Young Fighter’s 101: Stories of Revolutionary History for Adolescents in Children’s Literature of the 1930s

Abstract

Maria Litovskaya’s “Young Fighter’s 101: Stories of Revolutionary History for Adolescents in Children’s Literature of the 1930s” examines the ideological demands put on children’s literature in order to develop in the consciousness of the young generation a uniformed knowledge about domestic history, its development, and preconditions to the establishment of the socialist state. This call for such homogeneity of historical knowledge stimulated the production of many works of literature about revolutionary struggles aimed at the young audience. In Soviet literature for the young, a special genre of “a historical revolutionary novel” was established. The main features of this genre are analyzed in this article using the novella, Adolescents, by B. S. Itsyn as an example.

Keywords: literature and ideology, soviet children's literature of the 1930s, historical revolutionary novel, B. S. Itsyn.