From the Military Secret to the Sacrament of Revolution: Ideology of Arkady Gaidar's Late Works

Student: Buyanovskaya Victoria

Educational Programme: Russian and Comparative Literature (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2020

My master’s thesis aims to provide a complete interpretation of Arkady Gaidar’s later works and to reconstruct his myth which is based on the idea of “magic” children of the same nature as the Revolution itself is. I consider the unfolding of the Military Secret as Gaidar’s “magisterial plot” that explores different aspects of Soviet childhood. In the three chapters of my thesis I discuss three stages of “initiation”: following the path through the “wonderland”, replacing Soviet pedagogical hierarchy with the phenomenon of children’s “self-organization”, finding with the help of Soviet Providence a direct or round-about way to the new grace.

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