In the service of ideology: ‘The Civil War’ in the Adventure Literature of the 1920s and 1930s for Young Readers

Abstract

The subject of the study is the interpretation of the Civil War theme in adventure literature for young readers in the Ukrainian SSR. The purpose of the article is to analyse the transformation of adventure genres into a means of ideological influence in Ukrainian children’s literature and to identify the national specificity of this process, including the existence of works of the counter-canon. The latter determines the novelty of the study, since the Soviet practice of transforming children’s literature into a means of social engineering is considered mainly on the basis of Russian literature, so such an aspect of this strategy as denationalisation remains unnoticed.

As the use of entertainment genres for ideological purposes continues to be used by ideologised societies, a thorough analysis and evaluation of this practice, as well as resistance to it, is an urgent task of literary studies in the context of the current war.

To achieve this goal, the cultural-historical and structuralist methods were used.

The study proves that the policy of Ukrainisation contributed to the fact that in the works of Ukrainian literature for young people the Civil War was interpreted as one that destroyed the empire and made possible the development of nations and ethnic groups. At the same time, the narrative of children’s aid to the Red Army was shaped by Bolshevik ideology and Russian models. The works that embody it  usually have a narrow space and pseudo-historical time. Later, this narrative spreads to other adventure genres, including detective and science fiction novels, turning the civil war into a means of structuring the world. In these works, the civil war was ongoing, which meant that there was no possibility of coming to terms with the past. Thus, the idea of national unity in space and time, cultivated by the Ukrainian Renaissance, was being destroyed at its core.