Judith Kerr’s trilogy “Out of the Hitler Time” was published in 1971—1978. However, its Russian translation was released by “Albus Corvus” Publishing House only in 2019—2021. The trilogy is the perspective object for research because of several reasons. Firstly, because of the theme. The novels, of which the trilogy consists, tell about the Jewish German family’s years of migration in the period before The Second World War and during it. Secondly, the author drew attention to the connection between her life and the trilogy in different interviews. Autobiographical features in fiction are actively researched in literary studies at the beginning of the 21st century. They are considered mainly in the context of the relationship between the writer's life and his texts. It could also be interpreted as a special artistic device used by the author combining both fact and fiction. On the one hand, to reach the goal of defining the specification of autobiographic features in Kerr’s trilogy, it’s necessary to determine the autobiographical features in researched texts. There are such features as the use of a single egocentric consciousness, the merger of a narration object and a narration subject, the compositional and plot heterogeneity, and the retrospection technique. On the other hand, the biographical background for creating the text is given in the article. Their transformation corresponds with the author’s literary goals. The synthesis of fact and fiction creates a single fictional world of literary works, on the one hand having a historical basis, on the other hand, created by the author, separated from the heroine of the trilogy and separated from the events she experiences by time and age distance. The boundary between fact and fiction is sometimes difficult to distinguish, because fiction grows out of real events, on the basis of which it is created, and consists of believable details.
For citation:
Demianenkova D.V., Razumakhina K.U. The fact and the fiction in Judith Kerr’s autobiographic trilogy “Out of the Hitler Time”, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2022, iss. 4, pp. 15—25.