Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The period of relative cultural liberalization (mid-1950s to early-1960s), Khrushchev’s Thaw, heeded the revival of Western classics for children in Russia, an opportunity the Soviet generation was deprived of during Stalin’s times. Poet Boris Zakhoder resurrected the forgotten tradition of playful poetry of the 1920s with his retelling of A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” (1960) and “House on Pooh Corner” (1962). Resettling Western characters onto Soviet surroundings created a space for social critique that was distinguishable to skillful adult readers and forged a free zone for creativity and imagination within restricted Russian culture. His work was adapted as a visual mini-series (1969, 1971, 1972) by Soviet filmmaker Fyodor Khitruk. Both literary text and visual production made Vinni Pukh into a medium of Aesopian message about freedom of imagination and artistic expression that escaped Soviet censorship. This text-into-visual adaptation process in Russia was different from Disney’s in the United States. Milne’s Winnie was transformed into a domesticated American bear with middle-class values, simplified and sanitized from the playful and sarcastic original. I investigate how this canonical text was converted into a paragon of consumerism vis-a-vis media for the West and an anti-totalitarian message for the East, thus influencing two different communities: those of happy shoppers of Winnie’s artifacts and those of dissident voices who camouflaged their resistance to the Soviet regime through references taken from both textual and visual adaptations of the original text. I employ both Wolfgang Iser’s Reader-Response theory and my modification of it, Viewer-Response theory, Lev Loseff’s Aesopian language, Jack Zipes’ “Disneyfication and Disney Spell,” and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s culture industry to investigate how this canonical text was converted into a paragon of consumerism for the West and an anti-totalitarian message for the East. This work has a theory focus. Although, one can find several examples of scholarship on Milne’s adaptations within the Russian context, the comprehensive analysis of both textual and visual narrative modes has not been done yet.