The story of Boris Pasternak “Luver's childhood” in the context of gender researches

The gender-based impact analysis (or the gender approach taking into account the influence of biological and social gender) has long been accepted in historical and social research. The studies of recent years reveal the success of the gender approach in the analysis of literature. The story of B.L. Pasternak “Luver’s Childhood” with the main issue of the pubescence of a girl is the principal work in the analysis of the gender problem in the Russian literature of the 20th century. Both in lifetime criticism and in modern studies the story is probed as a story of the development of a child, the “set” girl’s soul. The article examines the gender problems of the story “Luver’s Childhood” which reflects gender stereotypes associated with a man’s perception of physiological processes in a woman’s body. The story of Pasternak shows various ways of a person’s spiritual and theoretical assimilation of reality, which is called the “gender view of the world” and “awareness of oneself as a representative of a given gender, the feeling of one’s female or male body, awareness of one’s gender in a social context”, i.e. the “gender identity”. Pasternak shows the process of self-awareness as “a person’s experience of himself as a representative of a certain gender”, as a result of which he gives the comprehensive view of the reality. The story reveals all the “attributes of gender activity”: in addition to shame, other traditional images of femininity include Zhenya’s comprehension of the meaning of the words “mother is pregnant”.