Child Adults in Soviet Children’s Literature – Lazar Lagin’s The Old Man Hottabych

Abstract

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</p><p>Literary scholar Jenniliisa Salminen investigates children’s fiction in the Soviet Union, where strict normative limits regulated how children could be depicted in literature. Child characters were to be positive heroes, exemplary, and serve as role models for the child reader. However, character education was undermined by these perfect child characters, thus authors used different strategies to circumvent this problem. The author Lazar Lagin, for example, introduced alongside with the protagonist another, a slightly less perfect character via whom the lesson could be taught. In <i>Starik Hottabych </i>(1938, 1955)<i>, </i>Lagin uses an adult character, a three thousand years old oriental genie that in the text performs the role of the child in need of education.</p>