Olga Kapitsa

Olga Hieronimovna Kapitsa (1866–1937) was an educator, a specialist in children's literature and folklore, a collector, and a researcher of children's folklore, and she developed a methodology for teaching it in higher education. She was the daughter of Hieronim Ivanovich Stebnitsky and the wife of military engineer Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa. One of her sons was Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, a physicist and Nobel Prize laureate. Her achievements include the publication of the first scholarly book devoted to the study and collection of children's folklore. Thanks to O. I. Kapitsa's work, the collection Children's Life and Folklore was published. Olga Hieronimovna was a Russian folklorist and writer, and she served as the organizer and head of the commission for the collection and study of children's folklore. In 1926, O. Kapitsa collected and published Children's Folk Entertainments; in 1927 she published Children's Folk Nursery Rhymes, Amusing Sayings, and Songs; and thanks to her, Russian Folk Tales were also published. She collected an extraordinarily rich body of children's folklore, on the basis of which S. Marshak created plays for children's theater, fairy tales, riddles, and counting-out rhymes, while K. Chukovsky wrote the book Fifty Piglets. Olga Hieronimovna opposed educators who in the 1930s considered the fairy tale an embodiment of alien ideology, and she demonstrated the educational role of folklore. Here is how her grandson, physicist and science popularizer, host of the program The Obvious and the Incredible, Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa, remembered her: "Grandmother Olga Hieronimovna Kapitsa took care of our reading and constantly sent children's books from Russia. She was a professor at the A. I. Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad and worked on children's literature. Grandmother undoubtedly had a great influence on the generation of young and talented children's writers that was then taking shape in Leningrad; it included Marshak, Bianchi, and Zhitkov. They created what is now called Soviet children's literature. In my opinion, this was a very significant achievement in that difficult and anxious time.