Curious diet for Russian kids

Astonishing! Going to a leading Moscow bookshop, such as Biblo-Globus, Molodaya Gvardiya or Moskva, on a Saturday afternoon is akin to shopping in Safeway or Tesco a couple of days before Christmas. The place is packed: young mothers stand shoulder to shoulder in the aisles and there are enormous queues at the tills.

Yet, although there are some play areas for young children, Moscow's bookshops don't seem to offer quite the creature comforts we have come to expect in many UK bookshops—cafés, toilets, a sofa or two. Although, in turn, the UK is still several paces behind some of the more inviting US stores, such as Politics and Prose in Washington and The Tattered Cover in Denver. And gone are the days when students could happily while away an entire afternoon sitting in a corner of Blackwell's in Oxford, making notes for a long overdue essay.

The big crowds suggest that Russia has a very strong reading culture among the professional classes. This is a country where the literary giants of the past—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Chekhov—are not only revered but read, and where there is a familiarity with the whole canon of European literature.

Not only that. The Russian government is acutely aware that its children are the country's future. From 30th September to 2nd October, the Russian Language Development Centre organised a mighty international festival for hundreds of school librarians from near and far. It was not only patronised by, but fronted by, the president's wife, Ludmila Putina.

Leading ladies

The Festival of School Libraries was also attended by the UK's Cherie Blair and the US' Laura Bush, as well as the first ladies of Bulgaria and Armenia. Each of them introduced two children's authors from her own country. Children's laureate Michael Morpurgo and I made up the UK team.

But Russia is a country in a state of flux. Gigantic advertisements for Mercedes cars and Snickers bars claimed equal space with fabulous gilded domes; go-ahead entrepreneurs are still dogged by unsmiling and heavy-handed officialdom; and though no fewer than 70,000 new titles are published each year, the sector still suffers from problems of paper supply, distribution (Russia stretches across 11 time zones) and piracy. So it's not surprising that, inside a Russian bookshop, things are not entirely what they first seem.

What are Russian children reading? Who are the counterparts of our own frontrunners—Pullman and Wilson, Almond and Fine? As I walked down the aisles of the children's section, I saw pile upon pile of Russian, Western European and US classics—Pushkin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and their contemporaries—dolled up with Rackhamesque illustrations; retellings of myths, legends and folktales; big, shiny and somewhat forbidding encyclopedias and anthologies; and old fantasy favourites such as Tamara Kruckova's The Prisoner of the Mirror and Sofia Prokofyeva's Heavy Bag.

What is so strange and disheartening is that there are virtually no living authors among them and, remarkably, no social realism at all. In this country—which declared its experiment in communism dead only 12 years ago and has by no means faced the terrors perpetrated in its name— there are no equivalents of Alan Gibbons, Bernard Ashley, Beverly Naidoo and Malorie Blackman.

The situation is not dissimilar to that in West Germany in the 1970s. It was a full generation after the Second World War before Germans were fully able to confront the Nazi atrocities.

Although more than 4,000 titles were translated from English into Russian last year, not many were children's books. So who represents the best of British? Well, Roald Dahl, C S Lewis (published in Bible-like format), J R R Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, J M Barrie and Daniel Defoe are in force.

And what about the land of the living? There's the blessed J K Rowling, of course, and Eoin Colfer and Philip Pullman. Northern Lights sold out of its first 20,000-copy print run in its first week of publication and has just been reprinted. Other than these, there are sundry Ladybird books: pleasingly, Ursula le Guin and, less so, Lemony Snicket.

For the time being, it's unlikely that UK publishers of children's fiction dealing with contemporary issues will be able to sell Russian rights. But when I visited Rosman, the leading children's publisher, both the editorial and marketing departments emphasised their keen interest in buying UK fantasy, historical fiction, traditional tales and, possibly, romance.

Not that authors can expect to get rich on the proceeds of sales from the potentially vast Russian market. The average price of a book is 75 roubles (about £1.50), and deals are made on the wholesale price rather than the retail price—not so very different to the situation facing authors in the UK, where the royalties on up to 80% of sales are depressed by hefty discounts.

Market for English language

I was surprised to see only a handful of English-language children's books in the leading stores. There was just one, for instance, from my own publisher, Orion, The Adventures of Odysseus by Neil Philip, illustrated by Peter Malone. Yet the 10-year-old children I worked with at the Festival of School Libraries spoke some English, and understood much more, while the 14-year-olds were virtually fluent. Here, surely, is a market opportunity for UK children's publishers, although the price differential between UK and Russian books is plainly a thorny problem.

In Russia, the children's book industry is, in the words of the Beowulf-poet, "ut-fus": it's eager and looking outward. So I've come home excited by the Russians' own excitement about their expanding market, conscious of its present limitations, and utterly captivated by the country's enduring love affair with the golden and lasting printed word.



Kevin Crossley-Holland is the author of the Arthur trilogy. Orion has just published the concluding volume, King of the Middle March (£12.99, 1842550608).