Elizaveta Vodovozova

Elizaveta Nikolayevna Vodovozova (, née Tsevlovskaya, , 17 August 1844, Porechye, Smolensk Governorate, Russian Empire, — 23 March 1923, Petrograd, USSR) was a Russian children's writer, educational theorist and memoirist, the wife of Vasily Vodovozov.

Biography 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?" (published by Biblioteka Dlya Chtenya in September 1863) came as a direct response to Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?. How People of Different Nations Live. The English, 1897, illustrated by Viktor Vasnetsov 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" (Умственное развитие детей от первого появления сознания до восьмилетнего возраста, 1871) 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 (Одноголосые детские песни и подвижные игры с русскими народными мелодиями, 1876) 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 (Из русской жизни и природы, 1871—1872) and For Leisure (На отдых, 1880).