Münchhausen in 1920 years: to the history of children s adventure literature

The article describes children s adventure literature in the 1920s. Soviet children s literature witnessed a real boom of an adventure genre (S. Auslender, P. Bliakhin, R. Volzhenin, L. Ostroumov and many others) during the period from the first soviet republications of a book about the baron in 1923 till its second edition in 1928 translated by K. Chukovskii. Characters and motives of children s adventure books of the 1920s remind stories about the German baron-liar and his adventures: this includes heroic deeds on battlefields during the Civil war, unbelievable travels with a help of extreme and exotic vehicles and so on. Adventure plots of children s literature of the 1920s succeed not only to books about Münchhausen but to the tradition of earlier Russian and western adventure literature. In this way, they fit both into the ideological format of that era and wider context of an avant-garde way of portraying a new person in soviet art in the 1920s, which is closely connected with «socialist utopia» of New Economic Policy.