Soviet Mythology in Children's Literature

Abstract

The article dwells upon the mythological and archetypal nature of the central topics of Soviet children's literature. The mechanism of merging heterogeneous symbolic elements and connecting the incompatible is revealed with the help of active reference to literary texts, which is a clear sign of mythologism. The synthetic nature of mythologemes in children's literature is associated with the combined influence on the writer, the idea and its embodiment of the Slavic folklore tradition, the foreign literary tradition of the adventure novel and Soviet ideology (on the one hand, neo-mythological in its nature, on the other hand, romanticizing characters, thirdly, describing so-called “religious atheism”). Soviet mythologism is considered in the context of the broader universal concept of neomythologism.