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The article analyzes the novellas “Kostya Ryabtsev’s Diary” by N. Ognev and “School” by A. Gaidar, which, on the one hand, continue the Bildungsroman tradition in Russian prose and, on the other hand, anticipate the birth of socialist realist literature. The aim of the study is to identify the features of the embodiment of the Bildungsroman genre tradition in these novellas. The study is original in that it is the first to analyze the phase of the socialist realist proto-canon in the context of the problem of the novel of personality formation based on the works of A. Gaidar and N. Ognev, which allows us not only to expand the scientific understanding of the artistic distinctness of socialist realism and its chronological boundaries, but also to comprehend the specifics of the refraction of the Bildungsroman tradition in them. As a result, it was found, firstly, that the genre tradition of the Bildungsroman, represented in these texts, embodies the general universal idea of the socialist realist novel – the education of workers in the spirit of socialist realism. Secondly, the markers of socialist realist consciousness, carried by the main characters, are: a clearly formed position in relation to the bourgeois class, a heightened sense of justice. Thirdly, A. Gaidar’s and N. Ognev’s protagonists have not yet come to an exclusive “positivity”: the process of transformation of Kostya Ryabtsev and Boris Gorikov is identical – it is a path from spontaneity to conscious obedience to the party. Finally, unlike that of the heroes of socialist realism, the personal development trajectory of A. Gaidar’s and N. Ognev’s heroes is a downward movement, down to the point of symbolic death.
Osmukhina et al. (2024) studied this question.