THE CATEGORY OF AGE IN THE POETICS OF GIRLS' HANDWRITTEN STORIES

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.18522/1995-0640-2026-3-160-173

In girls’ handwritten stories - a genre of naive literature that flourished among adolescent girls in Russia from the 1970s through the 1990s - the category of age functions not merely as a biographical parameter but as a structure-forming element of poetics. For the young female author, the very act of writing becomes a means of comprehending her own coming of age, and the narrative voice is invariably situated within a clearly defined age framework. Age markers, typically ranging from fourteen to twenty-one years, acquire an initiatory function: each threshold - fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years and beyond - carries stable semantics that actively shape the organisation of the plot and the development of the love conflict. These age boundaries are rarely neutral; they serve as narrative turning points that determine the heroine’s social status, her degree of autonomy, and her access to romantic experience. The study reveals a pronounced gender asymmetry in the representation of age. Whereas the heroine’s age is meticulously specified and endowed with symbolic significance, the hero’s age remains either approximate or entirely omitted, underscoring the genre’s orientation toward the girl’s subjective experience of maturation. In addition to age thresholds, the poetics of the genre foregrounds two key temporal markers - the birthday and the graduation party - which function as plot manifestations of the transition from childhood to adulthood. These ritualised moments condense the conflict between generational norms and individual desire, often serving as the setting for declarations of love, farewells, or the heroine’s first act of self-determination. The analysis demonstrates that in this genre age operates not as a mere chronological characteristic but as a key instrument of initiation and the primary measure of life events. The narrative logic is subordinated to the rhythms of a maturing consciousness: time is experienced as a series of emotionally charged thresholds, and the passage from one age to another is depicted as a stage in the heroine’s symbolic entry into the adult world. Thus, the category of age in girls’ handwritten stories transcends its denotative function, becoming a central organisational principle of both narrative structure and the representation of self-awareness in the process of growing up.

Key words: naive literature, girls' handwritten story, poetics, plot formation, category of artistic time