Narrating love in Soviet adolescent literature of the 1930s: Ruvim Fraerman's the Wild Dog Dingo; Or, A tale about first love

Abstract

This article article discusses the evolution of femininity in Soviet children's literature. In prerevolutionary narratives, authors typically portrayed the female heroine as sweet, pretty, and obedient, often an orphan who won over people's hearts through love and dedication. After the 1917 Revolution, a "sugary sweet" prototype of the female character in children's literature was replaced by a more gender-neutral identity and explicit femininity came to epitomize bourgeois values. Increasingly girls were portrayed more androgynous looking and physically and emotionally strong. I discuss femininity in the context of coming-of-age fiction and focuses on the theme of adolescent love in Soviet literature of the 1920s-1930s. I argue that although the question of love was typically avoided in children's literature of that time, some texts broke out of the established conventions and brought to the forefront the discussion of love and emotional maturation of their female characters. I then illustrate this argument with Ruvim Fraerman's school novella, "A Wild Dog Dingo, or The Story of First Love" (1938) that establishes strong intertextual references to classic Russian literature. Heavily criticized for its "petty-bourgeois" attention to feelings, Fraerman's novella, nevertheless, remained for years one of the favorite readings of Soviet youth. © 2014 The Russian Review.