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Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes
Edited by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 7] 2017
► pp. 203–220

Chapter 11
Mapping illusions

Between the child’s fantasy world of Lev Kassil’s Sсhwambrania and the geography of a fledgling Soviet state

This chapter examines the artistic functions of the visual and verbal depiction of a child’s fantasy country in Lev Kassil’s novel Sсhwambrania (1933) against the background of the state’s interest in geography and cartography. After a short overview of the political circumstances that accompanied the reforms in Soviet cartography, this chapter applies Harley’s approach to the interpretation of the two maps of the child’s fantasy world of Sсhwambrania, considering the graphic and linguistic components of these maps and their description in the text, and, in addition, reconstructing the different types of context relevant to Kassil’s book.
Article outline
  • Contextualizing Kassil’s mapping
  • Authorial mapping in Schwambrania : The first map of an imaginary state
  • The second map of Schwambrania
  • Maps of Schwambrania: Leaving aside child’s fantasy
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.7.12mik
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