The Late Victorian world and after

In late Victorian times, the world of nostalgia and fantasy was created by Robert Louis Stevenson in his collection A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), entirely conceived as children's reading. The dedication to Stevenson's nurse, Alison Cunningham, states that clearly. That elderly woman, who had met Sir Walter Scott, introduced young Robert to the realm of Scottish folklore. Most tender and lyrical lines in the collection are addressed to Stevenson's nanny. The poems deserved the attention of such master translators as Bryusov, Balmont, and Khodasevich.

Rudyard Kipling's childhood was also protected by "ayahs", native Indian nannies whose retelling of folktales haunted his imagination. That's why his best-loved stories, ballads and poems are set in India or elsewhere in the big world. Just So Stories (1902) contains the most famous pieces of Kipling's children's poetry and was originally story-told in the family. The author wrote the book for his first child, Josephine, who died at an early age. Even stories in prose sound just so poetical!

"In the sea, once upon a time, О mу Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel..."

Kipling's stories and poems are full of wordplay and humour: the lazy Camel's rebuke of 'Humph!' turns into an ugly Hump on his back, and so on. The book was meant to be read aloud: the reader and the listener are carried along on с soaring wave of sounds and pictures – 'sclusively for children of all ages. In 1923 it was translated in tandem by Chukovsky and Marshak. Since then, these poems have become tremendously popular with Russian children (Text 47).