TWENTY-TWO RUSSIAN TALES FOR YOUNG CHILDREN BY LEO TOLSTOY

These are tales that Tolstoy wrote for the children of peasants who worked his estate, but they do not suit and will not satisfy children of contemporary idiom--unless as curios. They're storyless (i.e., just brief narrative messages), uninflected, and didactically proverbial, as witness the five Tolstoy selections in Miss Morton's Harvest anthology that reappear here. Her translations for this collection like those in the other lack the spark of Tolstovian Russian. Eros Keith's strokes of cafe-au-lait to which type and trim are matched are similarly unwontedly somber.