Samuil Marshak’s career presents a balancing act between avant-garde traditions and the socialist realist canon. Marshak came from a Russian Jewish family in the Pale of Settlement area. In his youth he befriended Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov, a prominent Russian critic, who helped him to enrol into a Petersburg college. After World War I, Marshak became an ardent educator: he worked with homeless children in Petrograd and a children’s colony in Petrozavodsk. His early career involved journalism, translating and studying, from 1912-15 in a literature department at the University of London. Edward Lear’s nonsensical playful poetry inspired Marshak to write children’s verse. In 1922 he organised the “Little Town for Children”, an urban development in Krasnodar comprising a school,…
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Citation: Smith, Alexandra. "Samuil Marshak". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 June 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12110, accessed 22 November 2024.]
