Following up on the Commentary to "The Adventures of Dennis" by V. Dragunskiy: Stories for an Adult Reader

Abstract

The experience of preparing various commentaries on “The Adventures of Dennis” by Victor Dragunskiy revealed some important peculiarities in the poetics of this work that were hardly evident before. The aim of this article is to summarize these findings. Research of the cultural and historic realia surrounding the texts revealed that the writer, in most of his stories, explicitly or implicitly responded to events that were either important for him personally or played a significant role in the life of the State. This personal feature of his poetics was exploited by the editors of periodicals (“Ogonjok”, “Murzilka”, “Rabotnitsa”, etc), who published “The Adventures of Dennis” in special celebratory issues. This new context significantly altered the original meaning of the texts, since often the very fabric of the narrative was subjugated to the editorial demands of the moment. As a result, we as readers are faced now with different versions of “The Adventures of Dennis” that were published during the author’s lifetime.

Keywords: V. Dragunskiy, addressing important issues, textological commentary, Russian children’s literature of the 20th century