This undergraduate thesis examines social determinism and the representation of the child in Ivan Cankar’s novel Na klancu and Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood. It focuses on the literary representation of poverty as a structural force that shapes childhood subjectivity through the family environment, labour, violence, social exclusion, and limited access to education. Using interpretative and comparative analysis of narrative perspective, literary characters, motifs, and symbols, the thesis demonstrates that childhood functions in both works as a decisive stage in the reproduction of social inequality. Cankar represents social determination primarily through the symbolist imagery of the hill, the pursuit of the cart, and light, whereas Gorky offers a more direct depiction of physical violence, family instability, and material deprivation. Despite the strong influence of social conditions, neither work supports a wholly mechanical model of determinism, since the characters retain a capacity for moral judgement, compassion, and inner resistance. The central finding is that the environment substantially restricts individual autonomy without eliminating it completely.
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