In this article, F. Dostoevsky’s Christmas tale “The Beggar Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree”, published in the Writer’s Diary in 1876 and sometimes referred to by scholars as a Christmas fairy tale, is examined in the context of two surrounding works – one text titled “A Boy with His Hand Stretched out for Alms” and another about a colony of juvenile delinquents. Although each of the three texts on the shared theme of child suffering is written in a different genre and style, together, they form a unified thematic block, combining elements of the journalistic, the fairy-tale, the Christian, and the documentary. The introduction of fairy-tale motifs into a literary work – which underlies the second, central part of the triptych about suffering children – is, from the author’s perspective, a distinctive artistic device through which the tragic motifs of the Christmas tale are further intensified, signaling the writer’s disbelief in the possibility of overcoming human suffering through the efforts of any magical helper, who is traditionally a hero of the fairy-tale genre. In this triptych, the conditional ‘fairy-tale lie’ is juxtaposed with the plot about a children’s colony, in which another, equally obscure yet more realistic motif of the salvation of the world is outlined.
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