Orphaned Heroes in Children’s Literature: a Reflection of The Social Crisis at The Beginning And At The End of The Soviet Era

Abstract

The article “Orphaned heroes in children’s literature: a reflection of the social crisis at the beginning and at the end of the Soviet era” written by Olga Bukhina and Andrea Lanoux is based on the fact that the societal upheaval following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 produced staggering numbers of orphaned children, as did the collapse of the Russian monarchy in 1917. Russian writers in both periods regularly wrote orphaned heroes into their works, reflecting the real-life problems of their time while also giving symbolic form to the chaos and instability of their eras. This essay examines the treatment of orphaned heroes in the novels of Ekaterina Murashova and Dina Sabitova, comparing them to the orphaned heroes of the early Soviet era. Authors trace the evolution of the literary orphan as an emblem of revolution and ideal “new person” in the early Soviet period, to a victim of institutional failure and social trauma in the post-Soviet era.   Keywords: Grigory Belykh, Pavel Blyakhin, Arkady Gaidar, Ekaterina Murashova, Alexey Pantelev, Dina Sabitova, Soviet and post-Soviet children's literature, orphans as literary heroes, orphanhood, social trauma