Children's Readings: Studies in Children's Literature

FROM THE EDITORS

2025-06-25T14:51:00+03:00

Issue 27 of "Children's Readings" is devoted to discussion of the addressii of children's literature. The focus is on how ideas about the child reader are changing and what techniques poets and writers use to construct the childish depending on the concept of childhood or the writer's mission. Using the material of children's literature of the 19th-21st centuries, such aspects as the problematic reader's address of a folk tale, the transformation of the genre nature of a work in the context of a change in addressee, adult allusions and meanings hidden from children in works originally addressed to children are studied.

ACROSS TIME, ROLE, AND GENRE. A REVIEW OF THE BOOK: FIELDWORK IN UKRAINIAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE. ED. BY M. ŚWIETLICKI AND A. ULANOWICZ. NEW YORK: ROUTLEDGE, 2025

2025-06-25T17:39:55+03:00

The review of the collective monograph Fieldwork in Ukrainian Children’s Literature, published in 2025 under the editorship of Polish researcher Mateusz Świetlicki and the American researcher Anastasia Ulanowicz, provides a detailed analysis of the book about Ukrainian children’s and young adult literature. The review examines the structure and content of the monograph, describes the team of authors, and highlights the signiﬁcance of the publication as a contribution to the development of the designated research problem, presenting it within a broad cultural, historical and literary context. In their works, the authors of the monograph demonstrate that modern Ukrainian children’s literature is evolving dynamically, reﬂecting both the inﬂuence of classical literary traditions and the impact of contemporary socio-political events, such as armed conﬂicts and the processes of change and national identity formation. The chronological and thematic scope of the research subject is, on the one hand, quite broad — ranging from traditional folklore to contemporary children’s literature and mass genres — while, on the other hand, it remains clearly deﬁned by the boundaries of national culture. The author of the review outlines the main content of the twelve articles included in the monograph, brieﬂy characterizes the research approaches to the stated problems, and examines the theoretical role of the introduction and conclusion, which gives a fairly complete picture of the book under review.

Keywords: children’s literature, Ukrainian literature, diaspora, picture book, memory of the next generation, war in children’s literature, identity

CHILDREN'S WRITER IN THE 21ST CENTURY

2025-06-25T15:17:46+03:00

Since the first responses to children's books, discussions have not ceased about what a children's writer should be like: should he remain a "perfect child" at heart, be first and foremost a teacher and educator, or an artist of words? Each era put forward its own demands, sometimes quite contradictory. What does it mean to be a children's writer in the 21st century and how is this understood by authors writing for children today, we tried to consider in our small study.

RECYCLING-OBLIVION: THE STABILIZATION OF THE SCHOOL LITERARY CANON

2025-06-25T17:27:36+03:00

The article presents the results of a quantitative study of a database compiled from previously published datasets related to the Russian school literary canon. The authors examine the history of transformations in curricula, standards, and other oﬃcial documents over the period from 1974 to 2024, employing computational methods of quantitative research (data processing and quantitative calculations were conducted in Python using the Pandas library). Analyzing the material through the lens of the concept of cultural recycling — and even identifying its forms at the intersection of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods — the authors conclude that the nearly classical understanding of cultural recycling as the return of previously marginalized elements to the cultural mainstream is not widely applicable to the modern school literary canon. At the same time, the study reveals that the apparent return of school literature curricula in recent years to the “golden era” of the late 1970s and early 1980s occurs through a reverse phenomenon — recycling-oblivion, meaning the restoration of absence and suppression.
The authors provide lists of writers and poets, indicating the time of their inclusion in or exclusion from the canon, as well as a compilation of those whose works have formed the core of the school literary canon over the past 50 years.

Keywords: recycling, post-Soviet school, literary canon, school canon, school, school education, basic general education, secondary general education, standard, educational program, work program, literature

HOW IS THE RECYCLING OF THE FUTURE POSSIBLE? (THE CASE OF LIVING AND ADULT BY SERGEI YU. KUZNETSOV)

2025-06-25T17:33:44+03:00

My article deals with Sergei Kuznetsov’s novel The Living and the Adults, one of the literary works that were nominated for Russia’s most prestigious awards in 2019. Its plot is based on a peculiar vision of the Soviet history in the 1940s and the 1980s. In his novel, Kuznetsov mixes the genres of the so-called ‘school story’ and the fantastic horror, and seeks to recreate, in a literary form, the Soviet teenagers’ live experience. I suppose this is also the author’s attempt to revive and popularise his own memories of that time. In a certain sense, his novel belongs to the genre of autoﬁction and is a consequence of traumatic post-memory. In Kuznetsov’s ﬁctional world, the theme and topoi of war dominate, referring to the period of 1941–1945. However, there is a drastic diﬀerence between Kuznetsov’s version of World War II and the real events. In Kuznetsov’s narrative, the war does not end in the 1940s but continues into the 1980s. In addition, some of Kuznetsov’s characters plan to continue their ﬁght into the future as well. In other words, Kuznetsov is writing a piece of the war horror genre; he is describing a permanent war, i.e., one in which the past of war is united with the future, and in which the former and the latter are identical. It is therefore possible to identify Kuznetsov’s approach to the Soviet history not only as ‘recycling of the past’ but also as a ‘recycling of the future’. His recycling of history thus diﬀers critically from what might be called, to say, ‘therapeutic recycling’, which implies healing the trauma of the past. Otherwise, Kuznetsov leaves this trauma unhealed in his novel and even reinforces it with a particular poetics and ‘rhetoric of ﬁction’.

Keywords: Soviet teenagers, cultural recycling, World War II, ‘school story’ genre, horror, Russian literature, post-memory, trauma

CELEBRATING THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF SOFIA LOITER, A RESEARCHER OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE

2025-06-25T17:45:46+03:00

The review presents the materials of a scientiﬁc seminar dedicated to the 90th anniversary of Professor Soﬁa M. Loiter and the publication of a bibliographic index of her scholarly works. Soﬁa Loiter is a Professor at the Department of Classical Philology, Russian Literature, and Journalism of the Institute of Philology at Petrozavodsk State University. This seminar served as a continuation of the previous seminars commemorating Professors Irina P. Lupanova and Evgeniy M. Neyolov, aimed to rekindle the attention of young researchers in the study of folklore and literary fairy tales, children’s literature, science ﬁction, and fantasy, as well as to establish a continuity of approaches and methodology developed by earlier scholars.
The seminar featured various topics and new works that enhance interest in these ﬁelds and enrich the materials presented in a variety of formats by the participants, including educators, researchers, undergraduates, and master’s students. The reviewed reports address the scholarly legacy of Soﬁa Loiter and emphasize the innovative nature of her works, which can already be recognized as classics of Russian philology of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Keywords: children’s folklore, children’s literature, folklore of Karelia, Soﬁa Loiter

“IMPORTANT MONUMENTS OF THE PAST LIFE OF OUR ANCESTORS”: FAIRY TALES IN THE RUSSIAN LITERATURE HISTORY CURRICULUM FOR ORTHODOX THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES IN 1868

2025-06-25T15:34:19+03:00

The article focuses on the analysis of fairy tales as part of the Russian literary history course, which was ﬁrst introduced at Orthodox theological schools in 1868. Both the program’s connection to the 1860s pedagogical debates and the development of this subject in secular education are investigated. The author demonstrates that, in the late 1860s, theological schools were the ﬁrst to implement the historical approach to literature. Russian folktales were included as a component of “folk literature”, studied as a result of the emphasis on nationalizing the school canon. Seminarians studied fairy tales not as pedagogical works for children but as historical materials, whose examination reveals the “ideal” of the Russian people. The program was not provided with appropriate teaching aids. Relying on a variety of literature, each teacher was required to create a course on their own. In addition to being overly complex for students, the suggested textbook lacked concrete examples of fairy tale analysis. Few teachers were equipped to analyze fairy tales and identify the program’s prescribed mythical, domestic, and Christian components. Furthermore, this kind of work transformed seminarians from secondary school students into specialists in folk literature and even collectors. In their search for mythological components, theological school students may have incorporated elements such as the exorcism of demons through prayer, alongside the “superstitions” of Baba Yaga and Leshy.

Keywords: history of reading, reform of theological educational institutions of 1867, theological seminary, literary education, history of literature curriculum, fairy tails

SKAZY BY PAVEL BAZHOV: ON THE QUESTION OF THE CRITERIA OF CHILDISH IN THE CREATIVE METHOD OF THE WRITER

2025-06-25T15:44:17+03:00

The research is devoted to the question of the boundaries of children’s literature in Pavel P. Bazhov’s tales (skaz). The author of the article provides scholarly interpretations of Bazhov’s “tales of childish tone” and compares them, highlighting diﬀerences in the composition of texts typically classiﬁed by literary critics to as part of children’s literature. Relying on the writer’s ego-documents, journalistic works (in particular, the 1913 text Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak as a Writer for Children), the memoirs of contemporaries and lifetime publications of tales (skaz). The article investigates Bazhov’s own criteria for classifying speciﬁc tales as children’s literature. To reconstruct the reader’s perception, the study includes critical texts of contemporaries, in which Bazhov’s tales (skaz) are perceived as “fairy tales”, as well as materials of historical and literary polemics about the fairy tale and the speciﬁc historicism of children’s literatureThe article further explores the author’s strategies employed by Bazhov in constructing the “childish” tone of these tales: introduction of didactic question-and-answer form, where the answer is already known both to the reader and the protagonist; the deliberate or forced rejection by the characters of the story of the gifts of “secret powers” oﬀered during moments of temptation: and also incorporation of the motif of the unliftability of wealth (both physically and spiritually) into the narrative structure.

Keywords: Pavel Bazhov, children’s literature, skazy, Russian literature of the 20th century, Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, ego-documents, didacticism

THE AUTHOR AND HIS CHARACTERS IN SASHA CHERNY’S STORY “THE WONDERFUL SUMMER” (1929)

2025-06-25T15:58:58+03:00

The article considers the narrative structure of Sasha Cherny’s story Wonderful Summer. The book is dual-address, engaging not only a child reader but also an adult audience. The story depicts the child’s worldview by incorporating the boy’s own reﬂections into the narration of the primary narrator. The child’s perception, feelings, emotions, and experiences become the object of depiction. Playing with speech masks, changing points of view on the world or subjects of focalization creates a special style of the writer, which allows to reveal the child’s view of the world and the author’s attitude to his characters, manifested in the narrative word of the main narrator. Sasha Cherny presents a wide range of narrative techniques, including the merging of the narrator’s and characters’ perceptions, free indirect speech that reveals the inner thoughts of the young protagonist, the citation of internal speech enclosed in quotation marks within the narrator’s descriptive passages, and direct speech in character monologues and dialogues. The text of the story consists of several narrative layers belonging to the narrator, the boy, and even living beings — including inanimate objects, such as stars in the boy’s dream. As a result, elements of fairy-tale prose permeate the realistic work, with animals and non-living objects animated and endowed with consciousness and voice.

Keywords: Sasha Cherny, children’s literature, Russian emigration literature, novella, plot, narrative, narrator

BULAT OKUDZHAVA’S MUSICAL THE ADVENTURES OF BURATINO: FOR CHILDREN AND ADULTS

2025-06-25T16:12:02+03:00

The article examines Bulat Okudzhava’s song cycle Golden Key: The Musical, conceived during the production of Leonid Nechaev’s ﬁlm The Adventures of Buratino (1975) and published in 1993. Based on the memoirs of Okudzhava and Nechaev, the study reconstructs the creative history of the cycle and the circumstances surrounding the creation and existence of the songs that formed the musical. Okudzhava’s Golden Key is analyzed as a complexly structured text that, like Alexey Tolstoy’s fairy tale, has a clear dual audience. While it is intended for children at the plot and character level, it also contains numerous markers that allow it to be interpreted as the poet’s reﬂection on the historical processes of the “Thaw” and two adjacent historical eras. A key theme in Okudzhava’s reﬂections is the relationship between society and government across various periods of Soviet history. The abundance of self-reminiscences, both serious and parodic, in turn, allows the cycle to be examined within the broader con- text of Okudzhava’s oeuvre and in relation to the ideological and stylistic characteristics of his poetic world — “fairy-tale, medieval, and toy characters” (Alexandr Zholkovsky) — which trace back to the poetry of Alexandr Blok and Alexandr Vertinsky. The text embodies “ambivalence,” balancing between the hope for a miracle and the recognition of its impossibility.

Keywords: Bulat Okudzhava, Alexey Tolstoy, Leonid Nechaev, “The Golden Key. Musical”, “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, two-address installation, auto-reminiscences, parody, “thaw”

“IT’S USELESS TO READ MY POEMS... THEY NEED TO BE WRITTEN”: ON THE AUDIENCE FOR CHILDREN’S POETRY BY GERMAN LUKOMNIKOV

2025-06-25T16:32:38+03:00

The article studies the combinatorial poetry of German Lukomnikov, a representative of modern literary avant-garde. His book of poetry, It’s Good I’m the way I’m (Samokat publishing house, 2019) can be described as a book of double addressing. Paradoxical mini-poems seem simple at ﬁrst (typically written as couplets); the author positions them as poetry of primitivism, but they address complicated existential problems: the shortness and diﬃculty of life; the dialectics of talent and creative incompetence; and patterns of thought. It seems doubtful that a child, as a reader, can understand such problems. However, the author is against the age division of his audience. He considers his game poetic style to be universal for people of diﬀerent ages. The authors of the article raise question: what is the uniting base for Lukomnikov’s reception? The poet makes the border between the writing mind and the perceiving mind penetrable: he avoids plot and narration, often uses I-statements or direct speech which the reader can adopt. He tries to make the reader also a writer, a co-author. According to Lukomnikov, the language, as a creative environment in which we live from childhood and which we feel unconsciously, allows us to understand any game text. Thus, the poet oﬀers his readers to move from the form to the sense, reinterpreting (in other words: recreating), and removes the opposition of addressing children and adults.

Keywords: German Lukomnikov, double addressing, poetry for children, reader, combinatorial poetry, avant-garde, mini-poems

THE TEACHER AS ADDRESSEE OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

2025-06-25T16:55:31+03:00

Contemporary children’s literature is examined in this article as a form of address to teachers, oﬀering them a mediated perspective on the processes of growing up and gaining independence experienced by children and adolescents. These literary works are considered both through the lens of educators who read and use them in their professional practice, and as artistic explorations of pedagogical processes and personal development. The pedagogical reception of the books under analysis is presented based on interviews with schoolteachers and educators in extracurricular programs, in which they spoke about their personal reading impressions and how the book was perceived by the adolescents with whom they had discussed it. The depiction of a young protagonist’s journey toward independence is considered as a pedagogical statement in literary form, often centered around the concept of the “ideal self-image” or “future self-image.” This may take the form of appropriate behavior, a successful resolution to a problem, or a means of self-expression — since the works most frequently valued by teachers typically include this structural element. A key feature of the “ideal image” oﬀered by contemporary authors is the protagonist’s ability to accept their own imperfections and the world’s disharmony, often through discovering a form of self-expression (e.g., creativity). It is noted that books grounded in a more exploratory approach, which refrain from oﬀering a clear ideal or future model, are generally less in demand among teachers — even when they address explicitly pedagogical themes.

Keywords: contemporary children’s literature, characters, plot, dual address, pedagogical discourse

THE CREATIVE HISTORY OF THE FORGOTTEN BOOK BY SAMUIL MARSHAK’S

2025-06-25T17:02:21+03:00

The article compares six versions of Samuil Ya. Marshak poem Otrjad (Detachment): it’s publication in the magazine Ezh (Hedgehog) (1928); separate editions 1928, 1930 and 1933; the ﬁnal text published in the col- lection in 1935; and a revision by M. A. Eﬀendi in 1938. This poem marks Marshak’s ﬁrst engagement with the theme of the pioneer movement. The book was widely known, popular, highly praised by critics; however, from 1938 until the poet’s death, it was never reprinted and is now entirely forgotten. Analyzing the poetics, themes, and creative history of the text helps to understand the reasons behind its unusual fate. With each reprint, Marshak revised the text to reﬂect changes in societal realities, public sentiment, stylistic and ideological trends of that time, and critical reception. The poet’s desire to reconcile his creative attitudes with external requirements led to a compensatory editing method: the composition and style, new themes were modiﬁed, but the subtext was preserved — philosophical, ethical issues, important for Marshak, running through all of his work. Marshak’s pedagogical stance only partially aligned with the objectives of the pioneer movement; as a result, while the text captivated and delighted readers, it failed to reﬂect the political speciﬁcs of the children’s organization, and ceased to be published after the appearance of poems about pioneers written by other authors in accordance with oﬃcial ideology. However, the universality and archetypal content, the poetic mastery of the book The Detachment remained relevant and deserving of attention from modern readers.

Keywords: Samuil Marshak, children’s literature, creative history, textology, Russian poetry of the 20th century, images of pioneers

THE POETICS OF BEGINNINGS IN ARKADY GAIDAR’S WORKS FOR CHILDREN

2025-06-25T17:08:36+03:00

The article analyzes the poetics of opening passages in 15 works by Arkady Gaidar for children, spanning from R. V. S. (1926) to The Hot Stone (1941), in the context of the evolution of the writer’s idiostyle. The opening passage is understood as the ﬁrst paragraph of a text. It necessitates addressing issues of Gaidar’s textology, since more than half of the examined works exhibit signiﬁcant textual variations in their initial paragraphs across diﬀerent editions. These variations often pertain to structural organization and motif content, which are central to the analysis. The author identiﬁes that in the opening passages of Gaidar’s early works — from the 1920s to the early 1930s — motifs of local setting dominate, without direct character introductions, although child protagonists may be introduced via free indirect speech. In the texts of the early 1930s, character nominations by the narrator — mainly group-based — begin to appear, and a rhetorical formula emerges in the openings, linking the names of three protagonists with their ages. Starting in 1934, adult characters are included in the openings, and by the late 1930s they dominate, even though children remain the main protagonists. Around the same time, motifs of anxiety and social labor become a consistent feature in Gaidar’s openings. This reﬂects the general ideological and thematic evolution of the writer: from depicting children’s lives to portraying the relationships between children and adults, who increasingly become full-ﬂedged protagonists in his works.

Keywords: Arkady Gaidar, opening passage, exposition, idiostyle, motif, motif structure, narrator, free indirect speech

‘THIS IS ALL MINE, MY HOMELAND’: TEXTBOOKS AND SCHOOL LOCAL STUDIES OF THE 1960S–1980S

2025-06-25T17:19:36+03:00

Kraevedenie (local studies), as a practice of local knowledge production, has been unevenly researched. To address the lack of research on school-based local studies, the authors turn to a comparative analysis of a corpus of local studies manuals for secondary schools published between the 1960s and 1980s. The analysis begins by examining the relationship between the reha- bilitation of local studies in the post-war period and the transformations in school education. Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, the authors characterize the formation of the corpus of local history teaching aids and investigate how narratives about the region and its history are constructed. Relying on the image of a great country formed by Soviet school cartography, local history textbooks of this period develop the discourse of a ‘small homeland’, emphasising the role of the region attachment in citizens’ emotional belonging. Unlike their pre-revolutionary and early Soviet counterparts, these manuals focuses primarily on the historical narrative of the region. This narrative makes relies minimally on the discourse of heritage and concentrates not on antiquity but on heroic modernity. These manuals are also poorly embedded in the system of local history institutions and practices and equipped with references to opportunities for active learning of local material and interaction with the environment.

Keywords: textbook studies, local history, secondary education, late Soviet period, image of region, historical narrative, modernity, heritage