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Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories

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Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories

#101

Post by goto11 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #92
goto11 wrote: post #48

Important point many are missing: Folktales were not originally for children. They were told among adults after children had gone to sleep. But when folklorists (like the Grimm brothers) started collecting and publishing folk tales, it became a trend to publish sanitized edition for children. Read something like the Arabian Nights tales in an uncensored version - these were clearly not intended for children anymore t…

> Important point many are missing: Folktales were not originally for children. They were told among adults after children had gone to sleep. Do you have any evidence for this? Nothing I’ve ever read in anthropology supports it. When most children die before their fifth birthday, the average family lives in one room and a family is rich if they have two beds, a table and six good chairs people think very differently…

See for example Decameron - upper class adults telling stories (many of them folktales) to each other for entertainment. No kids in sight. It was a widespread tradition before mass media, among rich and poor. It was the Victorians who turned the folktales into children's literature. (And I think you are mixing a few things up about the child factory workers and chimney sweeps - these were the urban poor after industrialization. Grimm had to go to the countryside to record the folktales because the tradition was lost in industrialized urban society.)

> Life used to be nasty, brutish and short. Attitudes were substantially less delicate as a result.

I don't think you can draw a simple correspondence between brutality in real life and brutality in fiction. For example there is a lot more explicit violence in TV today than 50 years ago, even though by all account there is less violent crime in western society overall. And it is not like Grimms Cinderella is exceedingly brutal compared to say Saw or Game of Thrones. On the other hand we don't consider public executions appropriate entertainment for the whole family anymore.

Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories

#102

Post by goto11 »

renewiltord wrote: post #84
goto11 wrote: post #48

Important point many are missing: Folktales were not originally for children. They were told among adults after children had gone to sleep. But when folklorists (like the Grimm brothers) started collecting and publishing folk tales, it became a trend to publish sanitized edition for children. Read something like the Arabian Nights tales in an uncensored version - these were clearly not intended for children anymore t…

Were they not for children or did we decide later that children should read bowdlerized forms? After all, I read Arabian Nights uncensored with people cavorting[0] with courtesans and that one with the false sexual assault but with bad defence arguments when I couldn't have been even a teenager. Also all the Russian stories published translated to English by Pravda involved a lot of violence and head cutting and men…

They were passed on orally, not read, and they were not in particular intended for children. The frame itself is Scherazad telling the stories to her husband, a grown man.

Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories

#103

Post by rectang »

dang wrote: post #27
rectang wrote: post #21

> * Tolstoy wrote them; they couldn’t be that bad. Now I sincerely wish I had never touched them.* The reviewer is Disney's useful idiot. Gotta stay away from Tolstoy — it's not just disturbing, it's actually dangerous! Only Bowdlerized and Disneyfied happy happy joy joy for your kids! And if you aren't perpetually happy all your life, it's not not that the universe is indifferent to human suffering, it's that there'…

Please don't post in the flamewar snark style to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Maybe you don't owe the LA Review of Books better, but you owe this community better. Bashing another with your snark prowess doesn't open up thoughtful conversation. We're trying to have a community that manages not to succumb to the default of internet-acidic. I'm sure you know this, because we've had to as…

What you're asking for here only requires a minor adjustment on my part, which I'm happy to make: I'll pretend that the authors of the posted articles are HN posters.

In the big picture, it's jarring that I'm regarded one of the problem children around here considering how few of my posts I perceive as risky or potentially transgressive of HN norms (which yes, I have thought over quite a lot). But I suppose it makes sense (sigh). Tech is my second career and I'm generally horrified by the tech culture I parachuted into, especially how the hacker ethos which could be so iconoclastic and egalitarian is so exclusionary in practice. HN is more friendly than many tech haunts thanks to the moderation, but it remains alien.

Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories

#104

Post by vharuck »

taneq wrote: post #90
dannygarcia wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Folktales were not originally for children. I learned this the hard way. I purchased a beautifully made "Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales" to read to my then toddler. There are some particularly disturbing stories but I was surprised by how many were flat out nonsensical or silly (like The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear [0]). It's fascinating to read these in their (translated) original form. Not your typi…

Even the 'sanitized' versions of them haven't aged well and are often pretty silly IMO. Maybe it's just because we tend to see them as morality plays these days and try to infer a lesson, while the originals seem to just have been local stories from various villages. Terrible people do well for themselves, lots of people die to no real gain or purpose, etc.

I recently got this surprise when practicing Japanese by translating a folk tale [0]. Even revenge I was able to understand quickly turned into outright sadism. Maybe it was the morals of another time, maybe the tellers didn't care if all the characters were unlikable.

[0]: http://life.ou.edu/stories/sarukani.html

Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories

#105

Post by ivanhoe »

copperx wrote: post #50
ivanhoe wrote: post #47

Those books shouldn't be judged by today's norms. They were not written for the children (nor parents... especially not parents) of today, but for children back then who lived in a completely different world. For instance, in the version of Cinderella by Charles Perrault - the version that we all know - one of the evil stepsisters was advised by her mother to cut off her toes in order to fit the slipper. She almost f…

Aren't we and our children exposed to much more violence, blood, and plain evilness in media nowadays? I don't understand how people in those times would be less sensitive to such themes.

We're exposed to a lot of it, but it's Hollywood depiction of violence, which is a very sanitized, stylized version. People back then had more direct contact with nature and death, it was part of their everyday life and all around them. Many kids would die young, so they all have lost some brothers and sisters. They were expected to work on farms and land, take part in all activities. How many kids today have ever helped parents to slaughter and butcher a pig? Can you imagine today's 5-6 years olds holding a bucket to collect the pig's blood. Or 8-9 y/o being sent by mother to go and cut of the head of a chicken with an axe, and then pluck the feathers and clean the chicken by pouring boiling water over it, all alone without any supervision? And everything else was rougher also. If there was a war it was perfectly common for soldiers to rob, rape, kill and burn down villages along the way. People (poor ones at least) accused of thievery would be killed without much trial, and usually in a very bloody manner (hanging, drowning, boiling, quartering, etc.). Their corps would be left in sight in public places for days. It was a very different world than today for a majority of people.

Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories

#106

Post by forgotmypw16 »

vharuck wrote: post #104
taneq wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the 'sanitized' versions of them haven't aged well and are often pretty silly IMO. Maybe it's just because we tend to see them as morality plays these days and try to infer a lesson, while the originals seem to just have been local stories from various villages. Terrible people do well for themselves, lots of people die to no real gain or purpose, etc.

I recently got this surprise when practicing Japanese by translating a folk tale [0]. Even revenge I was able to understand quickly turned into outright sadism. Maybe it was the morals of another time, maybe the tellers didn't care if all the characters were unlikable. [0]: http://life.ou.edu/stories/sarukani.html

I think it's an effective and impressive warning, which makes one think about the tale at length. And the warning is that if you piss someone off by being greedy, you might accidentally get much worse punishment than you actually deserve for a small mischief.

The tale wouldn't make nearly as much of an impression if, let's say, the crabs just roughed the monkey up a little bit and then they all made up and lived happily ever after.

Nor would it be a realistic or helpful lesson, because that is not now reality works: sometimes actions have serious consequences.

Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories

#107

Post by utopkara »

A lot of the children's stories I heard growing up included violence of sorts. Not saying it was necessarily good, but it is very common, hence perhaps is either harmless or maybe beneficial in a convoluted way. fwiw, the stories kept me from wandering into abandoned old houses, tall thick bushes, or too far away from home; we were pretty much on our own when I was a kid.
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