Children and Childhood as a Sociocultural Phenomenon

Russian Studies in Literature ISSN: 1061-1975 (Print) 1944-7167 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrsl20 Children and Childhood as a Sociocultural Phenomenon Mariia Cherniak To cite this article: Mariia Cherniak (2016) Children and Childhood as a Sociocultural Phenomenon, Russian Studies in Literature, 52:2, 114-129 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10611975.2016.1243369 Published online: 16 Dec 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=mrsl20 Download by: [University of Newcastle, Australia] Date: 18 December 2016, At: 01:12 Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 52, no. 2, 2016, pp. 114–129. q 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1061-1975 (print)/ISSN 1944-7167 (online) DOI: 10.1080/10611975.2016.1243369 MARIIA CHERNIAK Children and Childhood as a Sociocultural Phenomenon Reflections on Reading the Latest Twenty-First Century Prose In this article, Mariia Cherniak describes the changes in children’s and young adults’ literature in Russia today vis-à-vis the classics of the Soviet past (school literature, etc.), which often reflect technological advances (cellular phones, internet, etc.) as much as political and ideological changes. Contemporary critics of literature note the importance of young characters for readers of all ages (and older readers who want to think of themselves as young). The article outlines the plot of several successful and telling recent works. The “Potterization of the entire country” that took place a few years ago did not entirely negate the desire of Russian teenagers to read about English translation q 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text, q 2011 the author. “Deti i detstvo kak sotsiokul’turnyi fenomen: opyt prochteniia noveishei prozy XXI veka,” in Konstruiruia detskoe: filologiia, istoriia, antropologiia, ed. M.R. Balina, V.G. Bezrogov, S.G. Maslinskaia, K.A. Maslinskii, M.V. Tendriakov, and S. Sheridan (St. Petersburg: Azimut; NestorIstoriia, 2011), pp. 49–61. Dr. Mariia Cherniak is a research professor at Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg. She specializes in the poetics of contemporary literature, textology, the sociology of literature, literary criticism, and contemporary children’s literature. She is on the editorial boards of several journals and is the author of dozens of scholarly articles. Translated by Kenneth Cargill. Published with the author’s permission. 114 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 115 protagonists who are closer to home and more understandable in addition to Harry Potter. It should be noted that many of the themes and genres of juvenile literature that were popular in Soviet times have been transformed or have disappeared altogether. For example, the school story genre with its special poetics was pushed to the periphery in the repertoire of the literature of the 1990s: reality has changed so rapidly that literature has simply not had time to catch up. The classic writers, including Viktor Dragunskii, Evgenii Nosov, Anatolii Aleksin, and Vladimir Tendriakov, who were read by the parents of today’s teenagers, have become outdated in many respects. We can still find the rebel who wages battle against school teachers in Vladislav Krapivin, whose main protagonists are “fearless knights with a spotless reputation,” eccentric idealists, and romantics (Valkin’s Friends and Sails [Val’kiny druz’ia i parusa], The Boy with a Sword [Mal’chik so shpagoi], Lullaby for My Brother [Kolybel’naia dlia brata], Baby Crane and Lightning [Zhuravlenok i molnii], Islands and Captains [Ostrova i kapitany], etc.). But critics are unanimous that while contemporary writers have abandoned the platitudes and biases of “school” literature of the 1960s and 1970s, they have failed to notice how much they have returned to the templates of the 1930s and 1940s, where the “superboy” who won duels with adult-traitors could be found throughout adventure and science fiction stories. At the same time we cannot help agreeing with K. Moldavskaia, a member of the Literary Board of the Incredible Dream [Zavetnaia mechta ] Children’s Literature Award: “Children want to find more than just adventure in a book. They also want advice and answers to their questions. They want to find connections to real life and to escape from the bounds of their personal lives. This is an important psychological and moral experience.”1 Today we occasionally find stories about present-day Timurs and their squads. For example, Renat Ianyshev in his novel Battle of the Internet [Srazhenie v Internete] tells us about a group of kids from a large building in St. Petersburg. They are fighting a businessman who bought an apartment in their housing complex and is trying to transform the courtyard into an elite condominium “for his friends.” In the story “Goat” [Kozel] by Twark Main (an ironic pseudonym for the Chelyabinsk-based author Vladimir Beloglazkin), a group of boys assemble as a flash mob (they hang a huge banner over the highway: “Traffic Cop A.Iu. Sopilniak! You jerk! I demand an apology from you!”) and force the high-handed traffic cop who had insulted the father 116 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE of one of them to apologize. Our era, which is characterized by the mass absorption of information without a full understanding of it, exacerbates the problem of the correlation of identity and historical memory. Interest in contemporary authors who write both for children and adults has increased. These authors use memory as a unique way of establishing reality. Radical changes that have taken place during the past fifteen to twenty years in the political, social, and cultural life of our country have led to the disappearance of many of the realities of the Soviet era. This is not true just of children who were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also of the memory of adults and the state itself. The life of the Soviet era has become a myth. For example, works intended for today’s schoolchildren reveal an incipient cultural generation gap, which can lead to a complete loss of a shared cultural language. For schoolchildren modern Russian history begins with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and all prior events merge with the history of the nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries and are imagined to have happened a very long time ago. Here are just a few examples from some school essays: “Once upon a time there was a war. At that time the city of Leningrad was encircled by a siege”; “Lenin was a revolutionary of the Russian Federation”; “In the Soviet Union criminals’ hands were cut off for theft”; “The reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the October Revolution,” and so on.2 In assessing the “nostalgia for the Soviet past” expressed in a variety of public opinion polls, sociologist Boris Dubin has noted: This is a cultural edifice that has been erected in reality. It is a metaphor of the modern (precrisis) present, including everything that is associated with what is good and trustworthy, as well as with social order, which has been currently adopted by the majority. The “Soviet” as a category has been redesigned, and as a result it has become a mirror that reflects who we are today. Two images reinforce each other: the past in the present and the present in the past. And this new design has also been replicated in culture.3 These two images also define the frame story of The Time Is Always Good [Vremia vsegda khoroshee] by Belarusian writers Andrei Zhvalevskii and Evgeniia Pasternak. This work was short-listed by the Kniguru young adult literary competition.4 The hero of the story, young pioneer and sixth-grader Vitia, jumps from 1980 into the near future year 2018, and the girl Olia, a computerized teenager from 2018, finds herself in the Soviet past. RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 117 Having changed places, the protagonists have to solve each other’s problems. In the 1980 timeline, there is an attempt to blackball Vitia’s best friend from the pioneers and even to expel him from school. And in Olia’s world, where people almost never communicate anymore in the “real world” and even mothers invite their children to dine with them in the kitchen using ICQ, oral exams are suddenly imposed instead of the usual computer tests. The topic of how the mass consciousness of the past is represented is one of the problems in the field of cultural science, literary criticism, and social psychology. Modern literature is engaged in a kind of “memory formation” in which national stories are integrated into the “global” story, and the main source of ideas about the past are myths, legends, and fantastic assumptions. It creates a strong sense that modern authors perceive history as a kind of mystical plot that makes it possible to translate reality into fantasy and depict the life of entire generations through the use of some fantastic code. Zhvalevskii and Pasternak, defending the view expressed in the title of the story, however, voice rather critical views of both the past and the future. Vitia sincerely does not understand what has happened to his bookcase of encyclopedias, why there are no longer any lines in stores, what exactly is this “Internet,” and why the guys at school have such a hard time responding orally at the blackboard. Vitya sees his new position as a special assignment: I sat up in bed. Life has become easier. Now I understand why no one explains anything to me: these are the conditions of the experiment. There’s some sort of task that I have to perform. But what is it? I will have to figure it out. Most likely I will be able to find some clues in these unfamiliar surroundings, in all of these “businesses” and “holdings” . . . Okay, let’s break through the impasse! Mom and dad are at my back. They will not let me fail.5 Gradually Vitia begins to teach his classmates how to socialize with each other: he plays the word-association game “Cities” with them and organizes his own “Amateur Conversation Group,” thereby bringing together other kids who have become disconnected by the virtual world and no longer know how to communicate in the real world. One of Vitia’s classmates admits: “We do not talk. We write.” Nevertheless, Vitia’s Soviet ideological stereotypes often prevent him from accepting this new world. 118 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE The grocery store, big as a stadium, was full of people, but there was no line in sight. I have already observed the customers quite dispassionately and noticed that many of them are engaged in conversations with invisible companions. Some, like the mother, had large earrings in their ears, while others were using little devices like mine. Only they were pressing them to their ear like a phone receiver. I suddenly realized that these devices are in fact phones! Only these devices are very small and handy, and you can carry them with you. Not even the Americans have such devices! How nice is it to live in the most advanced country in the world!6 Olia, on the other hand, is completely free of ideological blinkers: she does not understand the absurd oaths of the Soviet Pioneers or why there is one party, defends a boy who brought an Easter cake to class, and so forth. But at the same time, she lacks any connections to culture, books, and cultural codes: “I honestly tried to concentrate, but the meaning of the Russian teacher’s words escaped me. Why do I need to memorize verses if I can find them on Google in three seconds? What’s the point of making up all these fine phrases if they have all been written down long ago and internet accessible in all possible fonts?7 Literary sociologists and librarians have noted serious changes in the reading strategies of modern teenagers. V. Askarova and N. Safonova note: Teens are basically able to enjoy most of all the achievements of literary culture that adults introduce them to. At the same time teens create their own subculture that is different from the culture of the older generation. Not taking adult guidance seriously and considering the role of adults to be largely obsolete, these teens outstrip their parents, librarians, and teachers in their ability to learn new information technologies, foreign languages, Western musical culture, and the basics of market [culture]. The social upheavals of recent decades have led to a weakening of intergenerational ties and breaks with cultural tradition. For the modern teen, there is no time axis, and a particular time period, including its peculiar worldview and essential identity, are manifested as the characteristic features of modern teens.8 It is significant that Olia’s classmates resent the fact that teachers call them robots: Why robots? Well, why that term? Is it because our reality is more expansive than yours? We live in two dimensions, in both real life and in the virtual world. Why do you want to tear us away from our familiar RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 119 world and make us fit into yours? Our virtual world has no borders. We are all equal there. We have no complexes. Each of us is who we want to be there. We are happy here. Leave us alone!9 The story The Time Is Always Good by Pasternak and Zhvalevskii draws attention to the problem of the dual audience for children’s books. Published in the series “The Time is Childhood” by the publisher Vremia [Time], the story immediately became a topic of discussion by readers of completely different age groups. A comment left on the publisher’s Web site is indicative: “My daughter is eleven years old. She read it and recommended it to me (emphasis added—M.Ch). It’s a great book. It’s quite nice. I read it in one sitting, without stopping for two hours. And my daughter said: ‘I thought there was nothing left for me to read and that I had read everything, but then I came across this wonderful book.’”10 We must admit that we agree with the modern children’s writers Ilona Volynskaia and Kirill Kashcheev when they say that literature for teenagers is intended for a wide audience, in other words, the universal reader [emphasis added—M.Ch.]. Murakami or Ulitskaia will only be read by the person who bought the book, whereas a children’s book will be read by at least half of the family, if only to understand why the child likes it so much! And every reader, regardless of age, will find something to like about these books! This is a litmus test for any book intended for young adults. If it is suitable for readers between the ages of eight and eighty, then a reader between the ages of twelve and seventeen will also find something to like about it.11 I.N. Arzamastseva notes: Children’s literature performs a special backup function in relation to general literature: in addition to addressing age-specific educational tasks, it preserves the most important artistic discoveries that are made in the literary process and translates them into the next period of general literary development.”12 Infantilism, being one of the prominent features of the contemporary sociocultural situation, molds the rudiments of children’s consciousness into the protective reflex of the modern reader. We agree with M. Kormilova, who attributes the phenomenon of infantilism in modern society to the fact that 120 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE postindustrial society is devoid of ideas that require people to grow into adults to implement. Popular culture imposes children’s books and T-shirts on us. We are conditioned to want to escape anxiety by hiding behind the back of an adult who is stronger than us. The new Russia is ruled by both the standards of postindustrial society and Hollywood. They apply to the country’s internal developments. It is very difficult and scary to grow up during such a time, because it is very difficult to stand up when everyone else around you is tottering. In the end, infantilism is a mask that is necessary to wear in order to hide one’s fears. It is a kind of sign language that is used to ask for love and mercy. And as a literary device, it offers the hope that a harmonious artistic world will be created that is suitable for life.13 Umberto Eco provides a unique interpretation of the infantilism of the human consciousness in the twenty-first century. In his essay, “Speak to Me in the Informal You: I Am Only Fifty!” [Govorite mne “ty,” mne vsego piat’desiat], he writes about the displacement of age categories and the boundaries of maturity in connection with advancements of medicine: “Imagine now that mankind on average can live to be 150 years old. In that case puberty would shift to a person’s fifties. . . . In a society in which thirty- and forty-something teens are having children, the state will have to intervene again, taking control of the offspring and placing them in children’s institutions.”14 The infantile hero who cannot escape childhood memories and complexes (see the works of Evgenii Grishkovets, as well as Pavel Sanaev, Bury Me Behind the Baseboard [Pokhoronite menia za plintusom], Denis Gutsko, Pokemon Day [Pokemonov den’], etc.) is the typical literary hero of the 2000s that readers across a broad and mixedage audience want to read about. Critics have long remarked about the trend where the heroes of modern prose fiction have continued to grow younger over the past decade. This is due to the growing attention to the theme of childhood and adolescence as specific existential topics and the appearance of a special “youth” prose by twenty-somethings who write about teenagers, that is, about their schoolmates from the recent past (e.g., the prose of Sergei Shargunov, I. Abuzarov, Irina Denezhkina, S. Cherednichenko, Marina Koshkina, and others). Today both children and adults read fairy tales and comics, fantasy and adventure novels with relish. Contemporary writers are extremely sensitive to these tastes: it is no coincidence that the fairy tale has become one of the most representative genres of modern literature. The declaration of Aleksandr Kabakov is quite curious in this regard: RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 121 In recent years, people all over the world have become completely obsessed with fairy tales. Adults read children’s books about a boy flying on a broomstick, about monsters, aliens, and other supernatural nonsense. Such works sell in the millions of copies. Lyrical prose has been placed on a literary reservation. I was, I must admit, quite irritated by all of this until I discovered that I also write fairy tales with tried-and-true plot structures. There is no defending yourself against popular trends.15 Chingiz Aitmatov wrote the following twenty years ago: We are probably to blame for what happens to the fledgling young part of society. . . . You cannot rest easy hoping that nothing bad will happen: they may now be cruel, heartless, and arrogant, but they will grow up and reform themselves. We will correct them. Or will we? It’s such a difficult task.16 During this time an entire generation has grown up, and many today feel the complete pain of these words. As Liudmila Ulitskaia describes her project “The Other, Others, About Others” [Drugoi, drugie, o drugikh], “Fascism is a growing trend in our society. Violence is promoted on television. You cannot do away with all of these ills at once, but nevertheless we must resist them.”17 Ulitskaia is emphasizing the need to teach tolerance to children starting at the youngest age. Books in this amazing series (The Big Bang and Tortoises [Bol’shoi vzryv i cherepakhi], by Anastasiia Gostevaia; Ribbons, Lace, and Shoes . . . [Lenty, kruzheva, botinki . . . ], by Raisa Kirsanova; The Family Here and Abroad [Sem’ia u nas i u drugikh], by Vera Timenchik; A Journey to Different Tables [Puteshestvie po chuzhim stolam], by Aleksandra Grigor’eva) explore the origin of the world and the family, culture, world cuisines, and differences in national dress. The problem of tolerance also occupies the St. Petersburg writer V. Voskoboinikov. In his novella Everything Will Be Fine [Vse budet v poriadke], members of the older generation explain to their juniors why a Jew and a Chechen are no worse than an Egyptian and a Russian. The theme of tolerance has been updated for contemporary young adult literature, as can be seen in a number of works in recent years in which the heroes are children with disabilities. Such works include the story Special Ed Class [Klass korrektsii], by Ekaterina Murasheva, which provoked a lot of discussion and debate while still in manuscript and was awarded the prestigious Incredible Dream award in the field of children’s literature. The book is striking for its unvarnished and astonishing candor. 122 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE Children, today I ask you to reflect about whether you can remember what mercy is! In response half of our “E” class laughed out loud. The other half, the one with some sense in their heads, cringed. And with good reason. I think that on that day this very word “mercy” was pronounced inside our classroom for the first time in all the seven years that we have spent in school. Why is that? It just turned out that way. Children usually don’t use words like that in our classroom.18 So begins the story about what happened in 7 “E”, which is narrated by Anton, one of the students in this scholastic “Harlem.” Murasheva, a practicing family and school psychologist, portrays school as a macrocosm with the utmost frankness. It is the adult world, and not the world of the actually sick children, that is scary and painful. Klavdia Nikolaevna, the teacher of class 7 “E,” inspires a young geography teacher, the only teacher to take the side of the children: The school stands for society as a whole. Are you not able to see that our entire world is divided into “classes”? The poor and the rich. The lucky and unlucky. The clever and stupid . . . School cannot change the world that exists outside. . . . We have developed special programs for the Special Ed Class. The teachers teach there in combat-like conditions. . . . We may have taught them to read, write, and count, but understand that we are not able to change their fate!19 This story is about the things that schools cover up and the things that you will not read in the reports of teachers associations and teachers councils. This story is about the reality of modern school life, which is cruel and hopeless, where the word “mercy” enters into no one’s active vocabulary, where children are forced to invent their own separate bright, kind, and just world, to live in as well as to die in. It is up to the children themselves to change their fate. The real moral test for the Special Ed Class, which includes the children of alcoholics, the sick, abandoned children, those from broken families, and simply maladjusted individuals, is the arrival (or rather, the arrival of a wheelchair) of a newcomer, a young boy who has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The boy comes from an educated and loving family (which would be an unexpected miracle for many of the children). He is clever and ironic, and he constantly makes fun of himself and his illness. Iura not only unites 7 “E,” he acts as a litmus test, bringing out latent personality traits in his classmates that had been hitherto unknown: the ability to tolerate and defend, to care for and empathize with, and to RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 123 think and dream. Iura has a special gift: the ability to escape misery and hopelessness by entering into a parallel world where all wishes are granted. This is a world of “eternal spring” where there are wild strawberries and the Three Cowboys roadside saloon, a town with fountains and a princess castle, a world where you can get around without crutches and wheelchairs, and to which Iura organizes “excursions” for his classmates. And yet the story is optimistic despite adversity. The Special Ed Class exists in spite of everything: school orders, violence, disease, and poverty. The children themselves know the meaning of the words “mercy,” “kindness,” and “friendship.” The conclusion of this bright story with a sad ending is that all of modern society needs to be corrected. The acuteness of the issue of the declining humanity and atrophied capacity for compassion manifested by the adult world raised both in Murashova’s debut novel and in Mariam Petrosian’s The House That . . . [Dom, v kotorom . . . ] has resonated widely in society. Petrosian’s novel was written more than a decade ago. Its author is not a writer, but rather an animator (this fact, incidentally, helps explain the complex, almost cinematic structure of the novel). Calling Petrosian’s book “a bookend text for the decade,” O. Lebedushkina writes that “the theme of ‘adolescence’ as a form of existence of the modern hero is associated with the perennial motif of abandonment, which acts as a symbol of the cultural divide and the lack of cultural continuity between generations and eras.”20 A gray house exists on the outskirts of a large industrial city in which teens with severe illnesses live, including the physically disabled, blind, armless, cancer patients, and conjoined twins. The House is something more than just a school for children who have been abandoned by their parents. The heroes of the novel hate the House. They curse it, but nevertheless they are afraid of being cast out of the House into the larger world, which is still unknown to them. And the more they hate their House, the more they love it and are afraid to lose it, because it is the only thing that they have in the present. The inhabitants of the House are divided into “flocks”: Birds, Pheasants, and Bandarlogs. Each flock has its own leaders, traditions, and codes of conduct. For the characters it is obvious that they can only survive inside their flock. None of them remembers anything about their old lives and parents, since their only real family is inside the House. They feel a kinship not only with each other but also with the very walls of the House. 124 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE Smoker, the novel’s main protagonist, enters the House at age seventeen, shortly before the time when he will be released. And he is also happy to find a home, to become a member of his flock, to feel part of a single organism, “I lay wrapped in my bit of blanket, and I felt good. I became part of something big, many-legged and multiarmed, warm and chatty. I became a tail or a hand, or maybe even a bone. With each movement I felt dizzy. But I didn’t care, I hadn’t felt so cozy for a long time.”21 Smoker sees that the heartfelt warmth that links together the inhabitants of the House is in fact the mutual understanding of outsiders. The poignant tragic note of Petrosian’s novel is that the world that Smoker, Sphinx, Blindman, Tobacco, Lord, Grasshopper (the characters do not have real names, only the nicknames that they get when they cross the threshold of the House) have made up is infinitely far removed from the real world that they in one way or another will have to enter when it is time for them to leave. Ruthless reality intrudes into this fanciful and incredibly complex world. Some people are destined to die, some to disappear, and some to pick up strange intoxicating substances. Only gradually does it become clear that the world of the House is a metaphor for childhood, which we must all part with. In the book Discipline and Punish, the French philosopher Michel Foucault argues on the basis of a wide range of historical and sociocultural material that at the dawn of the modern age such “inferior” groups in the population, including children, the elderly, and the disabled, were actually forced into a kind of ghetto. They were not restricted in their movements or forced to wear special clothes, but in all senses they were pushed to the periphery of social and public life. During the twentieth century, society has slowly become aware of this injustice and has learned to deal with it. However, as Petrosian’s book shows, this issue remains topical in the twenty-first century. Posing a painful and very personal (again largely autobiographical) question about the tragic elements of coming of age inspired Egor Moldanov to write the amazingly touching and sensitive novella Difficult Age [Trudnyi vozrast], which received the independent Debut literary prize in the category “Courage in Literature” [Muzhestvo v literature]. In one interview the young writer, who died tragically in December 2009 at the age of twenty-two, spoke about the underlying conception of his work as follows: RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 125 Difficult Age is not my personal story. Rather, it is the story of my childhood. Sometimes I want to shout out at all the parents, teachers, and even passersby I come across: “Lord, what are you doing to your children, why do you pay so little attention to their problems that seem so petty and insignificant to you?!” . . . I do not want some teen to end up repeating the phrase of my protagonist: “I’m not hard to deal with—I’m just hard to reach.” Probably my main goal in writing the book was to make the child or teen realize: they are not alone in this world, their problems can be solved, true friendship and love exist, and they are surrounded by people and are also PEOPLE.22 The literature teacher Matilda convinces the protagonist of the novel to write a book, which will help him “heal the memories of the past.” Zhenia Tikhomirov, aka Aristarchus or Silver (such are the protagonist’s names that appear throughout the course of the novel) is brought up in a happy family. However, accidentally one day he comes across documents about his adoption. He immediately finds himself in conflict with his parents, and eventually they just kick the boy out of the House. This is the situation that Aristarchus (this was the hero’s name before his adoption) finds himself in. The name change is certainly a sign of the transition into a different state, the beginning of self-identity, and the start of a new phase of life that symbolizes the end of childhood. After leaving the House, the hero experiences the horrors of homelessness. Aristarchus is saved by his friendship with Komar, a boy faced with an even more terrible fate: Life circumstances have brought us together and sparked a flame of mutual understanding between us. We were drawn to each other like blind kittens, understanding that we must stand together against this big world in which we have been forced to live. Before Komar I thought that I could live without friendship. After meeting him I realized that friendship is wonderful. It is so perfect that nothing else matters.23 The plot develops as we trace the protagonist’s progress from one enclosed space to another. At first he is in a cage-house and in the Pentagon-school (“At the Pentagon we are taught three things: keep quiet, snitch on your neighbors, and don’t have an opinion of your own”24). Then he moves to an orphanage, which is called the Hockey Stick due to the shape of the building (“When I was a kid, I would talk like a child, perceive the world like a child, think like a child, but when I ended up at the Hockey Stick, I forgot about my childhood”25). Then he came to the Bastille, a colony for juveniles, which is where the story 126 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE begins. Describing the horror of bullying by peers, the cruelty of the “adult world,” the dramatic, but principled resistance against the gray mass that reproduces the unsavory model of relations between teachers and students as well as between students and other students, Moldanov comes to an artistic generalization: family and school reflect the state of society. The influence of Fedor Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent [Podrostok] and Grigorii Belykh and L. Panteleeev’s the Republic of ShKID [Respublika SHKID] can clearly be discerned in Moldanov’s story, when protagonist says, “I’ve learned not to be afraid and not to shiver in the cold, because we have lived in the zone of eternal human permafrost.”26 In responding to the unsightly image of the modern school, critics have felt that in the mirror of modern prose the posttotalitarian and post-Soviet schools are more terrible than their Soviet and totalitarian counterparts: For a long time teachers have not been mentors, gurus, or bearers of truth, but marginal figures standing on the periphery, in the lower depths so to speak. That is, everything is still on solid ground. But further in the distance you can see a social abyss into which people have been dropping without any fear, in fact out of habit due to the fact that they believe that nothing can be changed.27 However, we should recall that the critical image of the school was a kind of leitmotif that can be found throughout classic Russian literature (see, e.g., Nikolai Pomialovskii’s Seminary Sketches [Ocherki Bursy], Sergei Aksakov’s autobiographical novel Gymnasium [Gimnaziia], Petr Boborykin’s novel The Pathway [V put’—dorogu!], Nikolai GarinMikhailovskii’s Schoolboys [Gimnazisty], Lev Kassil’s The Black Book and Shwambrania [Konduit i Shvambraniia], the stories of Lidiia Charskaia, and many others). School is perhaps the most all-encompassing social institution. Therefore, it is quite natural to suppose that all the features of our society and our “Xerox culture” (as defined by Jean Baudrillard) can be scanned through the image of the school and the image of the teacher using the extensive toolset of modern culture. A. Griakalov rightly reasons: The crisis of pedagogical metaphysics mirrors what is happening more generally in the field of culture and the humanities (“the crisis of philosophy,” “the crisis of history,” “the death of the author,” “the death of the individual,” and so on). The value of tradition is also at issue: RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 127 values become stable and constant reference points for socialization in a situation of continuity and tradition, but at a time of fragmentation and discontinuity, local life and educational guidelines become more significant.28 The school is a living social institution that concentrates human characteristics and brings to life various stereotypes. For the characters of the literary works that were discussed in this article, the school is a platform on which to experiment, to test hypotheses, and to seek answers to pressing questions. It includes life stages and the process of seeking out lifestyles, determining self-identity and self-knowledge, and finding peace. Works by Zhvalevskii, Pasternak, Murasheva, Petrosian, and Moldanov are completely devoid of didactic moralizing, largely because the stories are told in the first person from the perspective of a teenager. This is the reason for the popularity of these texts with different audiences, including both teens and adults. It is obvious that young adult literature today is changing and undergoing transformation. It appeals to a much wider readership now than ever before. The critic E. Belzhelarskii writes: Our school fiction is languishing in a lethargic state. Times are changing, and literature is changing along with them. However, the school story has not changed, but rather has simply vanished from literary practice. Why is that? The adolescent maturation period ceased to be significant, and therefore it has ceased to be the focus of literature. If the welfare state manages to extend out this “period of youth,” then third world children will be forced to grow up dramatically and immediately. They will be forced to move from state A to state B without engaging in unnecessary reflections or bouts of melancholy and without having been “youths who ponder about the meaning of life.” Needless to say, this does not have a good effect on the maturation process.29 It is difficult to disagree with his assessment. However, as this article has shown, writers are clearly interested in the problems of modern teenagers. Evidence of this is the fact that the stories “Sin” [Grekh], by Zakhar Prilepin, and “Long Day After Childhood” [Dlinnyi den’ posle detstva], by Lev Usyskin have received the Yuri Kazakov Literary Prize. These works re-create the world of young people with subtlety and psychological accuracy, including experiencing first love and receiving life lessons from teachers. This choice by the jury is an assessment 128 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE not only of the quality of the prose but also of the relevance of the topic, which helps the reader navigate the “wild jungle of high school” (the ironic title of one of Grigorii Oster’s books). The credo of young children’s writers reads: Our books for teens must have geometric clarity, Shakespearean passions, Hollywood action, and the moral message of a Christmas story. They must be presented with the tact of a diplomat and stealth of a spy, so that the teenager is not conscious of the didactic effect! . . . And if you are able to satisfy all these practically irreconcilable requirements within one cover, and you are able to jump over the fence to escape the watchful gaze of vigilant parents who with pencil in hand are keeping track of a particular place in the book where you teach children a moral lesson, then you will have managed to write a book that can be read in good faith and leave readers wanting more. You will have proven yourself a genius who has managed to do the impossible. And if you cannot do the impossible, then write for adults. It’s easier.30 Whether these words are no more than a declaration will be shown in the new works of the twenty-first century that are written for “adult children” and “infantile adults.” Notes 1. “Ia ne volshebnik,” Piatnitsa, July 7, 2007; available at http://friday.vedomosti. ru/article.shtml?2007/09/07/10465/. 2. See also A. Veselova, “Sovetskaia istoriia glazami starsheklassnikov,” Otechestvennye zapiski, 2004, no. 5(19); I. Bogatyreva and B. Dubin, “My i nashi mify: ‘Vospominaniia ob etom vremeni u kazhdogo svoi.’ Deti i vzroslye o Sovetskom Soiuze. Sochineniia Belgorodskikh shkol’nikov,” Druzhba narodov, 2009, no 3; M.A. Cherniak, “Nostal’giia po proshlomu v proze poslednikh let,” Bibliotechnoe delo, 2009, vol. 18, pp. 28– 33. 3. B. Dubin, “Interv’iu,” Novoe vremia, 2009, no. 5, p. 3. 4. It should be noted that the Kniguru jury was formed using the latest technology, as any teenager who registered on the site could become a member. 5. A. Zhvalevskii and E. Pasternak, Vremia vsegda khoroshee (Moscow, 2009), p. 22. 6. Ibid., p. 78. Emphasis added—M. Ch. 7. Ibid., p. 51. 8. V. Askarova and N. Safonova, Podrostok i vzroslye: trudnyi dialog po povodu knigi; available at www.psibib.ru/rodit/odchten/dialknig.php. 9. Zhvalevskii and Pasternak, Vremia vsegda khoroshee, p. 68. 10. See http://books.vremya.ru/index.php?newsid¼1074/. 11. I. Volynskaia and K. Kashcheev, Literatura dlia podrostkov: pogonia za Bet Glatisant, ili ‘Ia ne dogoniaiu!’; available at www.eksmo.ru/news/authors/483417/. RUSSIAN STUDIES IN LITERATURE 129 12. I.N. Arzamastseva, “Khudozhestvennaia kontseptsiia detstva v russkoi literature 1900–1930-kh godov,” Doctor of Philological Sciences diss. (Moscow, 2006), p. 4. 13. M. Kormilova, “Nedoliubili: ob infantil’nom geroe v molodoi literature,” Novyi mir, 2007, no. 3, p. 145. 14. U. Eko [Umberto Eco], “Govorite mne ‘ty’, mne vsego piat’desiat!” Esquire, 2006, no. 5, p. 66. 15. A. Kabakov, “Kolonka ‘Ot avtora’,” Znamia, no. 1 (2005), p. 6. 16. Ch. Aitmatov, “Tsena—zhizn’,” Literaturnaia gazeta, August 13, 1986, p. 4. 17. “Interv’iu L. Ulitskoi,” GaZeta.SPb, November 13, 2007; available at www. gazeta.spb.ru/10617-0/. 18. E. Murasheva, Klass korrektsii (Moscow, 2009), p. 9. 19. Ibid., p. 13. 20. O. Lebedushkina, “Petrosian, kotoruiu ‘ne zhdali’: ‘Dom, v kotorom . . . ’ kak ‘itogovyi tekst’ desiatiletiia,” Druzhba narodov, 2010, no. 8, p. 112. 21. M. Petrosian, Dom, v kotorom . . . (Moscow, 2010), p. 99. 22. E. Moldanov, “‘Trudnyi vozrast’—istoriia moego detstva,” Amurskaia pravda, December 26. 2008, www.amurpravda.ru/articles/2008/12/26/5.html, p. 2. 23. E. Moldanov, “Trudnyi vozrast,” Ural, 2009, no. 10, p. 78. 24. See http://magazines.russ.ru/ural/2009/10/mol5.html. 25. Ibid. 26. Moldanov, “Trudnyi vozrast,” p. 91. 27. O. Lebedushkina, “Proshchai, korolevskaia grust’? O liubimchikakh i pasynkakh ‘novogo proizvodstvennogo romana’”—2,” Druzhba narodov, 2009, no. 11, p. 67. 28. A. Griakalov, “Filosofiia i transpedagogika detstva,” Innovatsii i obrazovanie. Sbornik materialov konferentsii. Seriia ‘Symposium’, vypusk 29 (St. Petersburg, 2003), p. 57. 29. E. Belzhelarskii, “Kto smolodu byl molod,” Itogi, no. 52, December 24, 2007), p. 27. 30. I. Volynskaia and K. Kashcheev, Literatura dlia podrostkov: pogonia za Bet Glatisant, ili “Ia ne dogoniaiu!”; available at www.eksmo.ru/news/authors/ 483417.