In a provincial Volga town in pre-revolutionary Russia, a new state with the proud name of Schwambrania appears in a doctor’s house. Schwambrania has its own geography, population, political system, and economy; wars break out and treaties are signed there, and its own villains and heroes emerge. Two brothers, Lyolya and Oska, invent this country and begin to play in it so intensely that sometimes Schwambrania becomes as real as life itself. It infiltrates a geography lesson at school and confuses the students, its map ends up in the secret police office and causes a stir, and an emergency supply of Schwambranian sugar one day brings joy to a whole group of real, half-starved children.
A *konduit*, meanwhile, is a special school logbook used to record any misconduct by students. And when you read about these school regulations from the beginning of the last century, you realize that no matter how foolish and cruel people may be, humanity as a whole is still moving toward the light, because none of us would want to end up in a school from just a century ago. Here, fights involving bloodshed occur every day, weapons are brought to school, gunpowder is tossed into the stove during lessons, students bully one another, destroy property, and school gangs run wild in the city like seasoned bandits, devising creative ways to mock their teachers. The teachers don’t stay in their debt either: they devise sophisticated humiliations for their students, impose unimaginable prohibitions, and revel in their power. In short, it is clear that the modern school, with all its shortcomings, has nonetheless taken several confident steps toward humanism.
This novella is autobiographical; Lev Kassil recounts his own childhood. The work was written in 1930, and while the revolution is celebrated here, it is not done so blindly: we are presented with a vivid testament to that era—an atmosphere of chaos, devilish fervor, grand hopes, collapsing worlds, despair, fear, rage, enthusiasm, and unbridled joy. Life battered everyone, sparing not even the children. Hunger, illness, displacement, and loss—these touched absolutely everyone; no one sat it out on the sidelines.
Despite the fact that "Konduit and Schwambrania" is a truly vivid, talented, and witty work, it will not be easy for modern children to read, so we advise picking it up only if you are quite confident in your bilingual child's abilities: the language here is complex, with an abundance of archaic and dialectal words and unusual syntax, and the historical period described is so contradictory that only a true intellectual would want to sort through this endless succession of events related to the revolution. Is your child an intellectual? And have they already turned at least 12? Then we recommend "Konduit and Schwambrania"!
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