UDC 37.026.4

Krylov G.E.¹ (Tula, Russian Federation) – gennadykryl13@yandex.ru

¹Leo Tolstoy Tula State Pedagogical University

Abstract. The issue of competent utilization of visual elements in children’s literature has acquired particular significance in today’s educational process. Illustrative content and active work with it have become an important means for developing children’s visual literacy. The technical capabilities for broad visualization of educational materials emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, which determined pedagogical attention to this matter. Book publishing houses played a significant role in their creation and dissemination, particularly M.O. Wolff’s firm—one of Russia’s first entrepreneurs who began producing richly illustrated children’s books. This article is devoted to studying the pedagogical aspects of illustrative content in publications by this publisher. The aim of the research is to identify and describe mechanisms implementing didactic functions in illustrated editions intended for child and youth reading published by M.O. Wolff’s firm (1856–1918). Historical determinism served as methodological foundation, allowing us to examine how the pedagogical views of book publisher M.O. Wolff were realized within his created children’s illustrated literature against the backdrop of key sociocultural processes characteristic of late-nineteenth-century Russia. A structural-functional analysis method was employed. As a result of the study, several didactic functions implemented through children’s illustrated editions were identified: decorative, informational (educational), educative, skill-developmental (developmental), and orientational. Based on these categories, we analyzed the corpus of M.O. Wolff’s publications. Analysis outcomes allowed us to speak about conscious attention from the publishing house toward book design, combining printing expertise with implemented pedagogical principles, and dynamics of didactic functions evolving from informative towards developmental ones. The novelty of this research lies in defining primary didactic functions realized by illustrated editions for children within Russian nineteenth-century publishing practices.

Keywords: M.O. Wolf, visual method of teaching, illustration, didactic functions, children’s literature.

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For citation: Krylov, G. E. (2026). Implementing didactic functions of illustrations in children’s publications by the M. O. Wolff’s publishing house. CITISE, 2, 882–892. (In Russian).