Ivan Boldyrev’s Story Boys and Girls: On the Peculiarities of Poetics

The article analyses the poetics of émigré writer Ivan А. Boldyrev’s (real last name Shkott) story Boys and Girls. The author focuses on the techniques of incorporating images of the past into a work of fiction, as well as the story of growing up. The analysis is based on a decentered plot and compositional structure, organised by switching points of view, stylistic heterogeneity, and an inverse perspective provided by the author (the view from the émigré present of the Soviet past). The fragmentation of the composition deprives the narration of a defining central action. Discontinuity, difficulty of speech, cinematographic discreteness with alternating perspectives, and intentional intermittence function as an artistic equivalent of the disastrous history of the post-revolutionary years of Soviet Russia. The story creates a portrait of a teenager who draws the reader’s attention to the timeless nature of youth and, on the other hand, reflects the crucial nature of the time after the revolution, where a teenager’s consciousness is a kind of a touchstone. The analysis shows how the story of the first Soviet schoolchildren generation becomes a prelude to the future tragedy of “émigré sons”, the writers of the “Russian Montparnasse”, who experience a deep rupture of historic legacy and feel the need to reflect the consequences of this rupture in their artistic works.