The article examines the reading of a child at the beginning of the twentieth century in connection with the question of its influence on the world of childhood in the work of A. Platonov. The study of the pre-revolutionary reading of children is of historical and literary interest, it can help in identifying specific texts from the early reading of the writer, in defining traditions that influenced the world of childhood in Platonov’s prose and shaped it, the genesis of children’s images, and the search for allusions.