The fairy tales of Toon Tellegen resemble a parody or stylization of “Hedgehog in the Fog” by Kozlov. And my surprise— the author is Dutch! The impression is that it’s a literary mystification: only a Russian person, living within our context, could write such things.
Even the last name clearly fits a hippie-sounding nickname—Tellegen. It’s as if you can already picture the hairy fellow running around muttering “telleys,” parodying “Hedgehog in the Fog”—a book itself very zen and mystical. Here, however, these traits are pushed to an even more vivid, downright absurd state, and they openly disregard reality, the force of gravity, and the physical proportions of the characters. “The author lives in Amsterdam, so his fairy tales are, correspondingly, Dutch. Toon Tellegen is a doctor—he worked in that capacity for three years in Kenya, and now he practices in the capital of the Netherlands. And it turns out he’s also a poet. And his animal fairy tales are loved by both adults and children.”