Entering and Leaving Childhood: Threshold Poetics in Sergei Aksakov and Erkin A'zam

The paper compares two narratives that stand at opposite ends of childhood: Sergei Aksakov's  Childhood Years of Bagrov's Grandson  (1858), which tells how a child enters the world of perception, and  three novellas by the Uzbek writer Erkin A'zam (The Street of Little Devils,  Ice Cream  and  Farewell to  the Fairy Tale), which tell how a child leaves childhood behind. Using the anthropological concept of the  threshold (van Gennep, Turner), narratology and the typological method of comparative literature, the  paper argues that the two traditions mark the boundary of childhood differently. In Aksakov the threshold  is crossed through a widening of perception and the gradual accumulation of impressions; in Erkin A'zam  it is crossed through a moral event, the discovery of adult untruth and the need to choose. The contrast  illustrates  a  broader  tendency:  Russian  prose  places  the  meaning  of  childhood  in  the  growth  of  consciousness, while Uzbek prose places it in conduct and moral trial.