The children are lost in surmise.
Yet somehow they manage, by mind and by heart,
To see through the world's strange disguise."
"Come gaze upon the antic play
Of kangaroos from far away.
They leap and spring the whole day through
Right here inside the city zoo."
The Soviet poet Samuel Marshak (1887-1964) presents an ESE typing that the socionist Talanov asserted without elaboration, but which is quite credible.
Marshak was deeply respected as the founder of Soviet children's literature. His poems are described as a world of "goodness, fun, fairy tales... and ringing, beautiful rhymes". He also translated Shakespeare's sonnets and Robert Burns' poetry. His literary translations deservingly remain the "canonical" versions for millions of Russian readers.
The most revealing single piece of evidence is testimonies from people who knew him, about his generous and approachable demeanor and the ability to become the emotional center of the collective. Isai Rakhtanov, one of the writers he mentored at the Leningrad Children's Literature Department in the 1920s, wrote decades later: "Marshak united us; he was the center around which everything turned... His editorial work was not a craft but an art... In that process there occurred the miraculous birth not only of the book, but of the author himself." This is ESE's Fe-leading function operating in the editorial domain in the creation and sustaining of a community.
The Leningrad School of Children's Books — the decade-long flowering of Soviet children's literature in the 1920s — was Marshak's creation in the most direct sense. As head of the Children's Literature Department at the Leningrad division of the State Publishing House, he attracted to children's writing some of the most formally experimental writers and artists available: Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky from the OBERIU group, Evgeny Shvarts, Boris Zhitkov, Vitaly Bianki, Evgeny Charushin. The fact that he sought out precisely these people— the most original, formally inventive, playfully strange figures in early Soviet literary avant-garde — is typologically significant. Originality and novelty energize ESE; Ne is the activating function, sought from the environment and responded to with genuine enthusiasm. Marshak couldn't write like Kharms — few ESE can constantly do literary experimentation and high-quality surrealism, Marshak's own children's writing was, on the whole, more everyday-life realistic — but he recognized Kharms's gift immediately, knew what it could do for children, and created the institutional conditions for it to flourish.
His motto as an editor was "big literature for the little ones". When asked if he ever rested, his characteristic reply was, "Yes... at my writing desk", but his exacting standards were in service of his personal warmth. ESE is the least "SJ" of the four sensory rational types, but the "J" trait produces in ESE a sustained disciplined commitment to the emotional-aesthetic mission once it has been established, not the irrational type's shifting enthusiasms.
The turn to children's literature itself is revealing (ESE is the most child-loving type of the whole socion). The immediate trigger was the death of his young daughter in 1915 — a loss that directed his "caretaking" toward the most vulnerable and unprotected audience imaginable. But the orientation toward children was already present before the loss: in 1914 he and his wife were already working with children of Jewish refugees in Voronezh, and in 1920 he organized Children's Town in Krasnodar — a children's theater, library, and studios — from what was essentially nothing. This was someone whose Fe-orientation toward children was genuine, not just a Plan B for his poetry career. His children's verse consistently exhorts children to be truthful, to love animals, to be kind to one another — the moral-emotional pedagogy of ESE's worldview applied to the youngest possible audience, and entirely distinct from ESI's individualized moral edification of adults. ESE teaches by warmth and example directed at the collective; not by ESI-style finger-pointing about your specific moral screw-up.
His translations of Burns, Shakespeare's sonnets, Blake, Kipling, and Heine became so embedded in Russian culture that it was quipped he was not a translator but a co-author. This is Fe's communicative mission applied to literary translation — making the emotional world of English poetry available to Russian readers. It's Fe in action: "I'm going to make you feel this English poem in your soul".
The meeting of his wife Sophia on the Middle East trip in 1911 — he brought back "impressions, poems and a beautiful wife" — has the same quality of instant wholehearted integration of personal and creative life that characterizes ESE's relational orientation. The journey was journalistic; the marriage was an expression of the same open warmth that would later build literary schools. The two were not separate dimensions of his personality but expressions of the same Fe-leading orientation toward people and their worlds.
The survival of the Stalinist period requires its own analysis. Marshak was on the political razor's edge repeatedly — his Leningrad publishing house was destroyed in 1937, many of his closest editorial colleagues were arrested and some executed. According to a rumour, Stalin, encountering his name on a firing list, reportedly moved him to the awards list instead because he liked his poems. Survival in this environment was partly luck, partly the protection of genuine literary prestige, and partly the relational intelligence that ESE deploys naturally in social environments. Marshak did not survive through calculating political positioning; he survived through the genuine warmth and literary value that had built real relationships with people who mattered, and through the concealment of his Jewish and Zionist past. That he managed this concealment while maintaining the authentic warmth that everyone who worked with him remembered is itself a function of ESE's attunement to the emotional needs of the moment.
The most vivid piece of first-hand testimony available about him comes from Lydia Chukovskaya's memoirs, in a scene involving her then-husband Matvei Bronshtein (who was later executed in 1938) — a young physicist who was writing a popular science book about spectral analysis. Bronshtein was reading aloud from his manuscript when Marshak suddenly placed his hand on the younger man's knee — a small, short-fingered but energetic and strong hand, as Chukovskaya notes — and interrupted the reading. The passage in question concerned the weight of inert gases, and ended with a parenthetical remark that helium had been discovered first on the Sun and only afterwards on Earth. "How is this — first on the Sun and only then on the Earth?" Marshak kept shaking Bronshtein by the knee. "Surely scientists couldn't have flown to the Sun? I don't understand anything in your parentheses." Bronshtein, initially indignant, patiently explained the spectroscopic method — that the element had been identified in solar spectral lines before being isolated terrestrially. Whereupon Marshak exclaimed: "And you report this event in parentheses!"
The physical expressiveness is pure ESE — the hand on the knee, the repeated shaking, the body participating fully in the editorial engagement. The method itself is equally characteristic: Marshak doesn't say the explanation is logically or terminologically imprecise. He presents himself as the bewildered reader — "explain it to us ignoramuses, to me and Lydia" — using the failure of emotional transmission as the diagnostic instrument. The fact — "first on the Sun, only then on the Earth" — is genuinely astonishing, and the text has buried it in a subordinate clause rather than broadcasting it. This is what he cannot forgive. His solution was quite revealing: simply tell the specific people, present in the room, how helium was discovered. The moment Bronshtein shifted to live oral speech, the connection came alive. Chukovskaya records that Marshak listened, then said: "I can hear in your voice — now you'll be able to write it." The written text must recover the warmth of direct human communication. For Marshak the editor, this was always the standard against which everything else was measured.
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