The reading club addresses Sergey Aksakov's book about childhood, memory, and growing up. Participants of the meeting will discuss the history of the story's creation and why Aksakov wanted to write a book for children without direct moralizing and a condescending tone. The focus of the discussion will be the artistic accuracy with which the writer conveys a child's perception: attention to the details of everyday life, family intonations, nature, and those first impressions that shape character in the future. A separate line of conversation will be the author's biography, his literary circle, and his friendship with Nikolai Gogol. An interesting part of the meeting will be the connection between the story and the fairy tale "The Scarlet Flower." This plot often lives separately in readers' memories, but in the context of Aksakov's prose, it begins to resonate more broadly: as part of family lore, as a sign of childhood imagination, and as an example of how oral tradition transforms into literature. The hosts are employees of the Gogol House Daniil Ryasov and Svetlana Panchenko. On our website, we tell about free events in Moscow.