Text and Image in Children’s Literature in Communist Romania

Based on the detailed iconographic analysis of a set of black and white tonal designs intended to illustrate an excerpt from Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables focused on the story of Cosette, this study attempts to explore the reasons why this book was deemed suitable for children and, at the same time, discuss the means deployed in order to render it accessible to a young readership. The study thus explores the role of the visual in communication strategies, but also the relationship between text and image, focusing on the more emotional and perhaps more complex messages conveyed by the ‘illustrations’, particularly through postures, gestures and the gaze, bestowing on the image an autonomous status and perhaps even a hegemonic position in relation to the text. A second layer of the analysis deals with the stylistic options of the artist who produced the graphics for the book. Although Iacob Desideriu’s biography is difficult to reconstruct, the essay attempts to place the artist’s work within the Expressionist paradigm, which may have travelled from Germany, Dresden and Berlin, to Bessarabia and, eventually Bucharest. The study aims to consider the function of these images, as they seem to transcend didactic and straightforwardly propagandistic purposes and engage in a complex and strongly affective dialogue with the young recipient. It is the contention of this essay that stylistic choices, the abandonment of Socialist Realism in favour of an adapted version of Expressionism redefined the purpose of the images, distancing it from the purely didactic and rendering it more accommodating to the affective and interpelative. Taking into account their interpelative function, the present study attempts to go beyond an analysis of images as mere illustrations, completely subordinate or, at best, complementary to the text, and approach them as a different way to render meaning and elicit responses from the target audience. Ultimately, besides illustrating the difficulties encountered by artists in a totalitarian regime by examining an individual and the designs he produced for one specific book, this study may contribute to the debates on the suitability and/or usefulness of iconography as a method beyond the borders of the early modern times, argue for the importance of the visual as a means of communication and perhaps bring images in children’s books to the fore of discussions concerning art during the communist period.