ABSTRACT
In his contribution to the present volume, Evgeny Dobrenko identifies the school tale as a genre that realizes the fantasies of adults and thus deprives children of a viable source of support at a crucial stage of life. His study raises important questions about the role of literature intended for youth, for if a literary tradition ostensibly devoted to the needs of children becomes appropriated by adults, youth literature is placed in the position of having to perform a number of corrective roles. As a rule, however, literature and other official social institutions for adolescents in the Soviet period did not acknowledge the deficiencies of children's literature but developed its own themes, genres, and practices. This literature, for and about youth but in most cases written by adults, presented its own mythology of adolescence, which, in the decades after the Second World War, may be viewed as a quest for heroic models of behavior in a period of relative peace.
