Masculinity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Children’s Literature: Transformation of Timur (and his Team)

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, the goals of Soviet children’s literature and pedagogy were set around the construction of a new gender-neutral Soviet identity. However, in the 1940s, as Soviet gender politics begins to shift toward reemphasizing the cultural and symbolical value of men and securing their dominant status in society, the gendering of children’s literature becomes more prominent. As a product of its time and this shift in gender roles, Arkady Gaidar’s canonical novella, Timur and His Team (1940), returns to the binary gender definitions and promotes the quintessential model of dominant masculinity in which the hero takes center stage while female characters function in relation to him and are assigned supporting parts. Timur’s historical narrative finds its nostalgic recontextualization in post-Soviet children’s literature and is especially prominent in Ekaterina Murashova’s novels. While Gaidar’s collectivist paradigm unambiguously resonates in her works, the gender paradigm seems different and her heroes appear to defy Timur’s model of masculinity: many of them have physical, psychological, or communicative problems and are therefore socially marked as “non-standard” or “abnormal”. These new heroes prompt a new, post-ideological way of being male and suggest a new reading of the gender binary in contemporary Russian children’s literature. The article addresses the conflict between Murashova’s resistance to the traditional representation of dominant masculinity and her inadvertent tendency to replace it with a new variant. The focus is on Murashova’s novel "Alarm Guard" (2008).   Keywords: Gender, “heroic masculinity” in Soviet literature, A. Gaidar’s Timur and His Team, non-traditional masculinity in post-Soviet children’s literature, E. Murashova’s novel "Alarm Guard" .