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Abstract: The article traces the tropes of electricity — hydroelectric plants, powerlines, transmission towers, electricians and lightbulbs — in early Soviet illustrated childrens' books. It shows how the books counterintuitively synthesize fairy-tale elements and productivist themes while teaching Soviet children about the science, technology and ideology of electricity. The article thus argues that these early Soviet picturebooks use electricity in profoundly subversive ways. By drawing on the fairy-tale model, these books perpetuated Russian modernist associations of pre-revolutionary electricity with irrationality and magic, foregrounded the subversive ambiguity of electricity as an enlightening and dangerous energy and transmitted essentially modernist modes of synaesthetic reading to define Soviet modernity.

The goal of this collective effort is to provide an overview of the course of Central European literatures in the twenty years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The authors have highlighted works they consider representative of their countries' literary production and placed them in the context of the political and social changes they reflect. Where English translations of the works in question are available, they are listed in a bibliography attached to each article.