Books were the subject of children's luxury
Periodically, I spend my trips to specialty stores children's books, as well as a children's section of most major bookstores. Stalls packed with expensive children's publications. Among them - books, toys (can be expanded as the puppet theater), books about animals for children. Repeatedly reprinted books known in Soviet times, children's writers - Marshak, Chukovsky Barto. However, in terms of circulation leading Milne, with his "Winnie the Pooh" and Lindgren with Carlson. Are still children, like their parents in childhood, reading Andersen, Brothers Grimm, Perrault.
All major publishers have children's departments. "AST", "Swallowtail», «Idebook», «The White City" produced encyclopedia for middle and high school students. Favorite topics: "Dinosaurs", "Myths," "Horses", "Military equipment". This is a new tradition - simply and tell children about difficult events, commemorative events and the unknown object. But with all the variety of books are practically no cheap, thin books for children. No previously very popular books, coloring. The impression is that children's book today is designed to entertain. See, she only people with average incomes. We can say that books were the subject of children's luxury rather than a means of cognitive activity.
I could not find books that would speak about the children of other nationalities, the poor children who need help on national traditions of families contacted by the family of Russian citizens. Even in Soviet times, the times of "proletarian internationalism" ideas of friendship and brotherhood among all peoples of the world and play up in textbooks, beginning with ABC, and on television (big teams concerts always began with folk performances). The posters and book covers can be seen smiling broadly boys - a dark-skinned, yellow-skinned and white men.
Children's writers are now governed by market forces, believe that the social orientation of the book can only be ordered by the state, and because publishers will not buy them. So says a popular children's author G. Oster. Cartoons and children's movies were also little demand. Former CEO of film studio. Gorky B. Grammatikov complains: once the country's largest studio of children and young people is now a complicated stage of privatization and restructuring. Over the past few years has not been withdrawn, no children's film.
Thus, children's book has become a lucrative commodity, focused mainly on the "middle class". The main character in the book becomes more and more abstract child whose childhood seamlessly, full of fantasies. Children are increasingly prefer to watch movies and cartoons, and the western, mostly American, of production. National cinema and television are not going to intercept the initiative.
Strange thing: being able to bring any samples of children books, stories, books, colorings, we will probably be in pursuit of the best, previously we have not seen before, began to buy children are bright, lurid, not Russian copies, forming thus the demand for bad taste. That now make intelligent parents? They got to the mezzanine, or ask friends old Soviet edition. They are not new, but they are much more meaningful, and most importantly - they unite us with our children.
This closeness may be people who have a common childhood, general enthusiasm, fears and experiences. Experience of the last of our emigration shows that parents who, having left the West, began to behave as if they were "real French", "real Americans", the word special people, and so these parents are faced with a psychological rupture in relations with own children . Abandoning his childhood, trying to forget it as a bad dream, we cease to interest her own children. They grow cold or simply indifferent - these are what they are trying to seem foolish, a little arrogant parents.
