Volume 70, Issue 2

At the outset, the introduction to the Main topic explores the social significance of children’s and youth literature within its cultural contexts. It highlights the role of children’s and youth literature in the socialization process and its often supportive relationship with the prevailing ideological discourse (such as in socialist children’s and youth literature). The introduction then examines two models of imagined communities in postsocialist children’s and youth literature. On one hand, there are communities born from artistic imagination, offering alternatives to existing societies through the fantastic, including utopian or dystopian visions. On the other hand, there are narratives that present real-world communities, either affirming or questioning how collective identities are constructed. Finally, the five contributions in the Special Issue are introduced as examples of these two types of imagined communities and are summarized.

In the ongoing debate about identity in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, contemporary children’s literature assumes the potentially trailblazing task of mapping prevailing social discourses on identities while offering young readers alternative concepts of identity embedded in imaginative, fantastical narratives. This paper examines three such works, Batu and the Search for the Golden Cup by Zira Naurzbayeva and Lilya Kalaus (2014), Alʼka’s Silver Tamga by Nurayna Satpayeva (2022), and the story collection The Mysteries of the Land of Mountains and Steppes. A Literary Journey through Kazakhstan (2022). All three books construct an open and tolerant Kazakhstani community in which people of different origins live peacefully and respectfully with each other and in harmony with their surroundings, the country’s flora and fauna. The writers thus revitalise the civic discourse of identity while simultaneously opposing a nationalist discourse, not only the Kazakh but also the Russo-Imperial one, which continues to be present in Kazakhstan.

The adolescent heroes in the popular fantasy novels by Serbian author Uroš Petrović are often conceived as loners whose individual search for identity involves crossing the border into a fantastic world and confronting mythical enemies. In Petrović’s young adult novels The Fifth Butterfly (2007) and The Children of No Man’s Land (2013) the motifs of identity and initiation are linked with a mysterious collective, the Zlodolci (Inhabitants of the Evil Valley), who support the protagonists in their fight against their adversaries. This mysterious group, which operates on the social periphery and on the border between fantasy and reality, is conceived as an imagined community and as an alternative collective in the context of the adolescents’ search for identity. This becomes clear, for example, in the community’s ambivalent relationship to Serbian orthodoxy, but also through the characters’ actions in the Balkan wilderness, which reflect the romantic notion of a return to nature in order to find oneself.

This paper focuses on three contemporary historical books for children or young adults dedicated to life under communism or a totalitarian regime: Petr Sís’ The Wall: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain (2007), Pavel Čech’s A (2016), and Michal Klíma’s Scouts’ Search for How the Communists Ruled Us (2021). It examines how indoctrination and lack of freedom affect the individual and his or her relationship to the masses. The imagined communities in the books include Soviet-era totalitarian communities as well as Western and post-totalitarian ones. It turns out that totalitarian communities are less homogeneous than one might think.

For the past decade, research on Cuba has increasingly focused on the cultural influences of Soviet-style socialism and its persistence in contemporary Cuba. On the part of Eastern European studies, the cultural relations between the two regions and the perception of Cuba in Eastern European cultures have been neglected for a long time. With regard to children’s culture such studies are lacking entirely. During socialism, however, children’s culture became a catalyst of imagined community between the countries of Eastern Europe and Cuba. Using examples from Soviet children’s literature the article examines the differing strategies used by authors of children’s literature to portray this relationship. Thereby it becomes apparent that the narratives do not only serve the creation of an imagined community with Cuba, but also the self-perception of Soviet society – either in a reinforcing or self-critical way. To this end the authors make use of the metaphorical and real opposition between children and adults familiar from colonial and imperialist discourses.

In the three volumes of the Soviet children’s classic by Nikolai Nosov, published between 1954 and 1965, the finger-sized mite Neznayka and his friends have adventures between Flower City and Green City, encountering technological progress in the utopian Sun City and the anti-utopian Moon City. The korotyshki’s autonomous way of life in their fantasy world, a natural idyll whose resources are nonetheless being exploited, probably had as much to do with the success of the trilogy as it had with the educational progress of the main character. This article examines the topicality of the trilogy through a cultural-ecological reading. It uses nature and the environment as text-analytical categories to illuminate the literary staging of the nature-culture relationship and its social conditions as reflected in ecological narratives.

The article presents a hypothesis regarding the evolution of the meanings of selected Polish lexemes, which, in addition to their basic senses, have developed secondary non-predicative meanings, and both of them function parallelly in the contemporary Polish; these are: całkiem , zupełnie ‘entirely/quite’, właściwie ‘properly/actually’, zasadniczo ‘strictly/basically’, pewnie ‘confidently/probably’, and with important reservations fakt ‘fact’. What is characteristic of them is that the derived meaning is in some aspects opposite to the primary one, hence they can be seen as examples of enantiosemy (in a broad sense of this term). In the presented interpretation, supported by many examples from the Polish corpora, the semantic change in question is triggered by the mechanism of hyperbolisation. The speaker’s “exaggerated speech”, if recognised as such by the recipient, may not result in the latter rejecting the utterance as incompatible with reality, but in a kind of adjustment, in which they actually read less information from what is said. Repeated situations of this kind may ultimately cause the “lowering” of semantic expectations regarding these words in general. Therefore, the meaning shift can be understood here as related to the switch of perspective from the speaker-oriented to addressee-oriented, and it is based on the conventionalisation of specific pragmatic effects connected with the use of these words in their original senses, in particular contexts.

Both passives and impersonal constructions demote agents, and personal passives also promote patients. The present paper reports two questionnaire studies on Polish aimed at answering the question whether this has an effect on the prominence status of agent and patient referents in upcoming discourse. In a forced-choice scenario, participants had to pick one out of two possible continuations after a stimulus, one containing the (implicit) agent and one the (always explicitly mentioned) patient of the stimulus sentence. Additionally, they were asked to give an acceptability rating, and their reaction times were recorded. No matter whether the stimulus contained a short personal passive, a -no/-to impersonal, or a personal active construction, participants invariably preferred the agent over the patient (at a rate of about 50 % vs. 40 %, with 10 % opting for ‘neither’). The findings allow to conclude that agent demotion and patient promotion only have local effects within the sentence or clause but do not affect the prominence structure of upcoming discourse.