{"title":"The Two Sides of Besprizornost’: Representations of Child Homelessness in Respublika SHKID and Pedagogicheskaia Poema","authors":"Diana Antonello","doi":"10.1016/j.ruslit.2022.07.004","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This article examines how the discourse about the re-education of <em>besprizorniki</em>, street urchins, became closely interconnected with the debate around the concept of the New Soviet Man in the 1920s and 1930s. This made child homelessness the ideal field in which to test different pedagogical approaches and the power of either the individual or the collective in the process of reforging human souls. By comparing two prototypical novels on <em>besprizornost’</em>, <em>Respublika SHKID</em> (<em>The Republic of SHKID</em>, 1926) and <em>Pedagogicheskaia poema</em> (<em>Pedagogical Poem</em>, 1933–35), this article analyzes how the discourse on children’s re-education and conversion was portrayed differently in literature, reflecting the changes in Soviet society under Stalin and in the approach to street urchins and children in this period.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":43192,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347922000746","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LITERATURE, SLAVIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article examines how the discourse about the re-education of besprizorniki, street urchins, became closely interconnected with the debate around the concept of the New Soviet Man in the 1920s and 1930s. This made child homelessness the ideal field in which to test different pedagogical approaches and the power of either the individual or the collective in the process of reforging human souls. By comparing two prototypical novels on besprizornost’, Respublika SHKID (The Republic of SHKID, 1926) and Pedagogicheskaia poema (Pedagogical Poem, 1933–35), this article analyzes how the discourse on children’s re-education and conversion was portrayed differently in literature, reflecting the changes in Soviet society under Stalin and in the approach to street urchins and children in this period.
期刊介绍：
Russian Literature combines issues devoted to special topics of Russian literature with contributions on related subjects in Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak and Polish literatures. Moreover, several issues each year contain articles on heterogeneous subjects concerning Russian Literature. All methods and viewpoints are welcomed, provided they contribute something new, original or challenging to our understanding of Russian and other Slavic literatures. Russian Literature regularly publishes special issues devoted to: • the historical avant-garde in Russian literature and in the other Slavic literatures • the development of descriptive and theoretical poetics in Russian studies and in studies of other Slavic fields.
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