Why is the story called: “The Wild Dog Dingo, or the Tale of. “Characteristics of Filka’s image in the work “The Tale of First Love Wild Dog Dingo” analysis of the work
“The Wild Dog Dingo, or the Tale of First Love” is the most famous work of the Soviet writer R.I. Fraerman. The main characters of the story are children, and it was written, in fact, for children, but the problems posed by the author are distinguished by their seriousness and depth.
ContentWhen the reader opens the work “The Wild Dog Dingo, or the Tale of First Love,” the plot captures him from the first pages. The main character, schoolgirl Tanya Sabaneeva, at first glance looks like all girls her age and lives the ordinary life of a Soviet pioneer. The only thing that distinguishes her from her friends is her passionate dream. An Australian dingo dog is what the girl dreams about. Tanya is raised by her mother; her father left them when her daughter was just eight months old. Returning from a children's camp, the girl discovers a letter addressed to her mother: her father says that he intends to move to their city, but with new family: wife and adopted son. The girl is filled with pain, rage, and resentment towards her stepbrother, because, in her opinion, it was he who deprived her of her dad. On the day of her father’s arrival, she goes to meet him, but does not find him in the bustle of the port and gives a bouquet of flowers to a sick boy lying on a stretcher (later Tanya will learn that this is Kolya, her new relative).
Developments
The story about the dingo dog continues with a description of the school group: Kolya ends up in the same class where Tanya and her friend Filka study. A kind of rivalry for their father’s attention begins between the half-brother and sister; they constantly quarrel, and Tanya, as a rule, is the initiator of the conflicts. However, gradually the girl realizes that she is in love with Kolya: she constantly thinks about him, is painfully shy in his presence, and with a sinking heart awaits his arrival at New Year's holiday. Filka is very dissatisfied with this love: he treats his old friend with great warmth and does not want to share her with anyone. The work “The Wild Dog Dingo, or the Tale of First Love” depicts the path that every teenager goes through: first love, misunderstanding, betrayal, the need to make difficult choices and, ultimately, growing up. This statement can be applied to all the characters in the work, but most of all to Tanya Sabaneeva.
The image of the main character
Tanya is the “dingo dog”, that’s what the team called her for her isolation. Her experiences, thoughts, and tossing allow the writer to emphasize the girl’s main features: self-esteem, compassion, understanding. She wholeheartedly sympathizes with her mother, who continues to love her ex-husband; She struggles to understand who is to blame for the family discord, and comes to unexpectedly mature, sensible conclusions. Seemingly a simple schoolgirl, Tanya differs from her peers in her ability to feel subtly and in her desire for beauty, truth, and justice. Her dreams of uncharted lands and a dingo dog emphasize her impetuosity, ardor, and poetic nature. Tanya’s character is most clearly revealed in her love for Kolya, to which she devotes herself with all her heart, but at the same time does not lose herself, but tries to realize and comprehend everything that is happening.
There are works that youth walk with you through life hand in hand, firmly entering your heart. They make you happy, sad, console and make you empathize. This is exactly the book I want to tell you about now. " Wild Dog Dingo, or the Tale of First Love" - This the whole world beautiful and noble feelings, a world of kind and brave people.
Reading this story, with some inner feeling, you understand that it was written by a very good person and talented writer. Therefore, such works leave a bright mark on the soul; they evoke in us an explosion of feelings, thoughts, emotions, dreams and tenderness. A happy and subtle book was written by Reuben Isaevich Fraerman about the girl Tanya, a girl who dreams of distant unknown countries, the Australian dog Dingo. Strange dreams and fantasies disturb her. And this is a story about the boys Filka and Kolka, the smart and courageous Colonel Sabaneev, Tanya’s sad mother and the sensitive teacher Alexandra Ivanovna. In general, this poetic and good book, about good and noble people. And let them not have an easy and simple life. Sorrow and happiness, sadness and joy alternate in their lives. They are brave and responsive, both when they are sad and when they are happy. They always behave with dignity, are attentive to people and take care of their family and friends. Tanya considers Filka to be her best and devoted friend. He is kind and simple-minded, but he has a brave and warm heart. And friendship with Tanya is not just friendship. This is love. Timid, pure, naive, first...
Reuben Fraerman V " The Wild Dog Dingo, or Tales of First Love"very accurately and soulfully depicts the sensual world of a teenager, the transformation of a girl into a girl, a boy into a young man. Psychologically accurately describes the age when the soul of a teenager rushes about in search of something incomprehensible and unknown. And yesterday’s children understand that the time has come to grow up, and the most beautiful, most unique feeling has come into their world - first love. And it’s a pity that for Filka, she, the purest, most sublime, first love for Tanya, turned out to be unrequited. But the writer found the right words to evoke in his reader feelings of compassion for Filka and joy for him. Yes, Tanya sees him only as a friend, but pure and young love for this girl elevates Filka, he feels and perceives the surrounding reality in a new way. And Tanya fell in love with Kolya. The popular wisdom is right: “From love to hate there is one step.” Long before Kolya’s arrival, Tanya hated her father, his wife and a boy she did not know. It was to them that Tanya believed that her father left the family, leaving his wife and very young daughter. And although Tanya didn’t remember him at all, she really missed her dad. And so, many years later, Tanya’s father and his new family come to the town where Tanya and her mother live. The girl is confused. She both wants and doesn't want to see her father. But Tanya’s mother really hopes that her daughter will get closer to her father and insists on their meetings. Tanya began to visit the Sabaneevs. She was very envious to look at family life father, how he looks at his wife, Nadezhda Petrovna, jokes with Kolya, Nadezhda Petrovna’s nephew, the boy to whom Tanya’s dad replaced his father. Tanya thinks that her father won’t look at her like that, and he won’t joke with her like that. And her heart ached with resentment. But despite this, she was very much drawn to the cozy atmosphere of this family. And she was also very offended that Kolya did not pay attention to her. He studies in the same class with her, sits next to her at family dinners, and plays billiards. But it seems to Tanya that she does not occupy his thoughts as much as he occupies hers. Tanya does not yet understand that she has fallen in love with Kolya; she cannot recognize love in her rebellious actions. She constantly quarrels with Kolya, mocks Filka, cries and laughs out of place. It’s not easy at 15 years old to understand what is happening to you. And only teacher Anna Ivanovna guesses what happened to her student. Anna Ivanovna noticed that Tanya had become somewhat depressed. “How often does she find her in lately and sad and absent-minded, and yet every step of her is filled with beauty. Maybe, in fact, love slid its quiet breath across her face? How beautifully said! Sincerely and sincerely! We hear the music of the word. And I want to take a deep breath and smile, and for some vague and captivating dreams, like Tanya Sabaneeva’s, to come to us. Even if it’s about the wild dog Dingo. Such is the power of art and the power of words.
Happy reading!
Fraerman R.I. Wild dog Dingo, or the Tale of First Love. - M.: Onyx, 2011. - 192 pp. - (Russian schoolchildren's library). - ISBN 978-5-488-02537-0
Plot and compositional aspects of revealing the inner world of the main character of the story “The Wild Dog Dingo, or the Tale of First Love”
We meet the main character of the story during one of the difficult periods in the life of every person - she is fifteen years old. This is adolescence, a transitional age, which is characterized by its own characteristics. At this time, self-awareness awakens, internal and external conflicts are brewing, difficulties in expressing one’s feelings and states, misunderstanding of oneself results in misunderstanding on the part of others, a great desire to be understood and to understand others. These traits common to all teenagers are also manifested in Tanya Sabaneeva. In the story, however, there are no tedious descriptions of the heroine’s psychological state, the rationale for her actions and internal monologues. Her inner world is revealed through the plot and composition of the work.
Among other plot-compositional aspects of revealing her image, I would like to highlight the relationship with her parents, which develops and changes as the girl grows up, and love as a plot-compositional element, since love can be considered as an event that changed the main Tanya.
Tanya grew up without a father, because... he left the family when she was very young. Of course, this circumstance affected Tanya’s personality. She steadfastly endured any situation, trying to be a support for her mother. Tanya’s attitude towards her mother is given a lot of touching lines in the story: “The chest is embarrassed by a bitter and tender feeling that brings tears to the eyes. Where does it come from? Is it the smell of her mother’s hands and face, or the smell of her clothes, or is it her look, softened by constant care, which Tanya carries in her memory everywhere and always?”
And at the same time, as often happens with teenagers, there is something that Tanya cannot trust even to her mother. She is not always comfortable in the house they live in. And although she often remains “the mistress of her leisure and desires,” but, as the author writes, “only she knew how this freedom weighed on her. There are no sisters or brothers in the house. And mom is often gone.”
She often had to be forced to remain alone, and her attitude towards this loneliness became the criterion of her adulthood, because “Before, every time her mother got ready to leave the house, Tanya began to cry, but now she only thought about her with incessant tenderness.”
The fact that Tanya grew up alone may have made her thoughtful; silence and solitude formed in her a special sensitive attitude to nature and the world around her.
As already mentioned, hidden from everyone internal drama there was the absence of a father in Tanya’s life. The figure of her father periodically appears in her mind, but since she is not familiar with him, it is not filled with any emotional meaning for her. Meeting her father, getting to know him, accepting him - all this will become a serious test for Tanya.
The appearance of her father discovers her internal conflict, which is expressed in the following lines: “Isn’t it out of pride that she always keeps silent about him? And if she has to say a few words, doesn’t her heart break into pieces?”
It is this conflict that defines one of the core lines of the narrative, which is intertwined with the line of Tanya’s relationship with Kolya. The teenager is trying to master the concept of pride for himself: since he once abandoned him and his mother, it means that now she should not love him, on the other hand, there is an urgent need for his father, for his care, for a feeling of security that only he can give, the need for his love and support. This conflict between the attitudes that Tanya gives herself and her feelings permeates many scenes of her meeting with her father.
So, convincing herself that she was not at all going to go to the pier to meet her father, she nevertheless “took her thin hair back with a ribbon and changed her dress, putting on her best”; she, “standing motionless by the flowers,” nevertheless “plucked flowers - grasshoppers and irises, which she had previously grown with care” in order to meet her father with flowers; tries to deceive herself, explaining in her internal monologue the reasons for this behavior, simulating in her imagination a conversation with her mother. “Why did she get up so early? “What to do if you can’t sleep,” she would say to her mother if she woke up from the creaking of a door in the house. “What can I do,” she would repeat, “if today I can’t sleep at all.”
Tanya's first, unexpected meeting with her father is permeated with tension. She peers into his face and eyes, trying to understand whether he is really as kind as his mother says about him. She addresses her father as if she doesn’t know how to behave. Together with him, new smells of a leather belt and cloth of an overcoat come into her life, new sensations, the heavy sound of his steps, “a man, a father,” which Tanya is not used to hearing in her home.
She tries to seem mature and restrained, but the author speaks in several details about what is going on in Tanya’s soul: “Tanya raised her hand to her temple, pressed it with her fingers, as if she wanted to stop the blood rushing to her face.”
Gradually the ice of mistrust is melting. And now Tanya, without noticing it herself, “just leaned against him, lay down a little on his chest. But sweet! Oh, it’s really sweet to lie on your father’s chest!”
The culmination of the development of the relationship is the scene during a snowstorm, when Tanya, exhausted from fatigue, “unexpectedly touched her father’s overcoat.
In the darkness, without any visible signs, not with eyes blinded by snow, not with fingers deadened by the cold, but with her warm heart, which had been looking for her father in the whole world for so long, she felt his closeness, recognized him here, in the cold, death-threatening desert, in complete darkness.
Dad, dad! - she screamed.
I'm here! - he answered her.
And her face, distorted by suffering and fatigue, became covered with tears.”
Fraerman talks about the subtle threads that connect parents with children that are beyond formal logic in this passage.
The resolved conflict affected Tanya’s perception of the world around her. Quite unexpectedly for herself, Tanya makes a discovery: “But lunch hour did not seem to Tanya such a difficult hour as before. Although her father did not so diligently treat her to bird cherry pies, Nadezhda Petrovna did not kiss her so firmly on the threshold, yet her father’s bread, which Tanya tasted on her tongue this way and that, seemed different to her now. Every bite was sweet to her. And her father’s leather belt, always lying on the sofa, seemed different to her too. She often wore it on herself. And Tanya has never felt so good before.”
The figure of her father, whom the girl has not known since childhood, is so significant for her that it brings confusion and ambiguity into Tanya’s perception of the people around her. She notices that the very word “father” brings alienation into her relationship with her mother. It was because of her father that the first disagreement arose in her relationship with her mother, when Tanya tried to get an answer to the question: who is to blame for the fact that their father left them. She cannot fully come to terms with the idea that what happened is irrevocable, with the fact that no one is to blame, it just happens in the lives of adults. And by resolving this conflict within herself, Tanya grows up. For the sake of her mother’s peace of mind, she is ready to leave the city in which she grew up, and in which her family and friends remain. She is attracted, although she does not fully admit it to herself, new home father. And although her heart sometimes “began to ache a little - to be filled with resentment”, in her father’s house “... everything attracted her here. And the woman’s voice, heard everywhere in the house, her slender figure and kind face, always turned to Tanya with affection, and the large figure of her father, his thick cowhide belt, constantly lying on the sofa, and the small Chinese billiards on which they all played , ringing an iron ball against the nails. And even Kolya, always a calm boy, with a stubborn look in his completely clear eyes, attracted her to him. He never forgot to leave a bone for her dog."
Perhaps the most popular Soviet book about teenagers became so not immediately after its first publication in 1939, but much later - in the 1960s and 70s. This was partly due to the release of the film (starring Galina Polskikh), but much more due to the properties of the story itself. It is still regularly republished, and in 2013 it was included in the list of one hundred books recommended for schoolchildren by the Ministry of Education and Science.
Psychologism and psychoanalysis
Cover of Reuben Fraerman's story “The Wild Dog Dingo, or the Tale of First Love.” Moscow, 1940
"Children's Publishing House of the Komsomol Central Committee"; Russian State Children's Library
The action covers six months in the life of fourteen-year-old Tanya from a small Far Eastern town. Tanya grows up in a single-parent family: her parents separated when she was eight months old. Mom is a doctor constantly at work, father lives in Moscow with his new family. A school, a pioneer camp, a vegetable garden, an old nanny - this would be the limit of life if it were not for first love. The Nanai boy Filka, the son of a hunter, is in love with Tanya, but Tanya does not reciprocate his feelings. Soon Tanya’s father comes to the city with his family - his second wife and adopted son Kolya. The story describes Tanya's complex relationship with her father and stepbrother - she gradually moves from hostility to love and self-sacrifice.
For Soviet and many post-Soviet readers, “The Wild Dog Dingo” remained the standard of a complex, problematic work about the lives of teenagers and their coming of age. There were no schematic plots of socialist realist children's literature - reforming losers or incorrigible egoists, struggles with external enemies or glorification of the spirit of collectivism. The book described the emotional story of growing up, finding and realizing one's own self.
"Lenfilm"
Over the years, critics have called the main feature of the story the most detailed depiction of teenage psychology: the conflicting emotions and rash actions of the heroine, her joys, sorrows, falling in love and loneliness. Konstantin Paustovsky argued that “such a story could only have been written by a good psychologist.” But was “The Wild Dog Dingo” a book about the love of the girl Tanya for the boy Kolya? [ At first Tanya does not like Kolya, but then she gradually realizes how dear he is to her. Tanya’s relationship with Kolya is asymmetrical until the last moment: Kolya confesses his love to Tanya, and Tanya in response is ready to say only that she wants “Kolya to be happy.” The real catharsis in the scene of Tanya and Kolya’s love explanation occurs not when Kolya talks about his feelings and kisses Tanya, but after his father appears in the pre-dawn forest and it is to him, and not Kolya, that Tanya says words of love and forgiveness.] It's more of a story difficult acceptance the very fact of divorce of parents and father figure. At the same time as her father, Tanya begins to better understand—and accept—her own mother.
The further the story goes, the more noticeable is the author's familiarity with the ideas of psychoanalysis. In fact, Tanya’s feelings for Kolya can be interpreted as transference, or transference, which is what psychoanalysts call the phenomenon in which a person unconsciously transfers his feelings and attitude towards one person to another. The initial figure with whom the transfer can be carried out is most often the closest relatives.
The climax of the story, when Tanya saves Kolya, literally pulling him out of a deadly snowstorm in her arms, immobilized by a dislocation, is marked by an even more obvious influence of psychoanalytic theory. In almost pitch darkness, Tanya pulls the sledge with Kolya - “for a long time, not knowing where the city is, where the shore is, where the sky is” - and, having almost lost hope, suddenly buries her face in the overcoat of her father, who went out with his soldiers in search of his daughter and adopted son: “...with her warm heart, which had been looking for her father in the whole world for so long, she felt his closeness, recognized him here, in the cold, death-threatening desert, in complete darkness.”
Still from the film “Wild Dog Dingo”, directed by Yuli Karasik. 1962
"Lenfilm"
The very scene of a mortal test, in which a child or teenager, overcoming his own weakness, commits a heroic act, was very characteristic of socialist realist literature and for that branch of modernist literature that was focused on the depiction of courageous and selfless heroes, alone resisting the elements [ for example, in the prose of Jack London or James Aldridge’s favorite story in the USSR, “The Last Inch,” although written much later than Fraerman’s story]. However, the outcome of this test—Tanya’s cathartic reconciliation with her father—turned going through the storm into a strange analogue of a psychoanalytic session.
In addition to the parallel “Kolya is the father,” there is another, no less important, parallel in the story: Tanya’s self-identification with her mother. Almost until the very last moment, Tanya does not know that her mother still loves her father, but she feels and unconsciously accepts her pain and tension. After the first sincere explanation, the daughter begins to realize the depth of her mother’s personal tragedy and, for the sake of her peace of mind, decides to make a sacrifice - leaving her hometown [ in the scene of Kolya and Tanya’s explanation, this identification is depicted completely openly: when going to the forest on a date, Tanya puts on her mother’s white medical coat, and her father says to her: “How much you look like your mother in this white coat!”].
Still from the film “Wild Dog Dingo”, directed by Yuli Karasik. 1962
"Lenfilm"
It is not known exactly how and where Fraerman became acquainted with the ideas of psychoanalysis: perhaps he independently read Freud’s works in the 1910s, while studying at the Kharkov Institute of Technology, or already in the 1920s, when he became a journalist and writer. It is possible that there were also indirect sources here - primarily Russian modernist prose, influenced by psychoanalysis [Fraerman was clearly inspired by Boris Pasternak's story "Childhood Eyelets"]. Judging by some features of “The Wild Dog Dingo” - for example, the leitmotif of the river and flowing water, which largely structures the action (the first and last scenes of the story take place on the river bank) - Fraerman was influenced by the prose of Andrei Bely, who was critical of Freudianism, but he himself constantly returned in his writings to “Oedipal” problems (this was noted by Vladislav Khodasevich in his memoir essay about Bely).
"The Wild Dog Dingo" was an attempt to describe internal biography teenage girls as a story of psychological overcoming - first of all, Tanya overcomes alienation from her father. This experiment had a distinct autobiographical component: Fraerman was having a hard time being separated from his daughter from his first marriage, Nora Kovarskaya. It turned out to be possible to defeat alienation only in extreme circumstances, on the verge of physical death. It is no coincidence that Fraerman calls the miraculous rescue from the snowstorm Tanya’s battle “for her living soul, which in the end my father found without any route and warmed it with his own hands.” Overcoming death and the fear of death is here clearly identified with finding a father. One thing remains unclear: how the Soviet publishing and magazine system could allow a work based on the ideas of psychoanalysis, which was banned in the USSR, to be published.
Order for a school story
Still from the film “Wild Dog Dingo”, directed by Yuli Karasik. 1962
"Lenfilm"
The theme of parental divorce, loneliness, the depiction of illogical and strange teenage actions - all this was completely out of the standard of children's and teenage prose of the 1930s. The publication can be partly explained by the fact that Fraerman performed government order: In 1938 he was assigned to write a school story. From a formal point of view, he fulfilled this order: the book contains a school, teachers, and a pioneer detachment. Fraerman also fulfilled another publishing requirement formulated at the editorial meeting of "Detgiz" in January 1938 - to depict children's friendship and the altruistic potential inherent in this feeling. And yet this does not explain how and why a text was published that went beyond the scope of a traditional school story to such an extent.
Location
Still from the film “Wild Dog Dingo”, directed by Yuli Karasik. 1962
"Lenfilm"
The story takes place in the Far East, presumably in the Khabarovsk Territory, on the border with China. In 1938-1939, these territories were the focus of attention of the Soviet press: first because of the armed conflict on Lake Khasan (July - September 1938), then, after the publication of the story, because of the battles near the Khalkhin Gol River, on the border with Mongolia. In both operations, the Red Army came into military conflict with the Japanese, and human losses were great.
In the same 1939, the Far East became the theme of the famous film comedy “Girl with Character”, as well as the popular song “Brown Button” based on the poems of Evgeniy Dolmatovsky. Both works are united by the episode of searching for and exposing a Japanese spy. In one case this is done by a young girl, in another by teenagers. Fraerman did not use the same plot device: border guards are mentioned in the story; Tanya's father, a colonel, comes to the Far East from Moscow for official purposes, but the military-strategic status of the location is no longer exploited. At the same time, the story contains many descriptions of the taiga and natural landscapes: Fraerman fought in the Far East during the Civil War and knew these places well, and in 1934 he traveled to the Far East as part of a writing delegation. It is possible that for editors and censors the geographical aspect could be a powerful argument in favor of publishing this story, which is unformatted from the point of view of socialist realist canons.
Moscow writer
Alexander Fadeev in Berlin. Photo of Roger and Renata Rössing. 1952
Deutsche Fotothek
The story was first published not as a separate publication in Detgiz, but in the venerable adult magazine Krasnaya Nov. From the beginning of the 1930s, the magazine was headed by Alexander Fadeev, with whom Fraerman was on friendly terms. Five years before the release of “The Wild Dog Dingo,” in 1934, Fadeev and Fraerman found themselves together on the same writing trip to the Khabarovsk Territory. In the episode of the Moscow writer’s arrival [ A writer from Moscow comes to the city, and his creative evening is held at the school. Tanya is tasked with presenting flowers to the writer. Wanting to check if she is really as pretty as they say at school, she goes to the locker room to look in the mirror, but, carried away by looking at her own face, she knocks over a bottle of ink and heavily stains her palm. It seems that disaster and public shame are inevitable. On the way to the hall, Tanya meets the writer and asks him not to shake hands with her, without explaining the reason. The writer plays out the scene of giving flowers in such a way that no one in the audience notices Tanya’s embarrassment and her stained palm.] it is tempting to see an autobiographical background, that is, a depiction of Fraerman himself, but this would be a mistake. As the story says, the Moscow writer “was born in this city and even studied at this very school.” Fraerman was born and raised in Mogilev. But Fadeev really grew up in the Far East and graduated from school there. In addition, the Moscow writer spoke in a “high voice” and laughed in an even thinner voice - judging by the memoirs of contemporaries, this is exactly the voice Fadeev had.
Arriving at Tanya’s school, the writer not only helps the girl in her difficulty with her hand stained with ink, but also soulfully reads a fragment of one of his works about a son’s farewell to his father, and in his high voice Tanya hears “copper, the ringing of a trumpet, to which the stones respond " Both chapters of “The Wild Dog Dingo”, dedicated to the arrival of the Moscow writer, can thus be regarded as a kind of homage to Fadeev, after which the editor-in-chief of “Krasnaya Novy” and one of the most influential officials of the Union Soviet writers should have reacted with particular sympathy to Fraerman’s new story.
Great Terror
Still from the film “Wild Dog Dingo”, directed by Yuli Karasik. 1962
"Lenfilm"
The theme of the Great Terror is quite distinct in the book. The boy Kolya, the nephew of Tanya’s father’s second wife, ended up in their family for unknown reasons - he is called an orphan, but never talks about the death of his parents. Kolya is excellently educated, knows foreign languages: it can be assumed that his parents not only took care of his education, but were also very educated people themselves.
But that's not even the main thing. Fraerman takes a much bolder step, describing the psychological mechanisms of excluding a person rejected and punished by the authorities from the team where he was previously welcomed. Based on the complaint of one of the school teachers, an article is published in the regional newspaper that turns the real facts 180 degrees: Tanya is accused of taking her classmate Kolya ice skating just for fun, despite the snowstorm, after which Kolya was sick for a long time. After reading the article, all the students, except Kolya and Filka, turn away from Tanya, and it takes a lot of effort to justify the girl and change public opinion. It is difficult to imagine a work of Soviet adult literature from 1939 in which such an episode would appear:
“Tanya was used to always feeling her friends next to her, seeing their faces, and seeing their backs now, she was amazed.<…>...He didn’t see anything good in the locker room either. In the darkness, children were still crowding around the newspaper hangers. Tanya's books were thrown from the mirror cabinet onto the floor. And right there, on the floor, lay her baby [ doshka, or dokha, is a fur coat with fur in and out.], given to her recently by her father. They walked along it. And no one paid attention to the cloth and beads with which it was trimmed, to its edging of badger fur, which shone underfoot like silk.<…>...Filka knelt down in the dust among the crowd, and many stepped on his toes. But still, he collected Tanya’s books and, grabbing Tanya’s little book, tried with all his might to snatch it from under his feet.”
So Tanya begins to understand that school - and society - are not ideally structured and the only thing that can protect against herd feelings is friendship and loyalty of the closest, trusted people.
Still from the film “Wild Dog Dingo”, directed by Yuli Karasik. 1962
"Lenfilm"
This discovery was completely unexpected for children's literature in 1939. The orientation of the story to the Russian literary tradition of works about teenagers, associated with the culture of modernism and literature of the 1900s - early 1920s, was also unexpected.
Adolescent literature, as a rule, talks about initiation - the test that transitions a child into adulthood. Soviet literature of the late 1920s and 1930s usually depicted such initiation in the form of heroic acts associated with participation in the revolution, Civil War, collectivization or dispossession. Fraerman chose a different path: his heroine, like the teenage heroes of Russian modernist literature, goes through an internal psychological revolution associated with the awareness and re-creation of her own personality, finding herself.
I really liked the book. But main character Tanya is deeply antipathetic to me. The work has a double title: “The Wild Dog Dingo” and “The Tale of First Love.” If you imagine these names as a mathematical formula, and each part as a term, you end up with “Wild dog Dingo in the manger.”
I understand that Tanya is still a child, that she herself did not understand her first feelings, especially since she fell in love for the first time while meeting her own father, whom she had never seen before. Agree, this is stress, even despite the fact that the relationship with daddy can be considered improving, which is a considerable merit of the mother, who never told her daughter that her father was a goat, a scoundrel, abandoned an 8-month-old child... Take it, parents, Note - the earth is round, you never know how it will come back to haunt you.
But the way the heroine behaves is beyond normal. See:
1. Mom. Tanya not only loves her mother, but adores her. But at the same time he allows himself to read her personal letters. And inadvertently tease about old relationships with ex-husband. Okay, transitional age.
2. Father. It’s more or less adequate here: I didn’t know - I hated it, I found out - I loved it. And trying to gain attention and support. At the same time, he does not notice that his father gives all this. However, I liked that Tanya, when it dawned on her that her father also knew how to feel and experience, compared him with herself, and did not continue to think in labels.
3. Filka - best friend. Well, that’s who you have to be not to understand that the boy running after you from morning to evening, ready for any ridicule and crazy actions for your sake, is not doing this out of idleness at all... Who, huh? A naive little girl who sees the light in pink? But the following points prove that this person is not like that at all. So I draw a specific conclusion: Tanya understood perfectly well that the Nanai boy was head over heels in love, but it was CONVENIENT for her to pretend that she did not understand. And what? There is no need to respond to signs of attention, and Sancho Panza is always at hand...
4. Half-brother Kolya. Unexpectedly surging love. And how does our dreamer of distant Australian shores manifest herself? First - jealousy towards his father, then towards his neighbor Zhenya, and then the classic: Do you know Lope de Vega? His Countess Diana? Well, here’s the same thing, only with a twist on Soviet teenage reality. It was the attitude towards Kolya that made me doubt the girl’s sincerity and kindness, but the last point killed me on the spot.
5. Faithful dog Tiger. A wonderful dog who accompanied her owner on visits and even brought her skates herself if she saw her at the skating rink. And so, in moments of danger, the first thing Tanya did was to throw the aging dog to be torn to pieces by a crowd of brutal sled dogs so that they would change their running route. Yes, she and Kolya were in danger, but just like that to sacrifice those who are so devoted to you, and then cynically exclaim “My dear, poor Tiger!”... You should shut your mouth, my dear!
This is such a surge of emotions for me. I liked the plot, the author’s style, it was interesting to plunge into the atmosphere of a Far Eastern village during the USSR period. But I’ll tell you this: the wild dog dingo is the only dangerous predator on the Australian mainland... And it’s not just that Tanya’s classmates called her that. It's not about her strange fantasies. Children apparently see deeper...
(Book by a Soviet writer).
