Storying War Childhood in Al’bert Likhanov’s Russian Boys

This article examines the role of “cross-writing” in Al’bert Likhanov’s novel, Russian Boys (Russkie mal’chiki, 1960s-1990s), in which the author recasts his WWII childhood in autofictional form. As is frequently the case in autobiographical war fiction, the novel redefines the boundaries of childhood by calling attention to two narrative perspectives: the child’s perception of the changed surrounding world and the adult narrator’s perception of the states of abjection and trauma to which his young heroes are subjected. Likhanov’s novel is deeply personal and moving, yet it also tests the myth of protected Soviet childhood. In my analysis, I demonstrate how “cross-writing” helps the author not only to bring specific historical circumstances into the picture, but also to draw attention to the conditions of abjection and marginalization of Soviet children during the war. Ultimately, in Russian Boys, Likhanov shapes a narrative of hope and extraordinary personal psychological and moral growth “outside of the history of the experienced trauma.”