Rose Celli. Conte de petit poisson d’or. Dessins de I. Bilibine. Paris: Flammarion, 1933. Children 6509

Rose Celli. Conte de petit poisson d’or. Dessins de I. Bilibine. Paris: Flammarion, 1933. Children 6509

It Takes a Village... When there's talk of Russia – and especially of Petersburg – there's talk of contrasts, opposites, contradictions. This theme is a constant in Biely's novel Petersburg. Petersburg is fog, Moscow is sunshine. Moscow is medieval stave churches and onion domes, Petersburg was planned and executed by the Italians and French. Moscow is ancient, Petersburg is modern. Born on the eve of World War II into a leftist/pacifist family (my uncle sold tractors in Russia in the 30s with a fellow-traveler from Eureka, Kansas), this exhibit-maker was one westerner who grew up with a fascination for the fabrics, wooden toys, phonograph records, and other objects around the house that had been sent from that magical place. My uncle returned, disillusioned with the Communist Experiment. Came the war and my confusion over the contrast of the violent images in the newsreels with the colorful villages of the books like this one of Celli's; the dull black and white images in our Weekly Readers at school against cheery stories of Baba Yaga in my Jack and Jill. (My uncle explained that the real Russian Baba Yaga was not so child-friendly!) If you had shown me pictures of Petersburg in 1945, when I was 7, and told me it was Russia, I would have cried and argued with you that it did not look like the Russia I knew. P.-burg was gray, Moscow was red. I might still argue with you. One of these summers, I'll see Petersburg with the frost melted from my glasses.

Children 6509