Anya and Manya

Two wonderful heroines of the story, friends Anya and Manya, have a fantastical yet real life. Being together with kindergarten at a forest dacha, they decided not to sleep all night (and then another night and another). And here is what came of it. It turns out that if you try not to fall asleep and quietly sneak out of the bedroom, you can have a conversation with a huge talking Hedgehog, a creaking Closet, and the Moon, which can be round and plump or skinny, lying in a flowerbed. You can even fly in the night sky and sit on the clouds. The book is written in a light, melodious style, with soft humor, mainly in dialogues, in funny children's (and sometimes adult) remarks, in poems. The magical adventures and the real life of the girls in kindergarten are harmoniously combined. Some natural phenomena are explained (full moon, new moon), as well as the behavior of forest dwellers. The book 'Anya and Manya' was written by Elena Sergeevna Ventzel – a unique woman, a mathematician, an author of textbooks on probability theory, a prose writer. Her literary pseudonym is I. Grekova (named after the 25th letter of the Latin alphabet 'y', which in mathematics is used to denote an unknown or variable value, as well as the y-axis). I. Grekova wrote excellent books for adults. It is only regrettable that the story 'Anya and Manya' is her only prose work for children.