Diana Antonello (Università degli Studi di Padova)
The besprizornost’, childhood homelessness, has represented a social plague of enormous dimensions for the Soviet Union, a phenomenon increased by the significant historical and social transformation which hit the country during the twentieth century. Considering the social significance and dimensions of the phenomenon, the besprizornost’ influenced the emergence of a literature related to child homelessness, in which this topic became a literature subgenre with a specific narration and imaginary.
My presentation will focus on the representations of besprizornost’ through an overview of the Soviet children’s literature during the 1920s and 1930s. It will in particular analyse how the literary character of the besprizornik has transformed according to the emergence of the Stalinist official ideology and the creation of the myth of the “happy childhood”. In the 1920s and 1930s, the main characters of Soviet children’s literature were, indeed, besprizorniki. The topic of child homelessness was initially linked to the narration of besprizorniki adventures and troubles on the streets and orphanages (detskij dom), where children had to prove themselves “worthy of survival”. The journey they had to complete to become honest members of the new Soviet society was full of obstacles and challenges, but also of unexpected and exciting adventures. This “romantic” vision of besprizornost’ was challenged at the end of the 1920s, when the character of the neglected child became functional to the ideological discourse which saw in street urchins, deprived of a family and home, the perfect “raw material” to be moulded in order to create the “new Soviet man”.