Theatre for Young People in Soviet Russia, 1918-1939: Ideology, Aesthetics, and Cultural Education

Abstract

This essay discusses the rise of professional theatre by adults for children and youth in Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1939, the Interwar Years. Focusing on the two cultural capitals, I demonstrate how the agents in the field in Russia constructed the field as an artistic phenomenon, geared towards young people’s aesthetic and cultural education, and how it became coopted as an ideological instrument of the totalitarian regime in the late 1920s and the 1930s under Stalin, culminating in the condemnation of Nikolaj Bakhtin’s cultural education methods and the arrest and exile of Natalia Sats in the late 1930s.

Keywords

• Soviet
• ideology
• Marxism-Leninism
• theatre for young audiences
• pedagogy
• aesthetics