“Warming Someone’s Soul with Your Own Hands”: Ruvim Fraerman’s Children’s Prose and the Legacy of Russian Modernism

ABSTRACT

In her article, Maria Maiofis argues that Ruvim Fraerman’s 1939 work Wild Dog Dingo, Or a Story of First Love [Dikaia sobaka Dingo, ili Povest’ o pervoi liubvi] is not primarily intended as a story of adolescent love but rather of the vicissitudes of a teenaged girl’s relationship with her divorced parents. Fraerman’s treatment of adolescent psychology and the difficult path into adulthood reflects the legacy of Russian modernist prose and aspects of psychoanalytic theory, which he may have become familiar with firsthand in the 1910s or 1920s or indirectly through Russian modernist prose.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet children’s literature; adolescence; family relationships; parents; Ruvim Fraerman

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Notes

1. For example, two editions came out in 2016, four in 2017, and one each in 2018 and 2019.

2. See: http://www.detmobib.ru/files/100knig.pdf (accessed 8 July 2020).

3. Consider, for example, the prose of Jack London, or James Aldridge’s ‘The Last Inch,’ which was much loved in the Soviet Union (and written, admittedly, much later than Fraerman’s story).

4. Marina Balina was the first to advance the idea that an attentive reader would assume that Kolya’s parents were victims of the Terror in an article devoted to Fraerman’s story (Balina, 2008).

5. A doshka or dokha is a fur coat with a fur lining.