Fables for Children

Short fables, natural-science tales and stories for peasant children, written by Tolstoy for the school he ran on his own estate. He composed them in the early 1870s, between War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and rewrote each until a child could hear it once and repeat it. "The Lion and the Dog" and the accounts of how a tree grows are the two things every Russian child still knows by heart. Fifty-six plates of Russian genre painting by Perov and Savrasov, from peasant children on the ice to hunters at rest, mirror the world Tolstoy wrote for.