Sergei Rachinskii abandoned a Moscow professorship to teach arithmetic in a village school, and became a legend of Russian education. 1001 задача для умственного счета — a thousand and one problems for mental reckoning — is the drill-book he built there: short, sharp exercises meant to be solved entirely in the head, arranged to carry a child from simple sums to real computational fluency.
Bogdanov-Belsky’s famous painting Mental Arithmetic shows Rachinskii’s classroom at work on exactly these problems. Download the free EPUB and see how much arithmetic a nineteenth-century village schoolroom expected of its pupils — in Russian, as written.