Fairy Tales

The Finnish poet and writer Sakari Topelius (1818–1898) began to compose fairy tales, inspired by the example of his contemporary H. C. Andersen. Like the Danish storyteller, Topelius’s characters may include old pines, a weather vane rooster, and even a sunbeam. However, the main character of his extraordinarily poetic stories should be named northern nature. The writer said that «he grew up believing that everything in nature lives, feels, and speaks».
The Karelian artist Tamara Yufa, for whom northern landscapes became not only a theme but also the main background of the narrative, illustrated eleven of Topelius's fairy tales in such a way that his magical world acquired a unique charm.

Retold from Swedish by Alexandra Lyubarskaya
Poems for the fairy tales — in a free translation by Sergey Khamelnitsky