The Dominion SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1933. RUSSIA RECALLS THE FAIRIES

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 59, 2 December 1933, Page 6

The Dominion SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1933. RUSSIA RECALLS THE FAIRIES

For fourteen years, ever since the Bolshevik Kevo ution the fairies have been exiled from Soviet Russia. In accordance the soulless materialism of the Communist creed the children of the Revolution were forced into a state of premature rationalism. Ik glowing ecstasv of spiritual and imaginative feeling was denied them For them, no God, no mythology, no fairies. Even Robinson Crusoe, because he represented “The spirit of the British type of sailorcolonist,” and so might encourage improper reflections on Impel lalism and the colour problem, was put on the black list. There are indications that the Communist leaders aie repentiig of this policy of starving the children’s imagination. Perhaps they have discovered that good little materialists are apt to make bad big citizens At all events the Central Committee of the Communist 'Party of the U.S.S.R., convinced at long last that children canno. live by propaganda alone, has decided to restore classical children s literature,” and fairy tales. Even Robinson Crusoe has been recalled with his Man Friday and his parrot. Once again the children of Russia will be able to revel in the story of the Three Bears, and let their fancies dwell on the romantic incidents in the adventures of Snow White and Rose Red. . It is a wise decision. Imagination and fancy aic the tieasuie islands of childhood. .In these realms of enchantment and unreality virtue and innocence are splendidly and spectacularly triumphant, and the wicked, when they are found out, are sternly and ignominiously punished. While in fancy they dwell therein they can enjoy to the full the pleasure of seeing obnoxious persons.turned into worms or toadstools at the wave of a fairy wand, beautiful. princesses rescued from dragons or ogres, deserving heroes endowed with fabulous wealth, and everybody entitled to be so rewarded, ordained to that felicitous condition-described in the fairy books as “living happily ever after ” That for fourteen years the children of Soviet Russia have had the doors of that wonderful region bolted and barred against, them is really a crime against humanity. More than that, it is the sterilisation of the seed from which sprouts in later yeai s the rich foliage of literature and the fine arts. Poetry was to the nations, said Sir Philip Sydney,, “the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards on tougher knowledges.” The fairy tale is the childrens fust introduction to poetry, to what has been described as “the rich pageant of human imagination.” The return of the fairies to Russia excited a good deal of interest and comment in foreign cotintires. ‘‘The idea that children can be satisfactorily brought up on a literary diet of Communist pamphlets, however ingeniously disguised and cleverly illustrated, is,” observed the Yorkshire Post, “a purely theoretical conception, entirely opposed to the facts of mental growth. It is unnatural for children to think in abstract logical terms; until adolescence their mental activity is mainly pictorial, and they are usually 'disinclined to recognise a clear boundary between the world of imagination and the world of material fact.”

The fields of unreality in which children delight to wander are by no means unsafe places. Through fairy tales they can enter the region of folk myth. They can acquire, almost without knowing it, a perception of the ancient symbolic truths expressed therein, and can then return to their work-a-day world with minds receptive to the presentation and explanation of these truths iri everyday language and in their material setting.