Portrayals of Disability in the Circle of Teenage Reading of the Twenty-First Century Anna Godiner (bio) Translated by Alexander A. Kharitonov Once, drawing a portrait of a middle-age man with a serious disability, the famous Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko gave him the following words, addressed to a couple of boys slightly older than ten: “A person is created for happiness as a bird is created for flight.” Isn’t it the age when they recognize the desire to strive for happiness? Striving for happiness is the key to every good book for teens, including the ones where there are characters with disabilities: happiness to accept themselves and to be accepted as an equal—with worth and love—in family, school, and society; happiness to have kind and faithful friends and to be a good friend; happiness to study what they want and what they can, to become a necessary and useful person for neighbors and for those far away. These images of happiness of a character with a disability to some varying degree depend on the image of disability itself as the leading motif of narration and inter-character interaction. It is a defining attribute of literary works worldwide that have characters with disabilities that enter the world of kids’ and teens’ reading. For nearly the first time in Russian fiction, images of happiness and disability as a common journey and labor of all characters appear in the short novel The Blind Musician by Vladimir Korolenko. These characters are so strong and convincing that they are relevant for teenagers even today. One of the teenage readers admits that the main lesson that she learned after having read this remarkable story is that one always needs to treat others with understanding, kindness, and charity. She felt that a person should not close her eyes on others’ troubles; nobody ever knows what can happen to any of us. People have to help each other, to be humane. It is also important not to lose heart, whatever happens. Whatever the circumstances, she said, one should remain human and never give up. In fact, this book was included in the Leopold Classic Library1 as the cultural heritage of humanity. [End Page 76] Naturally, in this short review, we can only discuss the main images of disability in books published in the last twenty years. Others are listed in the bibliographic index The Books That Help to Live2 at the Gaidar Central Moscow Library. The index covers the books and separate works, including ones by Russian writers, for children and teen readers that were written at different times but were published in the twenty-first century. As they say, all of us belong to our childhood. Therefore, the image of disability is often viewed through the eyes of the siblings of disabled children. Whenever a book was written, its essence was the same: it is necessary to comprehend what is happening and to let your siblings into your life (not all at once, of course)—to let them in despite your growth pains, in spite of bewilderment of peers, in spite of being hurt by their behavior at school and at home, in spite of their bad attitude, in spite of the deaf silence of adults when you have to guess everything from some snatches of conversation and half words. And if you finally let it all in with peace, it will be a priceless experience of knowing yourself and knowing human relationships. Examples are Lydia Charskaya’s Notes of a Little Grammar School Girl, Anna Nikolskaya’s I Am Going to Live in “Sweater,” Eugenia Basova’s Teenager Ashim, Svetlana Varfolomeyeva’s Mashka as the Symbol of Faith, and Anna Verbovskaya’s Angel Called Tolik. On the other hand, the family itself can become an image of disability comprising a lot of conflicts: one adult strives for healing even at the price of the loss of the family, and the other one simply wants to live. And only the daughter, a disabled teenager who knows for sure that all of them should be together, can reconcile them (Anna Nikolskaya’s Little Threshold). There is a lot of antagonism: how...
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Jan 17, 2024
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