Fairy Tales

We want to introduce you and your children to the wonderful Russian storyteller Vladimir Dahl. After reading his fairy tales, A. S. Pushkin wrote in his friend Dahl’s manuscript his fairy tale about the fisherman and the fish: “Take it from you! To the storyteller, the Cossack from Lugansk, the storyteller Alexander Pushkin.”

As your child immerses themself in the world of the Russian fairy tale, whose text has not been distorted and shortened by today’s publishers of glossy children’s books, the child will reflect on good and evil, truth and lies, diligence and laziness—and, of course, will be filled with the virtues of the people.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801–1872) is known to us primarily as a lexicographer, the compiler of the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language,” the main work of his life. He was also a naval officer, a military doctor, a surgeon, an ethnographer, and a writer. And if preserving a word in a dictionary preserves the language as a whole, then preserving a person’s health preserves the people—so, too, preserving fairy tales protects children from the temptations of the modern world.