«ИЗВЛЕКАЙ ИЗ ВСЕГО НАИБОЛЬШУЮ ПОЛЬЗУ»: МИР КАК РЕСУРС В ДЕТСКОЙ НЕХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ 1920-Х ГГ.

Abstract

The article discusses the process of building a “resource approach” in relation to nature in early Soviet children’s non-fiction. On examples from books on energy, technology, minerals, flora and fauna, it is shown how the sentimentalization of nature is abandoned and redirected towards consumer discourse. Methodologically the article is in the zone of intersection of literary approaches, adhering to the tradition of rhetoric studies and attempts to contextualize it, using the arsenal of digital humanities and automated construction of concordance according to the lemmas “benefit”, “useful”, “use” with the corpus tool (DetKorpus). The analysis of the identified contexts of word usage demonstrates how, with the help of the concept of “benefit”, authors create a new way of nature management in the readers’ minds, in which “taking advantage” becomes a key condition in interaction with the outside world. With regard to the extraction of raw materials, energy resources, the development of territories, and wildlife, authors use the rhetoric of “metaphorical violence” – the suppression and coercion of free natural forces that should be put at the service of man. Such ideological components of this phenomenon as the campaign to promote the first five-year plan and M. Gorky’s texts, conceptualizing the project of an anthropocentric world, in which a person acts as a source of power, reorganizing the “first nature” into culture – “second nature”, are considered. The existence of a special trend within the framework of non-fiction, formed by a specific author’s rhetoric, with a double pragmatics of texts, consisting not only the translation of ideas, but also involvement of children in economic and production processes, is summarized.