the best artist was St. Petersburg illustrator, designer, member of the Union of Artists of Russia Mikhail Bychkov, who illustrated over a hundred books. Prize "For best book“The work of Leonid Kaminsky, a collector and illustrator of children’s folklore, and the publishing house “Detgiz” were noted for “The History of the Russian State in excerpts from school essays.”

The only Muscovite to receive the highest award was publisher Ilya Bernshtein, who became the best in the category “For Publishing Dedication.” The award presentation took place at the Central Children's City Library of St. Petersburg at noon on October 30, and that same evening Ilya Bernstein gave a lecture “Children's Literature of the Thaw: the Leningrad School of Children's Literature of the 1960s - 1970s” in the St. Petersburg space “Easy-Easy.” The proceeds from the lecture were directed to charitable purposes.

Ilya Bernstein presented a series of books “Native Speech”, which are published by the Samokat publishing house. It includes books that convey the atmosphere of the Leningrad literary environment of the 1960s and 1970s, presenting names and topics that arose at that time. Among the books in the series are works by Valery Popov, Boris Almazov, Alexander Krestinsky, and Sergei Wolf.

The series was born like this: the publisher was offered to reissue two books by Sergei Wolf. But it is not Ilya Bernstein’s rules to simply republish books - he actually publishes them anew, looking for illustrators. He read Wolf, then Popov and decided to make a series: “All these writers entered literature after the 20th Congress, most of them were familiar in one way or another, friendly, many of them are mentioned by Sergei Dovlatov in his notebooks.”

But the main thing that the publisher notes is that these writers did not set themselves “children’s goals” in children’s literature. After all, in essence, children’s literature is a bright plot, an interesting plot that won’t let go of the reader, funny characters, and an obligatory didactic component. But for these authors, the main thing was something else - the interaction of words in the text. The word became the main character. They didn't lower the bar in any sense, talking to the child reader about a variety of things.

Now there are eight books in the series, including “Look - I’m growing” and “The most beautiful horse” by Boris Almazov, “We are not all handsome” by Valery Popov, “Tusya” by Alexander Krestinsky, “My good dad” by Viktor Golyavkin and “We and Kostikom" by Inga Petkevich, "Somehow it turned out stupid" by Sergei Volf and "What's what..." by Vadim Frolov. By the way, Frolov’s story, once famous in our country, published back in 1966, is still included in compulsory programs. extracurricular reading V Japanese schools, in the USA the author is called the “Russian Salinger”. And in our country, as Bernstein reported, after the book was republished, they recently refused to put it in a prominent place in one of the prestigious bookstores, citing the fact that “its labeling “12+” does not in any way coincide with its too adult content.” The story is a coming of age story

A 13-year-old teenager in whose family a dramatic conflict occurs: the mother, having fallen in love with another man, leaves home, leaving her son and three-year-old daughter with her husband. The boy is trying to understand what is happening...

Boris Almazov’s book “Look - I’m Growing” was marked “6+”. For those who did not read it in childhood, let me remind you that the action takes place in a post-war pioneer camp near Leningrad, where children rest, one way or another traumatized by the war-blockade, evacuation, and the loss of loved ones. It is impossible to leave the camp territory - there is demining all around, and nearby German prisoners are rebuilding a bridge. One of the boys, who nevertheless left the territory, met the prisoner and... saw a person in him. But his friends don't understand this...

Ilya Bernstein notes that the “Native Speech” series did not initially involve commentary and a scientific apparatus. But the publisher wondered: what was the gap between what the author thought and what he was able to say? The books were written in the sixties, the writers had a lot to say, but not everything. External and internal censorship was in place. So in the book “Tusya” by Alexander Krestinsky - a story about little boy, who in the second half of the thirties lives with his mother and father in a large communal Leningrad apartment, also included his later story “Brothers,” written in 2004 in Israel a year before the author’s death. And this is actually the same story of the boy, only now Alexander Krestinsky speaks directly about repressions, arrests, and what hard labor one of his brothers went through and how the other died. This story is no longer accompanied by illustrations, but by family photographs from the Krestinsky archives.

Boris Almazov’s book “The Most Beautiful Horse” also includes two later works by the author - “Thin Rowan” and “Zhirovka”, where Almazov tells the story of his family. They are also accompanied by family photographs.

Bernstein at the Samokat publishing house is making another one book series“How it was”, the purpose of which is to tell modern teenagers about the Great Patriotic War honestly, sometimes as harshly as possible. The authors are again people of those times, who went through the war, who lived through the war - Viktor Dragunsky, Bulat Okudzhava, Vadim Shefner, Vitaly Semin, Maria Rolnikite, Itzhak Meras. And now in every book in the series piece of art is supplemented by an article by a historian setting out today’s view of the events described.

When asked how much modern children and teenagers need these books, how they are read and will be read, the publisher answered: “Edition of any kind, saving time, accumulating and comprehending experience, is important as a tribute to the memory of those who earned this experience, and those who to whom is this addressed now? I don’t have any special mission, maybe these books will help you understand what’s happening today and make your choice.”

Comments

Publisher Ilya Bernstein creates books with augmented reality - he takes Soviet texts, for example, “The Adventures of Captain Vrungel” or “Deniska’s Stories,” and adds comments to them from eyewitnesses of those events. In an interview with the site, he explained who needs 3D literature, why look for concentration camp prisoners, and why dissident literature is so popular in Russia.

You once said that you don’t make books for money. Is it possible to remain successful at the same time?
“I believe that you can build your career in such a way that you can make decisions that are not dictated by financial circumstances and still remain “in business.” This requires a lot of things. For example, not have any obligations - I have no rented premises, practically no employees on the payroll. I make books myself - I can do both layout and scanning with color separation, and I act as an art editor, a literary editor, and a technical editor. I do not pretend only to very special things, such as illustrations or proofreading. Well, the absence of obligations gives rise to freedom of choice.

You are an active participant in the development of non-fiction literature and observe this phenomenon up close. How has she changed over last years?
– The “Non-Fiction” exhibition grew by an order of magnitude last year, at least its children’s section. New people came, a new curator of the children's program, Vitaly Zyusko, came and created an unusually rich cultural program, including a visual one. If I didn't stand behind the counter, I'd be sitting at some new event every hour. For the most part, very high-quality publishing events - for example, an exhibition of illustrations organized by the Russian Children's Library. In all previous years, this activity was concentrated around commerce. In general, the exhibition was a legacy of the 90s - just a fair where people come to buy books cheaper, and everything else is secondary. In 2017, I think this changed for the first time. As for book publishers themselves, people achieve success. In 2016 there was a megahit - the book “Old Apartment”, which was published in “Samokat”. It was made by only two people - the author Alexandra Litvina and the artist Anna Desnitskaya. The entire exhibition revolved around this book. Last year, the exhibition revolved around children's literature in general, and not just one publication or publishing house.

Our “new” children's book publishing arose around several young women, mothers, who had traveled around the world, who decided to publish here, for Russian children, books that they were deprived of. It was a very sound idea in every sense, but a very difficult matter. The publishing houses “Samokat”, “Pink Giraffe” and others had to literally break through this wall - not so much from merchandising misunderstanding and ignorance, but from parental ones. Many books were translated, published and localized, giving impetus to Russian teenage prose. And she is now on a big rise. Look at “Non-fiction”: the number of Russian contemporary teenage and children’s books has increased significantly. And prose, and poetry, and actually non-fiction. Where previously there were - relatively speaking - only Arthur Givargizov and Mikhail Yasnov, now dozens of people work. “Samokat” this year made an “exhibition event” around Nina Dashevskaya - this is very good and completely “local” prose. I'm afraid of forgetting to offend familiar authors, so I won't list them. It’s the same in poetry – for example, Nastya Orlova was “presented” at exhibitions. Masha Rupasova is absolutely wonderful - these are modern Russian poets from abroad. What people watching TV always ask, especially in the provinces, “over the lip”: “Well, where is ours? Where’s the Russian?” And here it is.

Which of your projects would you call the most successful?
– “Historical”, “Soviet” books from various kinds I released about 30 comments in total. And the most successful are “Three Stories about Vasya Kurolesov”, “The Adventures of Captain Vrungel”, “Knights and 60 More Stories (Deniska’s Stories)”. Now the book “The Road Goes Far Away” is still unexpectedly successful. Comments." These are the four books in my own ranking, and they are also the top sellers. We also had interesting joint works with “Samokat” - the “Native Speech” series, for example, the books “How It Was,” which already had a developed commenting system. Developed in the sense that I was looking for other, non-academic ways of explaining what I had experienced. For example, in “How It Was,” Masha Rolnikite’s diary “I Must Tell” was published. Masha is a legendary person, she went through the Vilnius ghetto, two concentration camps, managed to keep a diary all this time and was able to save these notes. Her diary was published several times, but remained, in general, specifically Jewish reading. But I wanted to expand the circle of readers, to take the book out of this “ghetto.” We went to Lithuania and walked through all the places described in the book, with a former ghetto prisoner, and then a fighter partisan detachment Fanya Brantsovskaya. At that time, Fanya was 93 years old. We recorded her stories about these places, we also talked with a variety of modern Lithuanians and Lithuanian Jews about the Holocaust, about the participation of Lithuanians in the Holocaust, about the role that the Holocaust played and is playing in the life of post-war and modern Lithuania. 24 small videos were shot there, and the book had QR codes and links to them. The result was such a detailed video commentary. Now Ruta Vanagaite has been able to attract widespread attention to this topic with her book “Ours” and further speeches - she is also quite a heroic person. And then, two years ago, I was unable to attract the attention of a single Russian-language resource to the topic of the Holocaust in Lithuania, although the material was ready and original. But we managed to make a completely universal book, understandable not only to Jewish children, which is now finishing its second printing. That is, from a commercial point of view, it is quite successful and sells well in regular stores.

Named books– these are books from the Soviet period with modern commentaries. Who is their audience, who are they for?
– This is an adult series. I started in the “children’s” area, and that’s where I’m most comfortable. But if we talk about the Non-fiction fair, then these are books for the second floor, where “adults” are exhibited, and not for the third, “children and teenagers”. This is bought by people who know who Lekmanov, Leibov and Denis Dragunsky are, who understand a lot about commenting. They buy for themselves, not for their children.

In recent years, “thaw” literature, nostalgic stories and books about wartime childhood seem to have become popular again. What is the reason for this trend?
– My series “Native Speech” is defined as Leningrad literature of the “Thaw”. We were among the first in this segment of children's book publishing. Military childhood- this is the series “How was it?”. This is not one book - in each case no less than ten. I am guided by a purely aesthetic criterion. The literature of the Thaw included a generation of writers who rejected Soviet and especially Stalinist discourse. The denial was not even so much political level, although often these were children of repressed parents, at the aesthetic level: the generation of “Brodsky and Dovlatov,” and in my case, Bitov, Popov, Wolf, Efimov. The conventional “Hemingway” with a “remark” came or returned to Russian literature. We can say that this was a total denial of the Soviet literary experience - for artistic reasons. And these people, completely “adult” writers, not having the opportunity to publish, came to children’s literature, where there was more freedom in terms of censorship. Being non-conformists, they, without lowering their demands on themselves, began to write for children as they would write for adults.

On the other hand, very important changes have taken place in the West. And they were somehow moved here in time due to the “thaw”. At the level of children's literature - Lindgren, at the level of teenage literature - Harper Lee, Kaufman, Salinger. All this has appeared in a fairly concentrated manner in our country in less than 10 years. And this also had a significant impact. Then the pedagogical discussion was extremely important. What Vigdorova and Kabo did was about new relationships between parents and children, between students and teachers. The destruction of a rigid hierarchy, the idea that a child can be a more interesting, deep and subtle person than an adult, that because of this, in a dispute with elders, he can be right. Let us recall, for example, “The Girl on the Ball” or “He is Alive and Glowing” as examples of new hierarchies. Then very important “repressed” books were returned to literature. "Republic of SHKID" is the achievement of the previous literary peak. During the Thaw, books that had been missing for decades began to be published. That is, it was a time when, as in the well-known metaphor, the pipe, which had been blown unsuccessfully in the winter, seemed to have unfrozen, but which retained all this “piping.” An example is Alexandra Brushtein’s book “The Road Goes Far Away.” This, it seems to me, is one of the main “thaw” texts, written by a 75-year-old, formerly completely Soviet writer.

Should we expect any more reprints of outstanding examples of Soviet children's literature, say, “Timur and His Team”?
- I’m just preparing it. Gaidar is a difficult story because he has incredibly poorly written books, like Military Secret, for example. And they are included in the same canon. They are mediocre literary, unimaginably false ethically. Given the obvious talent of the author. Here's how to do it all? I have an ethical barrier here. That is, it is difficult for me to approach Gaidar with a cold nose, precisely because he has a lot of nasty and harmful things, in my opinion. But “Timur and his team”, “The Fate of the Drummer”, “The Blue Cup” are interesting. I still can’t figure out how to talk about this without exaggeration, without experiencing discomfort, but I’m going to do it in the coming year.

January 24 publisher Ilya Bernstein gave a lecture about books " Conduit. Schwambrania" And " Republic of Shkid" Both works became classics of Soviet children's literature. However, as it turns out, we know far from everything about them. IN Children's hall Foreigners the publisher told what mysteries he had to face while preparing these books.

How to edit classics

New edition of “Conduit. Shvambraniya" surprises from the very title. Where did the traditional conjunction “and” go?

Ilya Bernstein: “The spelling is different from the accepted one. And this is no accident here. I published the first author's edition. Lev Kassil initially wrote two separate stories, and so it existed for several years. Only then did he combine them and rewrite them into one text».

Ilya Bernshtei n: “ Since I am publishing the first author's version, I am publishing it as it was. Logical? But I don't do that. I imagine myself as the publisher to whom young Cassil brought his manuscript. And I believe that I can correct in the book what that first publisher might have recommended that an aspiring writer correct.

This is how typos, old spelling, and some semantic errors were corrected in the book. That is, what, it seems to me, the editor of the first edition should have paid attention to.

At the same time, I do not make corrections myself, but check them with later editions of the work. And if I saw that Kassil was wrong, then he corrected it in another edition, but in principle this could be left, then I left it.”

What do Lev Kassil and Bel Kaufman have in common?

Ilya Bernstein: “Conduit” was not written at all for children and was not published in a children’s edition. He appeared in the magazine "New LEF".

New times needed new literature, literature of fact. Not fairy tales and fiction, but something real. Or at least something that is given the appearance of being real. This is why “Conduit” seems to be composed of real documents: school essays, diary entries...

Do you know another work that is arranged in a similar way? It is from a completely different time, written in a different language, but also about school. This is "Up the Downstairs" by Bel Kaufman.

I don’t know whether the writer has read Conduit, but it seems to me that there is an obvious inheritance here, although perhaps accidental...”

How the photographer Jean wrote a mission to Ilya

While preparing Lev Kassil's book for publication, Ilya Bernstein examined the scene of the stories, the city of Engels, in the past - Pokrovsk. He also became acquainted with the press of that time. One of the advertisements in an old Saratov newspaper won the publisher’s heart. A Pokrovsky photographer named Jean precisely formulated his own working principle.

Ilya Bernshtei n: “ If I ever have my own website, and there will be a “Mission” section on it, then I will limit myself to this. “I ask gentlemen customers not to mix my work with other cheap ones that cannot compete with me because they use the work of other people. All the work that I propose will be performed by me, with my own labor and under my personal supervision.” This is exactly how I make my books.».

Ilya also wondered what the Dostoevsky School really was, and spoke about an alternative continuation of the book

Bernshtein Ilya independent publisher. ‒ What follows seems clear: they saw such a book, looked at it, were surprised at first, then they liked it... And who buys

Into history on the “Scooter”

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