A strange story came back to me. Or rather, the story itself is not strange; what is strange is that I remembered it. What for?
Once, back in the days of the struggle to create the children’s gallery, I was invited to Moscow to a very representative seminar on aesthetic education.
The participants were the heavyweights of aesthetic theory and practice: famous names, many very resounding names. And I was a girl from the provinces, freshly out of the institute. My paper was placed at the end of the third and final day.
All the famous names had spoken loudly, everyone had talked, listened, and grown tired. And then there I was with my “Experience of Working with Children in a Model Children’s Studio.”
I go out (terrifying!), load the slides, look at sleepy crowns of heads and backs of heads in the hall, and begin reading quotations from compositions by my four- and five-year-old children.
For them a worm is “an inhabitant of an apple,” and “from a person, light falls upon the earth”! And there was much else that was wonderful.
(At that time I was testing my method of imaginative development: compositions describing a word or a situation. “Apple,” for example, or “If I Woke Up as a Sofa.” The children spoke; the adults wrote it down without editing.)
I read the quotations without warning, without explanation. A grown woman stands there and talks about inhabitants of apples.
I looked into the hall: faces! They were looking at me in surprise, but they were listening. They had woken up.
And so I read my paper. I was awarded a silver medal of VDNKh “For the development of an original method of working with young children” (we also brought an exhibition); a year later I was invited to a plein-air session at Korovin’s creative dacha in Gurzuf; two rectors invited me to graduate school.
Since then I have remembered well: FROM PEOPLE, LIGHT FALLS UPON THE EARTH!
