This article is focused on Protestantism-related ideas encrypted in children’s literature in eighteenth-century
Russia. The primary focus of the study is on Detskiia Zabavy (1792), a short-story collection that was thought
to be an original Russian book. As this study shows, the book in question is actually a collection of texts
translated from German and French. The bulk of the collection deals with the so-called short didactic stories,
the ideological roots of which have been overlooked and understudied. The author’s findings help to clarify,
among other things, the subject of Pushkin’s parody in his Detskaia Knizhka (1830).
