Unpublished Material

I have had two interesting conversations with Sukhomlinsky’s daughter, Olga Vasilievna, about the extent of unpublished material held in the archives. It turns out that much of the material I believed to be unpublished has in fact been published. Some of it was simply published under a different name than that which appears in letters he wrote before his death. For example he refers to Parts 2 and 3 of “My Heart I Give to Children”. Part 2 was published under the title “The Birth of a Citizen”, and Part 3 was published under the title “Letters to My Son”. Other material has been published quite recently. I was very interested in a book dedicated to children with learning difficulties, and Olga Vasilievna has given me a recent publication containing material dedicated to that theme. Olga Vasilievna herself has been very active in seeing that her father’s work is published in Ukraine.

This means that I need spend less time examining unpublished material, and can spend more time learning about efforts to put Sukhomlinsky’s ideas into practice in the 21st Century. I plan to write an article dedicated to this theme during the coming months. Currently the main regions where Sukhomlinsky’s ideas are very much alive appear to be in Ukraine, Russia and the former Soviet republics, and in China, where there is great interest.