Literary scholar Jenniliisa Salminen investigates
children’s fiction in the Soviet Union, where strict normative limits regulated
how children could be depicted in literature. Child characters were to be
positive heroes, exemplary, and serve as role models for the child reader.
However, character education was undermined by these perfect child characters,
thus authors used different strategies to circumvent this problem. The author
Lazar Lagin, for example, introduced alongside with the protagonist another, a
slightly less perfect character via whom the lesson could be taught. In Starik Hottabych (1938, 1955), Lagin uses an adult character, a three
thousand years old oriental genie that in the text performs the role of the
child in need of education.