Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His Magic Land Series by Erika Haber (review)

Erika Haber's study, a recent addition to the University Press of Mississippi's Children's Literature Association series, presents a fascinating and largely unexplored case of Cold War intertextuality. In 1939, just after Stalin's Great Terror subsided, an unknown Soviet mathematician, teacher, and aspiring children's author named Aleksandr Volkov (1891–1977) managed, through one of those publishing miracles that seem strangely common in the history of Russian literature, to bring out a free adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Volkov called his book Wizard of the Emerald City, and despite a fine-print line on the copyright page identifying it as a reworking of the American story, most readers took it to be Volkov's original work (which in some ways it was, given the liberties that he took with Baum's text). He went on, in the 1960s and '70s, to write five original sequels to his initial adaptation. Volkov's Magic Land series, as it is now known, was as beloved throughout the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc as the Oz series was in the West, but during the Soviet period, at least, their readerships remained predictably separate; even now, as Haber notes, the generations of Russian children raised on Volkov's books "know little about the Soviet author and even less about L. Frank Baum" (4). Haber's study, for its part, does much more than introduce Volkov and his work to Western scholars not yet familiar with this author: it provides biographies of both authors, historical context regarding children's literature in the US and the Soviet Union, and a comparative analysis of the two series in terms of plot, characterization, and style. Haber draws convincing parallels between the life experiences and careers of Baum and Volkov, two unlikely giants of children's literature whose books still enjoy far more name recognition than their creators have found as authors, and she also examines their complex creative legacies.

Haber prefaces her book with a personal account of the coincidences that spurred and sustained her interest in the project. A professor of Russian at Syracuse University, she lives just ten miles from Baum's hometown and stumbled in 2009 upon the Baum family plot in a local cemetery. Her work on Volkov, in contrast, took her across the world to Tomsk, in Siberia, where she forged ties with a group of scholars who maintain a museum and university archive dedicated to the author. Haber's introduction lays the groundwork for her book by establishing the comparable popularity of the two series and the extent to which each became a cultural phenomenon on its own side of the Iron Curtain. As Haber acknowledges, large print runs in the Soviet Union didn't necessarily indicate popular demand, nor was demand itself a criterion in publishing decisions, which were instead based on political priorities and timing (7–8). She aptly argues, however, that timing and extraliterary concerns were equally important to Baum, who was under pressure, for example, to bring out a new Oz book in time for Christmas almost every year (8). Both authors, in fact, felt compelled at various points to continue their series, though they would have preferred to turn to other projects.

Haber's first two chapters present biographical essays on Baum and Volkov. Her research into both authors is impressive, and her accounts of their eventful lives are full of details both entertaining and telling (Haber's writing is eminently readable throughout). There are no biographical monographs on Volkov, so Haber constructed her narrative from primary-source research at Tomsk State Pedagogical University (36). In the case of Baum, she focuses perhaps a bit too much on metabiography, belaboring the paucity of reliable, scholarly work on his life and the attempts of his son Frank Joslyn Baum to mythologize parts of his father's biography. Nevertheless, the parallels that Haber draws...