“the Right To A Biography”: Remarkable Women And men In Children’s Literature

Abstract

The article examines the practice of selecting biographies for children’s
reading in the 1860s-1880s on the basis of criticism and bibliographic lists published in the magazines “Pedagogical Collection” and “Women’s Education”. The pantheon of heroes of the Fatherland included writers, statesmen, and rulers, saints, military leaders, artists and musicians, inventors and scientists, famous women. The recommendation of biographies for children’s reading was conditioned by the addressee, the facts of the heroes’ lives, their educational potential, socio-cultural and ideological environment. The images of women and men in biographical literature were presented unevenly. F. Resener’s book “Biographies of Remarkable Women” (published in 1878) highlighted the problem of gender inequality in biographical narratives offered for children’s reading and started the conversation about women worthy to be exemplar. This article presents the lists of recommended biographies,
grouped by the type of characters, for students of military educational institutions and students of the Department of Institutions of Empress Maria. The analysis of the lists allows us to examine the trends in the development of biographical literature and approaches to its selection for reading by different reader groups.

Keywords: biography, criticism of children’s literature, Fedor Resener,
«Biographies of remarkable women», regulation of children’s reading of
the 19th century, recommendatory bibliography