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Abstract: Books about animals constitute one of the largest thematic sections of children’s literature. This theme also remains relevant in the works of contemporary children’s writers. This article examines one such work – S. Vostokov’s short prose book “Do Not Feed or Tease!” (Samokat, 2010), included in “The White Ravens” catalog of world children’s literature at the Munich International Youth Library. Using this book as an example, the article makes an attempt to examine contemporary trends in children’s literature. The primary research objective is to reveal the receptive strategy of the text: the interest in this work is driven by a desire to discover the mechanisms by which the reading audience is formed and how the readers’ perception is organized. The book’s multifaceted visual component – the author’s illustrations, the publication’s conceptual editorial framework (cover, endpapers), and other components – is considered as one of the factors of address. The book’s specific paratextual apparatus, along with the presence of a number of visual-verbal elements (encyclopedic “handwritten” notes, short Latin inscriptions), suggest several types of target audiences: child, teenager, or adult. The book’s unique plot structure (the absence of an event plane) emphasizes the narrative structure of the work, making the speaker particularly significant. An analysis of the work’s speech plane suggests that the narrator is multifaceted, deftly shifting speech masks and using various stylistic registers. He is a master of words, skillfully exploiting the potential of language, a bearer of a naive “childish” consciousness, and an artist who paints vivid verbal portraits of animals. A capacity for play ensures the unity of all roles of the speaker, who also tries to construct a complex figure of the addressee: they could easily be either a child or an adult. The identified features allow considering Vostokov’s work as an example of a modern dual-address book, and thus illustrate the persistent tendency to blur the boundaries between children’s and adult literature.

About the author(s) :

Tatyana E. Sutyagina

Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-6194

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 23.06.2026; date of publication: 31.10.2026

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