Children's Stories

The Lion and the Puppy by Leo Tolstoy

A couple of day's ago IAman left a comment with this cryptic phrase: 

Как поговорить с кошкой, не обидев ее Толстой

which Google translates to:

How to talk to a cat without offending her Tolstoy

Google that and I find that the Los Angeles Review of Books has something to say:

THE RUSSIAN NOVELIST Leo Tolstoy, also a gentleman farmer, operated an ancestral estate called Yasnaya Polyana that included a small school for the children of the peasants who labored there. Tolstoy was known to drop by from time to time and share stories that he wrote himself, which, in his typical modesty, he predicted would be read by “thousands, even millions.”

In 1988, the children’s novelist and Russia expert James Riordan translated several of these for a collection called The Lion and the Puppy: And Other Stories for Children, published first by Henry Holt and Company. The cover has a nice picture of a lion and a puppy; the illustrations by Claus Sievert are lovely throughout. My children fell in love with that picture, and they wanted me to read them the book. My first thought was: Children’s stories by the author of the inspirational The Death of Ivan Ilyich? But pestilence has closed the schools and home reading was important. Tolstoy wrote them; they couldn’t be that bad. Now I sincerely wish I had never touched them.

The first story turned out to be the only one we endured together. It’s about a hungry lion in the zoo, whose keepers comb the streets for stray cats and dogs to feed him. Tolstoy recounts the lion coming for a puppy that got lost by its master: “Poor little dog. Tail between its legs, it squeezed itself into the corner of the cage as the lion came closer and closer.”

The lion decides not to eat this puppy, and they become friends. Until we get to page two, when the puppy, now a year old, suddenly sickens and dies. So what does the lion do? “[H]e put his paws about his cold little friend and lay grieving for a full five days. And on the sixth day the lion died.” The end.

Today Borepatch is suffering from a gloomy outlook and quotes Hilaire Belloc. Who the heck is Hilaire Belloc, you might ask? I know I did. Once again Wikipedia provides:

Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870 – 1953) was a British-French writer and historian and one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. . . .

His writings encompassed religious poetry and comic verse for children. His widely sold Cautionary Tales for Children included "Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion" and "Matilda, who told lies and was burned to death". . . .

He also collaborated with G. K. Chesterton on a number of works.

Hoo boy. What a cheerful bunch.