Chronotope as a Factor in Personality Formation: A Comparative Study of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and Gafur Gulam's Shum bola

This article examines how literary space-time, defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as the chronotope, shapes the formation of a child’s personality in two novels from different cultural traditions: Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–39) and Gafur Gulam’s Shum bola (1936). Although the works belong to different historical contexts, Victorian England and late imperial Turkestan, both place a socially vulnerable child at the centre of a hostile urban world and trace how that world acts upon him. Using Bakhtin’s typology of chronotopes (the road, the threshold, the idyll, adventure time and everyday time) combined with a comparative-typological method, the study shows that Oliver Twist builds personality as an essence that is tested and finally recognised, so that its chronotopes work as stages of ordeal leading to restored identity. Shum bola, by contrast, builds personality as a process of adaptation, in which the everyday, communal chronotopes of the street, bazaar and neighbourhood, together with the double time of retrospective first-person narration, make the hero an active, humorous, self-fashioning subject. The comparison suggests that chronotope is not only a formal category but a model of how each culture understands the making of a person: providential and recognitive in Dickens, social and dialogic in G‘ulom.