Fables of Tolstoy

One of the characters of the famous ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes scolds a friend: «You are an ignorant and lazy person, you haven’t even learned Aesop». In Athens, children were taught Aesop's fables. Unfortunately, very little is known about the legendary fabulist himself. His short moral stories have reached us in other people’s retellings, becoming the basis for the fables of La Fontaine and Krilov. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy set himself the task of reworking Aesop's texts, bringing them closer to the reality of his time and making them understandable for young readers. For example, where Aesop has the god Hermes, Tolstoy replaces him with the well-known water sprite from children's tales. Many of his texts are closer to the originals. In Tolstoy's tales, there is no crow with cheese, but rather a crow, as with Aesop, holding a piece of meat in its beak. The main merit of the fables in the hands of the great writer is their conciseness and crystal clarity. Tolstoy removes all later accretions, all «embellishments» and unnecessary details. Traditionally, fables were translated in verse. Tolstoy returns them to ringing prose. As a result, the whole core of the fable remains, clearly conveying its essence and meaning. Enthralled by the adaptation of Aesop's fables, L. N. Tolstoy continued this work. He reworked La Fontaine's fables, drew more than three dozen plots from Indian tales and fables, and also composed his own short stories. All of them are included in this book.

The edition is adorned with hundreds of black-and-white and colored illustrations by the Russian artist Ksenia Alexeeva. She honed her skills as a draftsman at the Moscow Academic Art Lyceum of the Russian Academy of Arts and then continued her studies at the Moscow State University of Printing. Ksenia became the winner of the young artists' competition «Illustrating Tolstoy», and as a result, a book of the writer's fables with her illustrations came to light. This collection was published by the State Museum of L. N. Tolstoy. For this edition, the artist created dozens of new illustrations. Ksenia approaches the illustration of ancient fables creatively, reinterpreting some plots in her own way. In her illustrations, a crocodile wears a bowtie, pigeons wear top hats, and a monkey wears aermine mantle. The instantly recognizable earflap hat falls off a turtle, and on the paw of a lion, one can see a wristwatch. In illustrating the fable «How Summer Passed», Ksenia depicts a wasp with abacuses, although there is no mention of them in the text. Such an approach does not distort the meaning of the fables, but only brings it closer to modern life, since fables usually speak about human nature, which remains unchanged at all times.