Self and selves: child personality in the Russian primers, 1906-1936

The article demonstrates some of the "mechanisms", variants and invariants of the textbook’s activities on the formation of children’s views on the world around, themselves and their role in society, childish and adultlike at the same time. Illustrations and texts of Russian alphabets and letters of the first third of the 20th century are considered as a vector of movement from the child's objectivity (the child as an object of the educational process) to its subjectivity (the child as a subject of the educational process) and vice versa.