The Ghost of Adolescence Past

This chapter discusses two Russian cultural works that conjure up the iconic image of teenage girls traversing the territory between the secular and the sacred: Svetlana Vasilenko's 1998 novella Little Fool (Durochka), and Anna Melikian's 2007 film Mermaid (Rusalka). These works are products of two very distinct moments in post-Soviet history: Vasilenko's text was published against the backdrop of the economic and social instability of the 1990s, during the chaos of the Boris Yeltsin years, while Melikian's film premiered during the relatively stable, “petrodollar-fueled prosperity” of Vladimir Putin's second term. Nonetheless, Vasilenko and Melikian both engage with the myth of the Soviet girl-martyr—as exemplified by Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, the “architext for all portraits of girl heroes” in the Soviet Union—in order to decouple heroic adolescence from Sovietness, with its attendant violence, militarization, and ideology. In their depictions of teenage girls who possess extraordinary powers, Vasilenko and Melikian each present a new adolescent savior who exposes the immorality and venality of Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively. Little Fool and Mermaid can be understood in the context of other recent Russian works that also look to Soviet youth culture for elements that may be salvaged for the post-Soviet present.