Aesthetical Novelties in Russian Children’s Short Prose of the 1960-70s and Their Function in the Late Soviet Literary Process

The 1960s – 1970s were a period of development for the genre system of short prose and the time of flourishing for short short story in Russian literature. This process included children's literature as well. Children's writers experimented with micro-stories (“Malen'kiye skazki” by Gennady Tsyferov, Moscow: Malysh, 1968 and “Vremena goda” by Sergey Kozlov, Moscow: Malysh, 1973). Short prosaic forms were used for impressionistic sketches (as in Yury Koval and Tatiana Mavrina’s book “Steklyanniy Prud”, Moscow: Detskaya literatura, 1978) or the neo-absurdist game (short stories for children by Viktor Golyavkin). The work examines the transformation of poetics and the development of the genre system that took place in short children's prose in the 1960s and 1970s through the literary works of Gennady Tsyferov, Sergey Kozlov, Victor Dragunsky, Victor Golyavkin and Sergey Wolf. In the research the aesthetic innovations are considered in conjunction with institutional changes in children's literature of the 1960s, which means in particular the appearance of new publishing houses and the changing role of an editor figure in the Soviet publishing industry. Therefore, another object of the study is the Moscow publishing house “Detskiy mir” and the editorial policy of its chief editor, Yuri Timofeev.