Literary History and the Literary Canon in School Education: An Orthodox Upbringing

One of the first influential literary anthologies for secondary-school students was published in 1819 by Nikolai Grech (Uchebnaia kniga russkoi slovesnosti) (Nikolai Grech (1787–1867), Russian journalist, philologist and educator. See, for example Grech 1819–1822), at a time when literature was not yet taught as a separate subject but was part of a combined course in language and literature. For two decades, the book, which contained both theoretical chapters on genres (literary and technical) and examples of historical writing, fiction, and poetry, shaped the corpus of texts used by teachers of language and literature. The list of authors consists mainly of Russian Classicism. As Anna Senkina has argued, the development of anthologies resulted in the idea of collecting the best specimens of writings by the best Russian authors (Senkina, Acta Slavica Estonica, University of Tartu Press, 2013, 44). Thus, the process of establishing a certain hierarchy of authors was already underway by the mid-nineteenth century.