Example

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 'How an image develops within someone’s mind – and how it finds its way into a school textbook’.

I was looking for an image of the Soviet partisan activities during WWII from a textbook for an exhibition. It was to follow the style of ‘socialist realism’ and to contain the typical romanticising touches of this Stalinist genre. I soon found what I was looking for. 

A history textbook for Year Four by V.L. Belaia et al. (Minsk 1996) contained the picture ‘In the School by the Forest’, which featured all the desired attributes.  

Figure 1
Author: Nikolai Ryzhii
Title: U liasnoi shkole [In the School by the Forest]
Origin: 1996
Printed in: Belaia, Valiantsina L., Zhytko, A.P., Pliashevich, U.K., Praianouski, A.P.: Maia radzima – Belarus [My Home – Belarus].
Padruchnik dlia 4. klasa [Textbook for Year Four]. Minsk: Narodnaja Asveta 1996, p. 200
Location: Braunschweig, Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. Shelf Mark: BY H-8 (1,96).

The image shows – in the typical manner of a children’s book illustration – four children being taught mathematics in the forest.

The blackboard has provisionally been fastened between two trees. The children are concentrating hard. 

And yet the idyll is deceptive. The teacher carries a gun at her belt; weapons, guard dogs, a camouflaged hut and a partisan riding past in the background may suggest a good defence capability and relative security; at the same time, however, these elements are an indication of the inherent threat. 

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