New Eyewitnesses to the War

Children’s literature and cinema play a role in the formation of ideological attitudes to the episodes of the national history. Literary fiction has a special device to represent a temporary transition in historical fantastic story—the time travel plot. The article examines this subgenre using the material of children’s literature from the 1950s to the 2020s, highlighting the Soviet and post‐Soviet periods. The main focus of the study is the narrative about the Great Patriotic War, also known as the Eastern Front of World War II. In the Soviet period, the plot of time traveler finding themselves in the Great Patriotic War had two varieties: in accordance with one, the war is presented as a space for adventure and individual voluntarism (Lev Kvin, Leonid Martynyuk), while in the other version it is a space for empathy of descendants towards their once warring ancestors and personal communion with them (Vyacheslav Naumov, Yuri Yakovlev). While the tasks of the first model were limited to expanding the readers’ horizons and were ultimately educational, the second model turned to emotional participation as an instrument of ideological indoctrination and joining the heroic narrative of war. For Soviet writers Naumov and Yakovlev time travel serves as a device to emphasize the preservation of family memory about the fallen ancestor heroes (1970–1980s). Oleg Vereshchagin, a post-Soviet writer of the 2000s, uses the same plot the other way round: generational continuity is irrelevant, and memory of war cannot be passed to descendants. To his protagonist, a 21st century teenager, wartime fight against the evil is the only legitimate way of self-realization in modernity. Hence the same literary device (time travel into the past) can be employed to deliver both anti‐war and pro‐war message. This consolidates the idea that the literary form itself is devoid of ideological meaning

Linguistics · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia

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