The Great Patriotic War in Modern Russian Children’s Literature: Looking for an Alternative

Abstract

In modern Russia, the Great Patriotic War remains an important element of official memorial policy and collective memory, mainly in the form of a heroic mythological narrative. But this heroic myth makes it difficult, and sometimes taboo, to express painful war experience. This article examines how the taboo traumatic experience (“alternative narrative”) is embodied in contemporary Russian literature for children and adolescents. This question is investigated on the basis of the reference to the texts of the novels “Cloud Regiment” (Oblachnyy polk) by E. Verkin (2012), “Traces” (Sledy) by E. Basova (2017) and “The t. g. Garden” (Sad imeni t. s.) by M. Boteva (2018). The author of the article considers these texts in the context of modern publishing repertoire of children’s literature, finds out what ideas about the Great Patriotic War the reader can get from these works and what artistic means this representation is formed with. Then, relying on several samples of the reader’s reception of selected works, the author makes some conclusions about the meaning of these examples of alternative narrative about the Great Patriotic War today. These books provide an example of how reading allows the reader to become a witness of the described events, thus illustrating the relationship between cultural memory and poetics.

Keywords: Great Patriotic War in the Russian Children’s Literature, Eduard Verkin, Eugenia Basova, Maria Boteva, memory and trauma in literature, juvenile contemporary prose