CHILDREN'S READING AS REFLECTED IN PEDAGOGY OF THE FIRST QUARTER OF THE 20<sup>TH</sup> CENTURY (ON THE ORIGINS OF THE EARLY SOVIET CONCEPT OF THE READER)
Russian educationalists of the ﬁrst twenty years of the 20<sup>th</sup> century were developing the theory of children's reading, signiﬁcantly drawing on conceptions that were formed in Germany at the turn of the 19<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup> centuries. Using ideas of G. Wolgast and E. Linde, the educationalists of the decade preceding the revolution and oﬃcials of education in Soviet Russia of the early 1920s formulated a general conception of children's reading which did not imply veriﬁcation by experimental techniques of reading skills. Unlike the German theorists of reading skills, Russian educationalists were aware of the necessity of developing speciﬁcally children's literature and relied on its value in terms of upbringing. The majority of educationalists of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century were writing about beneﬁts and drawbacks of children's literature following the thesis that nobody and nothing could interfere in its inﬂuence on the child. Experimental studies of reading that refuted this thesis were not taken into account by teachers of reading and experts in children's books when shaping the prerevolutionary conception of the reading child. Both the supporters of liberal upbringing and traditional educationalists refused to employ results of studies of reading children that were carried out by librarians under the guidance of A. K. Pokrovskaya. Early Soviet oﬃcial pedagogy led by N. K. Krupskaya was also built on little trust to the study of children's reading experience by experimental methods and determined the negligence of children's interests in reading in subsequent years.