We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
from Part III - The Bolshevik Revolution and the Arts (1917–1950)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2019
The fox or vixen, a trickster of fable and folklore, is a sly survivor of life’s vicissitudes and the natural alter-ego of the Fool. Within the Russian fox ménage, it is usually the female, or vixen, who stars. After a period of relative quietude during the last decades of the old regime, the fox came into her own in the Soviet era. The animals from Russia’s rich tradition of fables resurfaced as prominent voices in early Soviet literature. Works intended for children offered stories and pictures of foxes. Authors and illustrators exhibited wiles in their lives as well as their works. Alexei Tolstoy featured foxes in his work, but more to the point, managed to stay in Stalin’s good graces when many of his peers fell. Both Tolstoy and A. M. Volkov, the author of the strange 1939 Wizard of the Emerald City, cleverly adapted already well-established foreign works. And the fox was not just for children. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov let loose a fox in the person of their Ostap Bender. Readers could celebrate his wit and guile, as Russian émigré Andrei Sinyavsky noted in 1989 when he added Bender the Anti-Hero to his roster of Soviet foxes.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
