deathmtn

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Tolstoy wrote stories for the children who lived on his family estate; they went on to become popular throughout Russia and summon up the same feelings of delight and warmth that you find in Anna Karenina’s suicide scene. There is a lion who tears apart a puppy, a tree cut down ‘screaming in unbearable pain’, a dead bird, a dead hare, another dead bird. There is a disputation on ‘why there is evil’, in which a hermit tells us that ‘from our bodies comes all the evil in the world.’ The blurb on the back of my edition says the stories will ‘captivate and delight children of all ages’, always assuming that those children have a more than usually potent appetite for dead puppies.