I. V. Klypina, E. Y. Shestakova
Pomeranian State University named after M. V. Lomonosov, Severodvinsk, Russian Federation
Central library named after N. V. Gogol, Severodvinsk, Russian Federation
Artistic interpretation of the childhood theme in the stories by Fyodor Sologub
Abstract. Our research is in the trend of literary science studying the theme of childhood in the works of Fyodor Sologub, the Russian writer of the late XIX – early XX century. The aim of the research is to reveal the features of the artistic understanding of the childhood theme in the stories by F. Sologub. The following stories by F. Sologub writen in 1897–1912 “Lelka”, “Sting of death”, “Elkich”, “Light and shadows”, “Worm”, “Earthly to Earth”, “Beauty”, “Dream on stones”, “Smile” became the material for the study. The research is based on the methods of interpretation, comparison, observation and generalization. The results showed that the image of childhood presented in the stories by F. Sologub is introduced into a serious ideological and meaningful context; the theme of the tragic position of a child in the earthly world, the image of a child-victim, a child-martyr becomes the leading semantic dominant of the works. Fyodor Sologub’s interest to the artistic study of the childhood theme was due to the internal need to show the global perception and worldview of a child, to reveal the depth of his emotional experiences and reflections. Personal impressions of his childhood and the intensity of artistic and aesthetic searches at the era of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries determined the author’s choice of artistic means to reveal the childhood theme. The repertoire of the author’s interpretation of images and motifs developing the childhood theme gains depth and ambiguity. Images-symbols and motifs of stories (shadows, darkness, light, beauty, symbolism of the color scheme) serve to express the individual author’s understanding of a child’s image living between reality and otherness, experiencing the weight of earthly adversity. The stories emphasize the theme of loneliness of a child hero, images of madness and spiritual death. Portrait descriptions, highlighting the dominant details and cross-cutting images in them, help to reveal the inner world of the child characters, identify the key ideas of the works. The contrast principle guides the writer in depicting the features of the children’s worldview and the chronotopic structure of the stories (light and shadow, life and death, evil and good, purity and sin). The motif of children’s images ambivalence is widely developed in the stories. The category of double world becomes the leading one in the figurative and metaphorical solution of the works. The childhood theme in Sologubov’s stories is widely supported by the introduction of symbolism images and motifs, decadent aesthetics, naturalism, the philosophical ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and Slavic mythology. The literary texts have richness in color images, contrast comparisons, they are focus on the portrait characteristics of characters, the abundance of motivic and categorical spectrum shape and spatial structure; it all testifies to the originality of the author’s childhood theme realization. The symbolist writer is the successor of the direction of Russian realistic literature of the XIX century, which developed the theme of hard childhood including consideration of the issue of corporal punishment for children, the problem of “fathers and children”, the theme of sufferings and humiliation of a childd.
Keywords: childhood theme, short stories, Fyodor Sologub, artistic understanding, Russian literature, creativity.
Paper submitted: March, 15, 2020.
For citation: Klypina I. V., Shestakova E. Y. (2021) Artistic interpretation of the childhood theme in the stories by Fyodor Sologub. The Science of Person: Humanitarian Researches, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 22–31. DOI: 10. 17238/issn1998-5320. 2021.15.2.3.
