SKAZY BY PAVEL BAZHOV: ON THE QUESTION OF THE CRITERIA OF CHILDISH IN THE CREATIVE METHOD OF THE WRITER

Abstract

The research is devoted to the question of the boundaries of children’s literature in Pavel P. Bazhov’s tales (skaz). The author of the article provides scholarly interpretations of Bazhov’s “tales of childish tone” and compares them, highlighting differences in the composition of texts typically classified by literary critics to as part of children’s literature. Relying on the writer’s ego-documents, journalistic works (in particular, the 1913 text Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak as a Writer for Children), the memoirs of contemporaries and lifetime publications of tales (skaz). The article investigates Bazhov’s own criteria for classifying specific tales as children’s literature. To reconstruct the reader’s perception, the study includes critical texts of contemporaries, in which Bazhov’s tales (skaz) are perceived as “fairy tales”, as well as materials of historical and literary polemics about the fairy tale and the specific historicism of children’s literatureThe article further explores the author’s strategies employed by Bazhov in constructing the “childish” tone of these tales: introduction of didactic question-and-answer form, where the answer is already known both to the reader and the protagonist; the deliberate or forced rejection by the characters of the story of the gifts of “secret powers” offered during moments of temptation: and also incorporation of the motif of the unliftability of wealth (both physically and spiritually) into the narrative structure.

Keywords: Pavel Bazhov, children’s literature, skazy, Russian literature of the 20th century, Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, ego-documents, didacticism