Vol. 2 No. 2 (2012)

We devoted the second issue of "Children's Readings" to highlighting the problems of constructing the concept of children's literature in higher education courses and the process of university teaching. Irina Arzamastseva, the author of one of the authoritative textbooks on children's literature, reflects on this topic. Many of her judgments reflect the well-established Russian concept of children's literature and, at the same time, open up new problem areas of the concept of "children's classic". It is fundamental for us that the republication of the works of the significant researchers of children's literature N.V. Chekhov and E.P. Privalova allows us to think not only about the relevance of their searches after almost a hundred years. The republishing of the work of N.V. Chekhov (a classics of Russian children's literary criticism) demonstrates how far we have gone in understanding the phenomenon of children's literature, its boundaries, and functions. The study by E.P. Privalova is an example of a thorough analysis of the history of the entry of a literary work into the circle of children's reading. The second issue ends with a review of the round table "How to write the history of Soviet literature?"