Vladimir Iakovlevich Stoiunin

Born Dec 16 (28), 1826, in St. Petersburg; died there Nov. 4 (16), 1888. Russian educator; historian of Russian literature.

The son of a merchant, Stoiunin graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1850 and then taught literature in a Gymnasium. As a prominent educator and enlightener of the 1860’s, he opposed the prevailing class-based educational system and advocated a fusion of instruction and upbringing. He believed that the main task of the schools was to provide an overall education and to develop future citizens. He also proposed that the family and the school unite their efforts in the upbringing of children.

Stoiunin made a particularly great contribution to the development of a comprehensive system of teaching literature in schools. He asserted that the principle of historicism should be taken into account in the study of literature and that the texts of literary works should be studied intensively and analyzed in terms of both form and content. He wrote a new type of teachers’ manual that dealt with methodology, theory, and the analysis of literary works.

Stoiunin’s views on pedagogy and on the methodology of teaching literature were set forth in The Development of Pedagogical Ideas in Russia in the Eighteenth Century (1857–58), Our Family and Its Historical Destinies (1884), The Teaching of Russian Literature (1864), and Manual for the Historical Study of the Most Outstanding Works of Russian Literature (1869). Stoiunin also wrote a number of works on the history of Russian literature, articles on A. D. Kantemir, A. P. Sumarokov, and A. V. Kol’tsov, and monographs on Pushkin and A. S. Shishkov.