The selection of literary texts for schooling offers a historical perspective on the relationship between language education and cultural continuity in diaspora communities. This study examines the coexistence of classics, folklore and contemporary literature in Russian-language educational publications produced abroad between 1918 and 1939. It draws on Daria Strizhkova’s open dataset of the Russian émigré school literary canon [1], comprising 3,005 records of works and excerpts across 36 bibliographic units. The study provides a secondary quantitative analysis, distinguishing the original dataset from the author’s analytical procedures. Author representation is measured through record counts, distinct title strings and presence across publications. To assess the influence of serial publication, the 36 bibliographic units are additionally consolidated into 20 series or projects. The results reveal a stable classical core: Pushkin appears in 23 bibliographic units, Tolstoy in 22, and Nekrasov and Turgenev in 20 each. However, the repertoire also regularly includes later writers, notably Balmont, Blok, Bunin and Sologub; their presence remains substantial after consolidation. A conservative classification identifies 273 anonymous tales, songs and byliny, distributed across 23 bibliographic units and 15 consolidated projects. These findings suggest selective cultural continuity: educational reading preserved a classical foundation while incorporating folklore and selected contemporary writing. The study contributes a reproducible approach to analysing literary selection in diaspora education and provides historical material for discussions of cultural content in language teaching. Its conclusions concern the printed repertoire; the corpus alone cannot establish classroom practices, learners’ responses or language-learning outcomes.
Keywords: Russian émigré education; literary canon; school anthologies; cultural continuity; corpus analysis.
REFERENCES
[1] Strizhkova, D. “School Literary Canon of Emigration, 1918–1939.” Open Data Repository for Russian Literature and Folklore, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), Russian Academy of Sciences, 2026, Version 1.0.
https://doi.org/10.31860/openlit-2025.7-B020
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