The Poet, the Peasant and the Nation: Aleksandr Pushkin's 'Skazka o pope i o rabotnike ego Balde' (1830) in Illustrated Editions 1917-1953

In the 1920s the problem of how to deal with the poetry of the tsarist past became even more acute when the poem in question was also a fairy tale. Fairy tales were an embattled genre in the first decades of Soviet power, vilified under Lenin for their religious, royal and magical content, but revived under Stalin in the service of heroic nationalism. The status of Pushkin, the father of the canon of Russian fairy tale classics, was likewise contested, as his works were purged from public schools and libraries by Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaia in the 1920s, then glorified in enormous Stalin-era jubilee celebrations of 1937 and 1949. This article looks at the problem of Pushkin's verse fairy tale 'Skazka o pope i o rabotnike ego Balde' ('The Tale of the Priest and His Worker Balda', 1830) and how illustrated versions of the work helped to negotiate dramatic changes in political culture in the years 1917-1953.