The living room is a place for reading aloud and socializing while sitting around the the table. That’s why the bookcase here holds all the treasured family books: stories by Pushkin, Charles Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm, Russian fairy tales, Kryloff’s fables, Russian and international classics of children’s literature, works of modern authors, as well as the Children’s Encyclopedia in ten volumes and books published by M. O. Wolff: collector’s editions of the “Gold” and “Green” series. Also here are various children’s magazines.

Here you can find an interesting document in the living room – the formal decision to allow publication of Zhukovsky’s “Mice bury the cat.” Even fairy tales were subject to censorship.

One of the first books written in the spirit of dark humor – Heinrich Hoffman’s “Shaggy Peter” – is a series of moralizing stories about the horrific consequences of disobedience.

In this room old children’s magazines are collected. Among them is the ‘Children’s museum’ and the first issue of the magazine “Around the world.” Grandfather loved books about travel and adventures, great scientific discoveries and faraway lands. During his youth, the first translations of novels by Daniel Defo, James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott, and Jules Verne have appeared. 

Books that teach virtue are replaced by Maurycy Bolesław Wolff’s wonderful editions for children. Parents buy new picture books created by the best artists from A. Benois’ circle: Georgiy Narbut, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Anatoliy Neruchev, and Dmitry Moor. They observe with keen interest how leading theatre artists, painters, and decorators create books, from binding to vignette, as demonstrated by Yelena Polenova and Sergei Malyutin. 

Boys loved to play soldiers. Our hero and storyteller Alexander Benois and his son Kolya were no exception. Soldiers often became the heroes of the books, like in the picture book ‘War of the wooden soldiers, ” published in 1916 in the midst of World War I.

Books about boys who had magically shrunken and entered the world of insects were also very popular. This way authors could explain the workings of their mystical world. 

At that time handwritten school magazines emerged in almost every high school. Young authors took their literary work very seriously. Both teachers and parents supported these endeavors.

The real centerpiece of the girl’s room is the “Story about the colorful fairies” by Swiss artist Ernst Kreidolf. The gorgeous illustrations allow the readers to compose their own stories about the flowers and their personalities, so very similar to people.

Also elegant are the picture books of English authors. One of them is in Russian – “For friendly kiddies about black kitties” with Charles Robinson’s illustrations, and the other is a picture book by the famous artist Kate Grinway called ‘Under the window’ in German translation.

Children read on all the main European languages, and particularly loved English books with adorable pictures of cats, dogs, and dolls.

Based on the books found in the royal family’s library, it becomes clear which modern authors were considered appropriate for the proper upbringing of children. 

Our governess is young, enlightened, modern, and reads in several languages. She is a supporter of women’s rights to education and employment. She holds progressive views on the upbringing of children. She also knows how to play with children and engage them.

The room contains the most recent pedagogical books and the magazine ‘What and how to read to children’, as well as teaching aides for ‘kindergarten teachers, ” as the educators were called.
There are also various Russian and German books, used to teach about life is in the city and the country, at sea and on the land.

However, pedagogy was not the only subject that interested governesses. They also read detective books about Nate Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes that were printed in cheap magazines.

Room/maid”s side

Public education, literacy, simple books for the common folk (Alphabet), texts for teaching grammar, publishing programs for public education, Tolstoy, Gorbunov-Posadov, cheap books by Sytin, national public libraries.

In the maid“s room there is a publication for common people: those who study grammar and for public schools, collections of stories and poems for those who were learning to read, biographies of great people, and anthologies of works by classical authors.

In Russia many programs were developed to raise the literacy levels of the general population. “Tolstoy schools” emerged along with many publishing programs such as “Libraries for the children of Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, ” and publications of well illustrated, cheap books that could be afforded by poor families with children. The partnership of Ivan Sytin released cheaply produced illustrated books in enormous numbers, and those played an important role in introducing the children of poor families to reading. 

In “free schools, ” supported by Leo Tolstoy, creative approaches to teaching were especially important. This approach also became influential in home schooling.

New methods were being developed to encourage artistic development in children. Here, the experience of foreign colleagues in teaching painting, music and singing came in handy. Russian musicians and artists enthusiastically joined new pedagogical projects.

For teaching grammar, children”s books with a captivating plot were used, written in an accessible literary language. New interesting teaching aides emerged, helping make learning more approachable and engaging.

In this room, you can see “scorebooks, ” similar to modern school diaries. Actually, “scorebooks” contained much stricter rules, instructions and demands.

There are no serious or boring books on the veranda, only books about tricksters and hooligans. They are variations on Shaggy Peter, Max and Moritz, Carrick and Ldov’s fun picture books, and the very first comics.

All the inhabitants of the old house fell in love with cheerful tales by the Russian authors about tiny people, forest elves and other miniature creatures which were often called ‘murzilka tribe, ” although each variation had its own name: foresties, mossies, hollowies, earthlings, etc.

At last, the authors were not afraid of telling jokes in children’s publications. An example of this was the magazine ‘Galchyonok’ (baby jackdaw), the publication of which offered a revolutionary approach to childhood artistry and perception. Alexandre Benois did not abandon these ideas and brought them to life, when in 1915 he and his friends supported a project called ‘Our magazine’ which included texts and drawings by the artists’ children.