“A COLD, STUBBORN WIND THAT WOULD NOT LET SPRING IN.” OWN AND STRANGERS IN MODERN PROSE FOR CHILDREN

Abstract

This article analyses the images of “us”, the “other” and the “enemy” on the example of three books describing the contemporary military conflict through the eyes of a child (“Vovka, who rode a bomb”, KompasGuide, 2018) and teenagers (Anna Zenkova, “Scorpion’s Strike”, KompasGuide, 2021 and Andrei Bulbenko, Marta Kaidanovskaya, “Sit and Watch”, Samokat, 2022). In contrast to the established tradition in Soviet and Russian children’s literature about war, in particular about the Great Patriotic War, where “us” and “the enemy” are always clearly defined, personalized and endowed with a stable set of features, in the works under consideration here the circle of “us” is extremely narrow, questioned and reconstructed by the distrustful and ironic narrator, while the “enemy” is present in the form of an faceless aggressor, represented through comparisons and metaphors as an violent natural element that brings destruction and death. Thus, these works stand apart from the general trend of bringing the “other”, present in children’s literature of recent decades, returning rather to more ancient traditions of representing the enemy.

Keywords: contemporary children’s fiction, wartime children’s fiction, “us” and the “enemy”, military conflict