Article

Name: The story “Childhood” by L. N. Tolstoy as a pretext of “Luvers’s Childhood” by B. Pasternak

Authors: Abramova K. V.

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract:

The theme of childhood, being of particular importance in the 20th century, was influenced by the tradition of describing the child’s worldview in the stories of growing up in the 19th century. This work considers the story “Childhood” written by L. N. Tolstoy as a pretext to another story “Luvers’s Childhood” by B. Pasternak. We analyze the echoes that arise between two stories. The method of defamiliarization (ostranenie) causes the world of childhood to be transformed into a world filled with things that exist in the space of memory and therefore undergo transformations. Although being almost imperceptible in Tolstoy’s story, this transformation of things in Pasternak’s story results in an enormous number of associations growing out of each image. While indicating the difference in using defamiliarization approach in the 19th and 20th centuries, we argue that the impressionistic perception caused by this method is already present in Leo Tolstoy’s text. Also, the analysis covers the theme of memories and the associated motifs of the border and its crossing and the themes of sleeping and awakening, vision through dreams. These themes and motifs arising in the story of growing up suggest the authors to have introduced borderline situations and states into the narrative. Such a tradition in the Russian story of childhood, already having been presented in Tolstoy’s “Childhood”, was preserved in the works of the 20th century.

Keywords: story of growing up, childhood, estrangement, L. N. Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak, “Luvers’s Childhood”, image of a child, pretext, memory, boundary, dream motif

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