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The narration from the child's perspective and the author's position in contemporary short prose books for children ("The Cedar Elephant" by A. Anisimova) // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2026. Issue 1 (243). P. 108-117

The narration from the perspective of a child character is often found in modern short prose books for children (A. Orlova, A. Petrova, A. Anisimova, S. Makhotin, etc.). It is significant for such books to understand the hierarchy of adult and child voices, identities. In the literature of the 19th and 20th centuries (autobiographical prose about childhood, teenage novels of the 1960s and 80s, etc.) the text structure clearly embodied the voice of an adult narrator, who commented, drew conclusions, and corrected the mistakes of a child character. In modern books of short prose for children there are no such explicit forms of expression of the author's identity, which is associated with the specifics of children's literature today (avoiding didacticism, inviting a child to play, communication co-reflection; addressing the text to a child and an adult). These features require a solution to the question how the position of the adult speaker is realized in books of short prose with narration from the perspective of a child. Is there really no didacticism in such texts, or does it take on other unobvious forms? Finally, are short prose books for children bi-address, and how is being the addressing done? During the research, a number of conclusions about the specifics of the author's position and the forms of addressing in А. Anisimova's "The Cedar Elephant". The author's position is not characterized by open didacticism – the "modality of knowledge" (V.I. Tjupa) appears only at the beginning of the book, mediated by children's consciousness and then replaced by other “modalities"; the "modality of persuasion" taken into a subtext, addressed to at adult as well. The author's position reviewed is akin to the careful position of the "modality of understanding". If addressing a child in the books under consideration occurs at the level of the plot-character and through the visual side of the book, then addressing to an adult is embodied primarily in building a corpus of texts – division of books into sections, presence of doublet texts, etc.

Keywords: bi-addressing, the narration from the perspective of a child, a child narrator, author's position, a book of short prose, modern children's literature