Word: seryozha
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Seryozha's summer is a tense one. His mother marries and he finds he must now share her love with another person. The new stepfather understands and works hard to win the affection of Seryozha; and at the end of the summer the two have grown to love each other. But by that time, a baby brother has been born, and a whole new series of emotional readjustments must be made. When the stepfather is temporarily transferred to work on a different collective farm, his parents decide to leave Seryozha behind for the winter to recover from an illness...
...relationships with other children and adults who are not relatives, in his reactions to their problems and peculiarities, Seryozha demonstrates his own view of life in general, and adults in particular. And the experiences of the two older boys he constantly follows around mirror both his fears and ambitions...
These attitudes are for the most part expressed visually. A solemn procession of little kids, including Seryozha, watch an older friend unconsciously immitate the mannerisms of his sailor uncle, whose bearing, imagined adventures and magnificent tatoos they all worship. The camera follows the delinquent escapades of Seryozha and his friends with the eye of a fellow child. Fast action and disaster, hasty exits and final parental retribution. Seryozha's loneliness during the first few weeks of his mother's marriage isolates him from the rest of the children: he is shown on the fringe of groups, always a little absent...
...giant as he splutters prodigiously at the bathroom washbowl. Working up his courage, he inquires in a very small voice: "Are you going to whip me?" The man replies: ''Why should I?" A light wakes in the child's eyes. When his stepfather leaves the bathroom, Seryozha goes shyly to the washbowl, makes a tentative little splutter of his own, and then dries himself on the same towel his stepfather used...
Come Sunday, friendship really gets rolling on a nifty little two-wheeler the stepfather picks up for Seryozha. That afternoon something deeper stirs when the stepfather, surveying what's left of the bike after it runs into a billy goat, shows no sign of anger. Doglike devotion sets in when papasha declines to punish Seryozha for insulting an insulting uncle-"My dear, we must not punish a child for calling a fool a fool." Absolute adoration is attained when the stepfather lets Seryozha spend a day at the collective farm he manages. "He's my Daddy...