Children learning about Leo Tolstoy: Narrative strategies

Abstract

The article is devoted to an urgent problem of modern humanitarianism – narrative strategies in literary biographies. We summarize and systematize literary and methodological studies devoted to representations of documentary and biographical material in the works aimed at the child reader. The article identifies basic principles of constructing such narratives: describing mainly the events of childhood and adolescence of the person being portrayed, omitting facts that can traumatize the child’s psyche, as well as controversial ones in their ethical and historical assessment. The realization of these attitudes is traced in the collection of memoirs “Tolstoy’s Garden”, the popular science essay by K. Lomunov and the fictionalized biography by A. Strokina. The article emphasizes the genre traditions of anecdote, heroic legend and parable, which are genetically embedded in biographical narratives. Special attention is paid to the intersection of the semantic dominants of Leo Tolstoy’s own memories of his childhood and the memories about the writer left by his descendants, students of his school and the children who met with him in Yasnaya Polyana and Khamovniki. We note that the child’s point of view determines the specific features underlying the literary world of A. Strokina’s book and reveal additional meanings that arise due to presenting a real person as a narrator, who is part of the Tolstoy family. The conclusion is made about the combination of documentary principles and the tendency to mythologize the writer’s personality in the works aimed at a children’s readership.