> I’m all for showing your kids reality
I really don't think that's why children's stories used to be macabre. Nobody ever claimed these were accurate representations of reality.
Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
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Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
#32Is the site down?
Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
#33This seems to be pretty much par for the course for 19th century children's books. Compare them to the original versions of H.C. Andersen's fairy tales or Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter
When you say “the original versions of H.C. Andersen's fairy tales,” you mean as compared to modern (Disney) adaptations, right? I know the Grimm tales were self-sanitized in later editions, but haven’t heard that of Andersen's.
Yeah, I was mainly referring to the later adaptions. Don't think there were different versions.
Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
#34Why do headlines all sound like they're written by teenage girls now, even when they're written by grown men?
Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
My gandma used to read the Struwwelpeter stories to me as a child. I would actually disagree with the premise of the article that they make children want to die. They actually are supposed to frighten children into behaving properly.
I actually enjoyed the stories back then and they didn't really work when it came to changing my behaviour. Probably mostly because I just didn't grasp the seriousness of the bloodier parts.
> Probably mostly because I just didn't grasp the seriousness of the bloodier parts.
And this is why the original folktales emphasize the gore. You can basically chop off the last quarter of any folktale and replace it with a direction to the story-teller, i.e. "[and now you shall carry on about bad things happening to the child protagonist, in as visceral a manner as you have the mind and words to render, until the children listening have been thoroughly traumatized as to the consequences of their misbehavior.]"
Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
#36I think classic folk tales were more macabre, but since consumers today are not interested in them so much it's somewhat lost to us. We have Grimm's Fairy Stories, but as the author points out, in most modern editions they edit out the darker ones. We have this Tolstoy collection because he is a famous author and people are interested in his stories. And guess what, they are super dark. Is that because Tolstoy was da…
> in most modern editions they edit out the darker ones Yeah, it's disgusting. It's incredibly hard to find actual stories now, they are always screwed up by talentless editors. Reminds me of drawing fig leaves over Renaissance pictures when protestantism took over.
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Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
#37In case you skimmed the article after the first few paragraphs, note that the point is not that the stories are sad or grim but that they are only sad or grim. There is no moral or hate that leads to things happening. The characters just lives who’ve are sad. I also read the article as lighthearted and humorous and so assumed some things may have been exaggerated it embellished slightly for effect.
Knowing Tolstoy's other writings I get the feeling that these one paragraph summaries don't do his prose justice.
Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
#38The Gigantic Turnip is an delightful children's book. I wore that thing to the spine with my kids:
https://www.amazon.com/Gigantic-Turnip-Aleksei-Tolstoy/dp/19...
Re: Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories
#39> * 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'…
Old Disney stuff was dark. The fluffy versions are relatively recent.
The fluffy versions sell. How popular would Little Mermaid have been, if at the end, Ariel ended up as sea foam?