Product Overview
From Russian folklore and literary tradition comes a gathering of twenty-one tales in which the bear appears as ruler, fool, victim, companion, threat, and comic hero. Fables, folk stories, verse, and literary tales move from forests and farmyards to village homes, roads, and wild country, showing how one animal could carry many meanings across Russian storytelling.
First published in 1926, this compact anthology ranges from brief moral fables to longer narrative pieces, blending humor, danger, tenderness, superstition, and the strange logic of folklore. The translations preserve the plain force and unusual turns of the original stories, while the illustrations give the volume a distinctive period character. Some pieces draw on traditional material; others come from major Russian writers who reshaped familiar animal lore in their own ways. Together, the stories form a varied portrait of the bear in Russian imagination—sometimes noble, sometimes ridiculous, and rarely predictable. The result is lively, curious, and deeply rooted in tradition.
