In their final report, the book prize committee offers the following recognition of Picturing the Page: “Megan Swift presents a fascinating story of the relationship between the text, image, and ideology in early Soviet literature for children. She focuses on illustrations that accompanied Soviet editions of fairy tales, Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Mayakovsky’s and Marshak’s poetry between the 1920s and 1950s and details the ways the pictorial representations of familiar characters and settings responded to cultural policies of these turbulent decades. Tracing the visual representation of such central concepts as worker, peasant, mother, etc., the book contributes in numerous ways to our understanding of how the first Soviet generations envisioned and engaged with their country’s cultural tradition. The book is meticulously researched, engagingly written, and contains a wealth of visual material. In rich detail it recreates the story of early Soviet publishers’ and educators’ efforts to redraw the past and make it serve the legitimization of the present.”
We are pleased also to announce that Dr. Eugene Miakinkov’s War and Enlightenment in Russia: Military Culture in the Age of Catherine II: (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020) earned honourable mention in the book prize adjudication. The committee reports that, “using a wide variety of sources, Eugene Miakinkov provides new insights into Russian military culture in the age of Catherine the Great and enlivens his book with engaging pictures of military leaders and events, such as Field Marshal Suvorov and the storming of the Turkish fortress of Izmail.”
2021 Jury for the Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor and Francis Book Prize:
Dr. Kees Boterbloem (University of South Florida)
Dr. Lyudmila Parts (McGill University)
Dr. Paul Robinson (University of Ottawa)