| Summary: | For several decades and despite political changes, the artist and advocate of peasant art forms Nikolai Bartram maintained an anthropological and non-instrumental reading of toys. This essay attempts to look through his ideas into several contexts of debates about toys, and in particular peasant toys, during the time span from 1900 to 1930 in Russia and the USSR. Be it in his books, through his experience at the museum of arts and crafts in Moscow since 1904, as the founding director of the Museum of Toys from 1918 to 1930, or as the head of the Soviet section "The world of the child" at the International exhibition of decorative and industrial arts in Paris in 1925, Bartram thought of toys not as objects of delight or entertainment, but as active subjects that trigger creativity. This open approach to toys encountered growing difficulties up to the ideological lock of the 1930s.
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