Children’s literature in “thick” journals: revisiting the transformation of children’s reading model

The paper deals with the problems of studying children’s reading and determining the place of books in modern society, which are at the epicenter of complex social stereotypes and myths, interrelated directly and indirectly. Understanding children’s reading involves a sense of both its extra-historicality and its historical transformation, since childhood is different for each generation. The eight editions of the Druzhba Narodov (Peoples’ Friendship) journal’s roundtable “Only Children’s Books to Read” (2015-2022) provide sufficiently representative empirical material to trace the transformation of children’s reading repertoires and to see how generational codes influence text perception. The analysis of these materials makes it possible to understand the phenomenon of children’s reading and to identify the specificities of a child reader’s communication with the text. In this context, it seems important not only to analyze various autocomments of the survey participants, but also to discover the gap in the routes of reading children’s literature through the student surveys.