Authors

Zuzana Kubusová¹;  ¹ Università di Bologna, Italy

Discussion

This article focuses on Slovak left-wing author, teacher, and educator of proletarian youth Peter Jilemnický (1901–1949) and his reasons for engaging with ideologically driven children’s literature in the 1930s and 1940s. This paper examines his fairy tales, situates them within their historical and cultural context, and explores the ideological and pedagogical motivations that led him to use literature as a tool for educating proletarian youth. Beyond his literary production for adults—including short prose with avant-garde elements reminiscent of the Czech leftist group Devětsil and later socialist-realist novels—Jilemnický actively contributed to children’s education in multiple ways: co-organizing scout-like camps and teaching at a primary school in a poor Slovak rural region. He was also an active contributor to left-wing and comunist newspaper and magazines, where he regularly addressed issues such as the moral and ethical upbringing of children—explicitly framed within the Marxist-Leninist perspective—the educational and socially productive use of their free time, and the cultivation of socialist consciousness, consistently situating these discussions within the broader goals of proletarian education.
Jilemnický’s children’s writings include a number of manuscript fairy tales, presumably intended for publication, in a children’s magazine supplement, Detský kútik slovenského družstevníka—a children’s section of Slovenský družstevník, published between 1922 and 1939 by the Ústredný sväz československých družstevníkov (Central Union of Czechoslovak Cooperatives), with some tales actually appearing in print. These tales—Jonáš a Ornuta (based on the Lithuanian folk tradition, resembling Hansel and Gretel), Šarkan a cigán (Dragon and the Gypsy, inspired by two Russian fairy tales), two allegedly Finnish stories, Človek a krpec (Man and the Shoe) and Vlk, pohraničný strážca (Wolf, the Border Guard), and Jagu a medvedi (Jagu and the Bears, about a young Native American), and others, reflect his effort to adapt familiar folk motifs to socialist moral frameworks and his interest in promoting the idea of class solidarity across national borders.
Jilemnický’s early children’s writings emphasize class inequality, the exploitation of the weak, and the manipulation of poverty for personal gain, while reworking fairy-tale conventions to convey social critique and collective ethics. The paper situates Jilemnický within the broader interwar Czechoslovak context, noting parallel efforts by Czech authors such as Marie Majerová and Jiří Wolker, and argues that his work embodies a distinctive intersection of literary creativity, pedagogical mission, and ideological engagement.