“The enemies shot the pioneer, but they could not kill his song”: pride and sorrow in naive poetry about Musa Pinkenzon

The article is dedicated to the naive poetry about the death of the pioneer hero Musya Pinkenzon. In December 1942, the 12-year-old boy and his family became victims of the execution of Jews. According to the official version, before his death, Musya managed to play the Internationale (the USSR anthem at that time) on his violin. This plot was especially popular among naive authors in the 1960s – 1970s and the 2010s – 2020s. The article analyzes the features of the poetics of naive poems about Musa Pinkenzon, their pragmatics and plot motifs in poems created in different periods. The main conclusion of the article is that the authors of naive poems of the early and late times used different sources of information, in which this plot and the characteristics of the main character were interpreted differently. In the early poems, Musya Pinkenzon does not have an individuality, his role is to set an example for others by his death and inspire them to fight. In the later ones Musya Pinkenzon, on the contrary, is depicted as a unique child with supernatural musical abilities, who himself enters into battle with the enemy and achieves a symbolic victory over him. At the end of the article, the author shows how these two versions of the plot relate to different types of memorial culture in Soviet and post-Soviet times.

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