The specifics of the artistic interpretation of the theme of war in the stories of Yu. Yakovlev’s “Where the battery stood” and “Ivan-Willis”

The research material is two short stories by the classic of Soviet literature for children Y. Ya. Yakovlev, united by the theme of the Great Patriotic War: “Where the Battery Stood” (1967) and “Ivan-Willis” (1982). The analysis revealed the artistic features of understanding this topic. The writer combines two plans in space-time poetics (the post-war and the military world being restored in memories), the presence of two generations in the character system is significant – veterans and schoolchildren who were born already in peacetime. Yu. Yakovlev uses various techniques to show the process of starting the work of the memory of the war. In the story “Where the battery stood” these are symbolic images connecting war and peace (poplars destroyed by the Nazis and a school bell resembling the sound of a siren); in “Ivan-Willis” – a car that was perceived by the owner, and then by a teenager as a comrade, colleague, songs and even the weather, evoking memories of military events. In the poetics of short stories, the techniques of psychologism are significant (the use of various syntactic constructions to convey the inner state of a character, portrait characteristics and behavior showing emotions, feelings, thoughts and their dynamics). The stories have a weakly expressed plot level, the emphasis is on the inner life of the characters, on changing their consciousness, on the formation of values. At the center of the ideological content of the stories is the familiarization of post–war generations of schoolchildren with the memory of past events, the formation of post-memory (in M. Hirsch’s terminology) and the joint experience of different generations through dialogue, friendship, and common cause. Yuri Yakovlev defends the importance of the idea of the continuity of time, that modern peaceful life has been achieved at the cost of the efforts of the front-line generation. Therefore, it is important for new generations to realize their responsibility to contemporaries and descendants for preserving historical memory. In the texts of Yu. Yakovlev on the Great Patriotic War comprehends the way of formation of the child’s personality and the formation of his worldview through familiarization with the memory of the tragic past of the Motherland and the people.

literature for children, Yu. Yakovlev, The Great Patriotic War, the theme of memory, post-memory, remembrance