The Children’s Book Festival LiteraTula, in the Homeland of Leo Tolstoy

The Children’s Book Festival LiteraTula, in the Homeland of Leo Tolstoy Irina Rocheva (bio) Translated by Natalia Medved Tula is a year older than Moscow and is located 200 kilometers south of the capital of Russia. It is an armory and industrial forge of the country. By Russian standards, it is a small city of five hundred thousand residents. Five years ago, the first independent children’s book-shop, Korney Ivanovich, was opened here, and the first children’s book festival followed shortly. In 2019, the LiteraTula Children’s Book Festival became one of the most noticeable and significant events in the children’s book industry in Russia, serving as an inspiration for people from other cities to develop their own book projects and promote children’s reading. The book fair brings together forty Russian publishing houses with an impressive six tons of books sold over three days, one hundred events, seventy guest speakers, seven simultaneously running sites, and over four thousand visitors! These are dry figures about a very lively festival that gathers people from all over the country in Tula. The festival was created by Irina Rocheva (the owner of the children’s book club Korney Ivanovich) and Vladimir Apenov (the owner of the comic book shop BWComics in Tula) as the natural extension of their daily efforts to promote reading and attract attention to modern books in their city. Thanks to this collaboration, the festival has two parallel parts: the book program and the comic program. In Russia, the comic industry is seen as a separate market. Click for larger view View full resolution The festival’s book program is not limited strictly to books. It includes theatrical productions and read-alouds of modern books for children and teenagers and a variety of presentations: an exhibition of the international collection of posters inspired by children’s reading, from the M. I. Rudomino All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature; a display of Igor Oleinikov’s illustrations created for the Toon Tellegens books (published in Russia by Polyandria); an exhibit of handmade characters from modern children’s books (The City and Books Festival, Minsk, Belarus); an interactive display, “Books on Vacation,” of the association of [End Page 60] Russian illustrators, Magic Saw; a show of works by modern illustrators of the International Festival of Book Illustration and Visual Literature, “Berrywater”; a separate platform and program about book illustration with workshops and master classes by modern Russian illustrators; and lectures with discussions. In 2019, the festival’s motto was “We read to children.” Every day during the festival, specialists in the field of children’s reading read aloud various books to children, demonstrating distinguished practices and techniques of performance with a book. Traditionally, the festival hosts a regional semifinal of a large federal reading contest for high school students known as “Page.” Hundreds of teenagers across the country take part in the contest that includes meetings with authors and illustrators. A separate program is designed for librarians and educators. All fits tightly into three days of bustling events, and the aftermath spreads beyond the festival for a long time. Click for larger view View full resolution In 2017, the festival received the prestigious international award Yasnaya Polyana for the nomination of “Event.” The festival is well known in Russia; people rush to Tula from the most remote cities of the country. The organizers see the main outcome of their work in the rising interest in books and reading among children who grew up with the festival, visited it every year together with their parents and friends, made friends with authors and illustrators, and chose careers connected to children’s reading and book publishing. Hundreds of photos of the festival convey the unique, lively, informal atmosphere of the LiteraTula. The festival is noncommercial— admission to all events is free—and is independently organized, which gives its founders more freedom with the program and the concept. The organizers today pursue the same goal: to make the next year’s program even more interesting and elaborate, to invite foreign participants to Tula, to give children and their parents an opportunity to see not only modern Russian literature but also the...