Magpie Tales

Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy is an astonishing and talented writer of a rare gift. He created numerous novels, plays, and stories, and wrote scripts and children’s fairy tales. Aleksei Nikolaevich sought to reveal to young readers, to show them the enormous intellectual, moral, and aesthetic wealth that permeates works of Russian oral folk creativity. Carefully selecting and sifting through countless folklore works, in the end he included in his collection of Russian folk fairy tales 50 animal tales and about seven children’s magical fairy tales.

According to Aleksei Tolstoy, the adaptation of folk fairy tales was a long and difficult task. If we believe his words, among the many variations of Russian and folk fairy tales, he chose the most interesting ones, enriched with truly popular linguistic turns and surprising plot details of fairy tales that could be useful to children and parents in mastering Russian folk culture—its history.

In children’s literature, Tolstoy A. N. contributed his book, lovingly called “The Sorrows of the Magpies” ("Soroch’yi skazki"), prepared in 1910. Thanks to Tolstoy’s diligence and persistence, the stories from this book were often published in children’s journals of that time, such as “Galchonok,” “Tropinka,” and many others. Also, widely used even today are the works from his book.