V. Erl’ and D. Makrinov’s Short Story “How Kolya Nikolaev Was Sitting
in the Porridge. Story Told by the Pioneer Sasha Mironov”: Porridge Semiotics
in Children’s Stories

The article entitled “V. Erl and D. Makrinov’s short story How
Kolya Nikolaev was sitting in the porridge. Story told by the pioneer Sasha
Mironov” examines how the authors used clichés and the popular motifs of nauseous
porridge and a policeman putting things in order to create a text which can
be viewed simultaneously as a real event that had happened in a pioneers’ summer
camp and as a parody of the children’s literature production of the period,
and also as the Khelenukts’ game which was inherent to the Khelenukts’ poetics
as well as to their everyday life. The plot describes an event in the pioneers’
summer camp. The porridge served for breakfast to kids turned out to be uneatable
and so it was thrown out near the camp’s fence where it was discovered by
a policeman who ordered to bury it. The short story was written in 1966. It was
intended to be published as a story for children and so it had the typical attributes
of the genre. However the story was written in accordance with the
Khelenukts’ poetics as well. The characteristic Khelenukts’ strategies such as
alogism in spite of seeming presence of the plot, play on words, names, and language,
parodying of popular literature clichés, are present in the text. The characters’
names in the story belong to the Khelenukts themselves, their friends and
acquaintances, or to the literary characters which semantically have nothing to
do with the plot. The names of the well-known poets are given to the caricature
figures. The story was written as a boy’s monolog. It was common for the stories
for kids to be written as a “child’s naive monologue”. Such were Nosov’s,
Dragunsky’s, Panteleev’s popular stories. The difference is in the endings. Unlike
children’s stories, Erl and Makrinov’s doesn’t end with a stilted morale.
Instead the final event in the linkage of those absurd occurrences is a catastrophe
that destroys the quasi logical chain of events as it is typical in folk-tales
with cumulative plot and in Khurms’s works.
Kharms’s works were not available to the authors at the time. However the
strategies and motifs used in the story are very alike to some rhetorical strategies
of Kharms’s “Events” and to the separate motifs of his miniatures. Khelenukts
made their statement about their contemporary reality and children’s literature
using a different logic. This logic was uncustomary and unusual for the children’s
literature of the time; it broke existing common patterns of such literature
by carrying them to the point of absurdity. The result was an inversion of the
commonplace plot pattern with a policeman or porridge which was typical for the children’s literature. Instead of didactic story it turns out to be a literary
game, a parody of the ideal world of children’s literature where the policemen
are always ideal and misbehaved kids are sorry. Playing tricks and jokes on each
other was the communication style for the authors and their friends mentioned
in the story. The story itself, fully invented, was just one more jest.