Abstract
This article focuses on the representation of childhood in Fridrikh Gorenshtein’s (1932-2002) autobiographical story The House with a Turret (1964) that epitomizes the collective experience of his generation of Soviet children growing up during WWII. Much of Gorenshtein’s fiction could be described as autofiction, a term coined by the French writer and critical theorist Serge Dubrovsky, a narrative form that undermines the generic borders between autobiography and fiction. This article examines how in his autofiction, Gorenshtein redefines the boundaries of childhood by calling attention to two narrative perspectives: the child’s perception of the surrounding uncanny world and the adult narrator’s perception of the states of abjection, trauma, and neglect to which his young hero is subjected.