Elizaveta Vodovozova


Elizaveta Nikolayevna Vodovozova was a Russian children's writer, educational theorist and memoirist, the wife of Vasily Vodovozov.
An 1862 Smolny Institute graduate, she started writing in 1863 on issues of women's emancipation and pedagogy for the magazines like Detskoye Chteniye and Narodnaya Shkola. Her debut publication, "What Stops a Woman from Becoming Independent?" came as a direct response to Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?.

Many of Vodovozova's ideas originated during an extensive trip over Belgium, Germany, England, Switzerland and France which she and her husband Vasily Ivanovich undertook soon after their marriage in April 1862, in order to investigate the theories of Friedrich Fröbel and how they worked in practice. Her influential book "Intellectual Development of Children" enjoyed seven re-issues in pre-1917 Russia. A strong proponent of the idea of the active use of music and games as educational and developmental means, she published a book "Russian Folk Songs for One Voice and Active Games for Children" as a supplement to her own educational program. Highly popular at the time were Vodovozova's children's stories. Many of them were collected in her books From Russian Life and Nature and For Leisure.
For decades Vodovozova's most important work was considered to be her magnum opus The Life of the Peoples of Europe. Narratives in Geography, reissued in ten volumes as "How People of Different Nations Live". In retrospect, though, the truly lasting part of her legacy proved to be her numerous memoirs and biographical sketches. Much lauded were her books Among the Petersburg Youth of the Sixties and Things Long Gone. Vodovozova's best biographical and analytical works, including the essays on Konstantin Ushinsky, Vasily Sleptsov and Vasily Semevsky, were collected in her two best-known books, At the Dawn of Life and Dreams and Reality.