Girls In Young Adult Literature About The Russian civil War In The 1920s (case Of The Novella “Little Red Devils” By Pavel Blyakhin)

Abstract

A girl as the title character rarely appeared in written in the 1920s young
adult literature about the Russian Civil War. The article discusses the novella “Little Red Devils” (1923) by Pavel Blyakhin, in which a teenage girl Dunyasha becomes a participant in the Russian Civil War. The important feature of this text was the author’s attention to gender and national characteristics, which undoubtedly corresponded to the political agenda of the 1920s. Blyakhin creates an active heroine who in many respects matches the heroines of the Russian Civil War as they are portrayed in adult literature. A typical characteristic of such heroines is the appropriated masculinity along with the girl’s features. The presence of typologically similar characters contributed to the creation of a single field of children’s and adult literature about the Russian Civil War. Feminine traits are generally interpreted as positive, and the writer tries to combine them with the category of heroic. At the same time, Dunyasha is not much different from the title heroine of Lidiya
Charskaya’s novel “Igor and Militsa” (1915). Blyakhin does not cancel the
exploits of the heroine, unlike Charskaya who at the end of the novel remembers about “female destiny”, but fixes gender equality, which corresponds to the new gender order, and this is his innovation.

Keywords: Russian literature of the 1920s, adventure literature, Pavel
Blyakhin, gender, masculinity, the Russian Civil War, Lidiya Charskaya