Fables and Fairy Tales by Leo Tolstoy (1886)

A selection of instructional short works collected or written by the famous Russian author.

Book Review: Fables and Fairy Tales by Leo Tolstoy is a bit of an oddity, but a good oddity. These are indeed fables and fairy tales, mostly aimed at children, all embodying a moral lesson. Unlike Aesop, Tolstoy doesn't include an actual moral at the end, leaving that for the reader to decipher. Since many of these pieces were included in primers to help students learn to read, the moral should be relatively simple, but a good number of these contain ideas worth pondering. A piece of advice in the middle of one tale is: "tell your sons that the elder will receive the entire inheritance, and the younger will receive nothing; then they will be equal." Of course, the younger son ends up better off than the older. But "The Snake" has a disturbingly nihilist conclusion, surely baffling to children. In another a hungry peasant eats roll after roll, and after finally eating a single pretzel is no longer hungry -- he realizes he should've eaten the pretzel first! Who says Tolstoy has no sense of humor? While all these stories were new to me, most seemed familiar. For example, Tolstoy uses the metaphor of many birds caught in a net for the adage, "if we do not hang together we will surely hang separately." In another, two hedgehogs find a way to duplicate the success of the tortoise with the hare. All in all, these Fables and Fairy Tales express Tolstoy's philosophy of doing good no matter the cost, which can be difficult for those who concern themselves with superficial notions of fairness, of right and wrong. In a longer piece we learn: "For life there is neither time nor space. The life of a moment and the life of thousands of years, your life and the lives of all creatures, seen and unseen, is one." This is for children? Finally, in "The Three Questions," the answers are: the most important time is now, the most important person is the one you're with, and the most important act is to do good to that person. Fables and Fairy Tales may be the shortest of Tolstoy's works, and at 130 some pages will be certainly the easiest way, even if you re-read, to honestly claim that you've read Tolstoy.  [4★]