A is for ... aah you guessed
July 25, 2013 2:57 AM   Subscribe

So back in the early thirties the Soviets had a problem: how to combat adult illiteracy in a country where millions of peasants had never had been to so much as primary school? How do you get these people to learn the alphabet? Well, by making an adult illiteracy campaign into an adult illiteracy campaign using an erotic alphabet book designed by Sergei Merkurov.
posted by MartinWisse (47 comments total) 37 users marked this as a favorite


 
Also of interest: classic Soviet board games of the 1920ties.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:58 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


[нбдр]
posted by rory at 3:06 AM on July 25, 2013


A is for spit-roast? wtf Russia?
posted by marienbad at 3:18 AM on July 25, 2013


To be compared with Joseph Apoux's Alphabet pornographique from the 1880s.
posted by elgilito at 3:49 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


That king seemed rather counter revolutionary.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:04 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Also of interest: classic Soviet board games of the 1920ties.

The funnest part of Soviet Monopoly was that after your smart-assed brother won you got to push him up against the wall and shoot him.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 4:08 AM on July 25, 2013 [13 favorites]


Interesting! Thank you. See also Max Bruinsma’s essay The Erotics of Type (NSFW).
posted by misteraitch at 4:13 AM on July 25, 2013


Is that a woman (okay, she has wings, so an angel) with a cock on the left in Л? :D
posted by Dysk at 4:23 AM on July 25, 2013


Is that a woman (okay, she has wings, so an angel) with a cock on the left in Л?

It's cupid or some other horny little cherub I believe.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 4:32 AM on July 25, 2013


Ah, probably. I still see boobs and a waist, even if it isn't intentional.
posted by Dysk at 4:53 AM on July 25, 2013


That's obviously a fake. The three-way was invented in 1974.
posted by psoas at 4:56 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Is that a woman (okay, she has wings, so an angel) with a cock on the left in Л?

Sorry, when I look at Л my attention is captured by three flying erect penis birds.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 5:03 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


This was a brilliant idea. Give people something enjoyable to read and they'll read more often or want to learn to read. Shakespeare may be great, but not everyone wants to read him.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:12 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Very cool! :)
posted by jeffburdges at 5:21 AM on July 25, 2013


So shakesperean slashfic then?
posted by Dr Dracator at 5:30 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]




Shakespeare may be great, but not everyone wants to read him.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:12 AM on July 25 [+] [!]


The Bard wasn't above a bit of alphabet-based filth himself. Witness this Malvolio speech from Act 2, Scene 5 of Twelfth Night: "By my life, this is my lady's hand. Here be her very Cs, her Us and her Ts, and thus makes she her great Ps."

Actors often underline the word being spelt out here by pronouncing the "and" as a casual "nn" sound - which is presumably the delivery Shakespeare had in mind all along. It's generally agreed to be his little joke at the expense of puritans who thought the theatre was immoral.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:48 AM on July 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


It's satyriffic!

Reminds me a little of ancient Greek erotica - maybe its a cyrillic thing?
posted by Artw at 5:49 AM on July 25, 2013


I just saw this cute modern furniture designer alphabet card set.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:59 AM on July 25, 2013


Did they do one in Braille?
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:11 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


When I first saw this (boing-boing? /r/socialism? /r/Communism?) They pointed out that there were a couple images that pretty much were male-on-male sex. One wasn't quite so clear, and they said it could have been seen either way. I was pretty sure both were.

Regardless, from making books on sex education that included images of gay sex and more than one partner to the current anti-gay hateful attitude in Russia as official policy (let alone culturally) is really sad to see.
posted by symbioid at 6:11 AM on July 25, 2013


й is the clear one.
posted by symbioid at 6:13 AM on July 25, 2013


Dysk: "Is that a woman (okay, she has wings, so an angel) with a cock on the left in Л? :D"

Wait - is that a dildo with wings? Is that the inspiration for the dildo-copter as protest a few years back?
posted by symbioid at 6:17 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've seen a number of places discuss this as "proof" that the portrayal of the USSR as sexless is a myth. And I'm now finding that counter-narrative even more annoying than the original. The problem is right in the first paragraph of the above-referenced review: "[this study] shows just how intensive discussions about sexuality were in post-1917 Russia, at least until the late 1920s."

Yes, there was a lot of aggressively progressive discussion of sexual revolution from around 1917 until somewhere around 1929. After which, Stalin solidified control, puritanism took over, and thus it remained until well into the 1980s. So Russia has about 10 years of sexual revolution, followed by 60 years of moral crackdown. While the West was giggling at Three's Company, the USSR was a place where you had to prove you were married before you could get a room with a person of the opposite sex, and homosexuality carried a prison sentence. And while abortion was common in the USSR of the 70s, I'm not sure it's progressive when that's the only form of birth control available.

It's true that the artistic and personal revolutionary spirit of the NEP years is under-discussed in the West. But that shouldn't blind us to the extent that the Ninotchka myth was a pretty accurate portrait of everything that came after.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 6:19 AM on July 25, 2013 [3 favorites]


"Hey, is anyone missing these? I found them in the sofa cushions."
posted by orme at 6:24 AM on July 25, 2013


"Not now, monkey!"
posted by Artw at 6:40 AM on July 25, 2013


I believe monkey approves.
posted by djrock3k at 6:47 AM on July 25, 2013


Satyrs gonna sate.
posted by jetsetsc at 7:04 AM on July 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex.

How'd ya like dem upheaval 'taters, Karl?
posted by drlith at 7:13 AM on July 25, 2013


Satyrs: Anatomically unsuited to missionary position.
posted by Artw at 7:13 AM on July 25, 2013


No one takes this "literacy" nonsense seriously, right?

The inclusion of male homosexual sex is fun but not too surprising. There's a raft of libidinous Victorian-era art with all sorts of enthusiastic fucking, including homosexual sex, bestiality, various merry groups. This alphabet set seems quite in line with that history. It's all just naughty fun, there's no coded social justice message.
posted by Nelson at 7:16 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


There are letters missing. o and π, for example. I think that's probably just a pair of pages they forgot to scan.

More interesting, however, is that despite supposedly being from 1931, it contains letters that were eliminated from the Russian alphabet during the Revolution, like і and ѣ and ѳ and ѵ. Given the royal imagery, is it possible this was not made in 1931, but was actually pre-Revolution anti-aristocratic propaganda (look at all the decadent sex the Tsar is having!), similar to materials from 18th century France?
posted by Sys Rq at 7:26 AM on July 25, 2013 [5 favorites]


Is that a woman (okay, she has wings, so an angel) with a cock on the left in Л? :D

No, it's Eros.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:28 AM on July 25, 2013


In Soviet Union, porn find you.
posted by ogooglebar at 7:54 AM on July 25, 2013


In Soviet Union, porn find you.

But what happens after porn finds you in the woods? There's like at least one scene waiting to be developed here. More if you return to the woods to see if porn finds you again.
posted by frimble at 8:02 AM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Regarding the inclusion of male homosexual sex: In The Good Old Naughty Days, a compilation of turn-of-the-century porn films, I was surprised that each film's standard lists of acts depicted included: a boy/girl, a girl/girl, a boy/boy, and a group scene (and occasionally a dog). I don't know quite why homosexual porn split into its own market; my guess is that as porn became easier to produce, it niche-ified, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone who knows more.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 9:32 AM on July 25, 2013 [4 favorites]


I don't know quite why homosexual porn split into its own market

I would think it would have something to do with homosexuality being illegal. The rise of totalitarianism in all its forms brought big crackdowns (to put it mildly) on male-male sex and depictions thereof throughout Europe.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:46 AM on July 25, 2013


Homosexual acts have never been exclusively their "own market". The line between hetero and homosexual is much fuzzier than people pretend; there's plenty of self-identified straight guys who have sex with other men all over the world. My take on cheerful erotica like this is they're just having fun with all manners of perversion.

For porny art of a similar era, erotic bookplates (NSFW) are fun.
posted by Nelson at 10:04 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


As I understand it, homosexuality bans came in in the late 19th century, though---did it get much more illegal between the turn of the century and the 1920s, by which time homosexual porn films had pretty definitively split off from straight?
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 10:06 AM on July 25, 2013


Homosexual acts have been stigmatized and criminalized a lot longer than the late 19th century. The Torah, for instance, and the Old Testament, and most of Christian European history. That doesn't mean everyone respects the law. Pornographic images like this are already outside the bounds of polite society. Once you depict people fucking, I think it was less of a big deal at that time to show all manners of fucking.

But I'm way out of my depth here; there's lots of scholars of attitudes towards sexuality who know this stuff for real.
posted by Nelson at 10:08 AM on July 25, 2013


Reading recommended by 9 out of 10 Vulgar Boatmen.
posted by islander at 10:13 AM on July 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


Excellent find!
posted by Tasmanian_Kris at 5:52 PM on July 25, 2013


But what happens after porn finds you in the woods? There's like at least one scene waiting to be developed here. More if you return to the woods to see if porn finds you again.

Not everybody's in it for the hunting.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:43 PM on July 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


No, historically this makes no sense. Just think about it for a second: why would a literacy aid for Soviet peasants include erotic symbols from Antiquity, like satyrs, cupids, and the Roman flying phallus effigy?

More conclusively, why would a Soviet book from 1931 illustrate letters that were abolished during the spelling reform of 15 years prior, like izhitsa Ѵ, fita Ѳ, and yat ѣ?

Anyone who is willing to draw conclusions about the treatment of eroticism and sexuality in the USSR based entirely on this extremely dubious artifact is demonstrating a really outstanding degree of credulousness.
posted by Nomyte at 8:04 PM on July 25, 2013


More conclusively, why would a Soviet book from 1931 illustrate letters that were abolished during the spelling reform of 15 years prior, like izhitsa Ѵ, fita Ѳ, and yat ѣ?

I brought it up, but I suppose it's so the people would be able to read slightly older stuff, maybe?

Still, though, if the Soviets were teaching the people those letters, they missed out on a big opportunity to control which written materials the people were able to read.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:46 PM on July 25, 2013


I would be surprised if that were the case. The letters Ѵ and Ѳ were obscure by 1917, sort of like the ö in coöperation a la the New Yorker. They were basically limited to specialized church terms borrowed directly from Greek (Ѳ = theta and Ѵ = upsilon).

Second, there are very detailed primary sources on the Soviet program for the elimination of illiteracy (commonly abbreviated Likbez). These things are documented and known.

Moreover, the literacy rate before the revolution was not bad. There are many sources showing that public education actually suffered tremendously during the tumult of the early Soviet era. So the narrative people are trying to extract from this item is based on a misconception.

Quite frankly, I think that assuming that this is an actual example of early Soviet literacy education is begging the question. What do even know about the provenance of this item?

Rather than starting with the foregone conclusion that this is an outrageous learning aide that stands our understanding of Likbez on its head, it's a lot safer to brainstorm some other possibilities that are no less unlikely. Maybe these illustrations are some kind of satire that was printed abroad. Or maybe this was a private joke the illustrator shared with a small circle of classically educated acquaintances.

Because, I mean, "What we need to get through to these peasants is something that's safe and familiar to them." "I know! Monkeys!"
posted by Nomyte at 9:31 PM on July 25, 2013


Well, if we know the author, and (possibly) date of publication, MeFi detectives should be able to get to the bottom of this, no?

My Google-fu is too weak; most of the references to it now stem from the original blog post. I found this page which dates the book to 1924 rather than 1931.

From my searching, I can't find any other graphic art that Merkurov did... only sculptures.
I did find this page, which says the book is held in a private collection. It might have some more useful info but Google Translate leaves something to be desired.

While I was looking I also found another erotic alphabet book.
posted by Gordafarin at 1:19 AM on July 26, 2013


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