4.5 stars

Reading the foreword and the long introduction, Vasily Eroshenko had a life worthy of a novel. An Ukrainian by birth, he lost his sight to a childhood illness, but never allowed that to define, or stop, him, and after his education was completed at the best school for the blind available to his circumstances, he got into writing and politics. He soon became known for his poetry as much as for his political activism, that got him eventually exiled for his anarchist views and agitating against the statu quo to compel people to rise up for change, just a couple of years before the Russian Revolution.

In Japan, he didn't abandon his convictions. To the contrary, he became even more acute in his convictions, and wrote fairy tales protagonised by animals, plants, and small creatures, that became a venue for his ideas and calls for radical reformation. In this anthology, you'll find all the tales he wrote in his exile in Japan before he again got exiled for political agitation, a total of thirteen tales, and also the four fairy tales he wrote in his exile in China. Written and published from 1915 to 1923, they are known as Japanese Tales and Chinese Tales here, not because they are either Japanese or Chinese in origin but because Eroshenko was living in each country when he wrote them. There seems to have been more, because Eroshenko wrote until his dying day, but the infamous NKVD confiscated his manuscripts under Stalin, so a lot was lost.

Written in a style that makes you think they'd be written by Aesop if Aesop were an angrier acivist instead of the quietly mordant fabulist he was, Eroshenko's fairy tales are pessimistic, bleak, and bittersweet. And so beautifully written they read like poetry. Like Aesop, Eroshenko's tales are deceptively innocent; when you start reading, you're lulled into a false sense of reading a nice little fable for children, and then, <i>whack!</i> The moral of the tale hits you right over the head, and you realise this is no children's sweet story. It carries a message, a metaphor, a reality. And it's not a pretty one. And Eroshenko isn't always obvious, you won't always finish a tale and think, "Ah, so he was talking about..." No, often, you'll have to play Spot the Point with his tales, trying to see what the political lesson, the philosophical aspect, the subversive idea, are. And no, you won't always agree with Eroshenko either, he can be super radical, but do take into account where he was from and what times he lived through, and you'll see his provocative commentaries make sense.

Also worth keeping in mind is that Eroshenko's disability, his blindness, shows in his fairy tales, and unlike non-disabled authors, he doesn't magically "solve" or cure disability, nor accommodates it to fit into the able world. His very first fairy tale here, "The Little Lantern," contains this theme of disability. His biography says his writings have made him a treasured member of the blind community as regards communicating their struggles and needs to the world, like Helen Keller, and I can see why. In traditional tales, disability is something to be "fixed," not so for Eroshenko.

They might not be the cheeriest of fairy tales, they might remind you a bit of Hans Christian Andersen, who also was known for giving his tales a most uncheery and tragic atmosphere, but they are so good and make you think! They should be read one at a time, if you want to grasp their message, and they also could be used to start debate and group conversation in the schoolroom, as the style of delivery is ideal for that.

I still want a novel about Eroshenko's epic life, though. Authors, if you're looking for someone that has everything: smarts, iron will, adventurous life, on the Soviets' hitlist, silver tongue (a <i>multilingual</i> silver tongue at that), cynical optimism (or was it optimistic cynicism?), revolutionary tendencies, anarchism, celebrity status, blind but thriving, globetrotting by force, native from Ukraine, etc., etc., Vasily Yakovlevich Eroshenko is your man.

Thank you to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales by Vasily Eroshenko is an amazing collection of political fairy tales that have been translated from Esperanto and Japanese. According to the description, the author of these fairy tales was a "blind multilingual Esperantist from Ukraine who joined left-wing circles in Japan and befriended the famous modernist writer Lu Xun in China". He was well-known for his politics, which can be seen in the fairy tales. They reminded me of Aesop's Fables or the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde.

Overall, The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales is a wonderful collection of fairy tales that would be perfect for classroom use. It would be great to see if students can find the political beliefs hidden in the fairy tales. Here are some of my favorites. The fairy tale "The Sad Little Fish" has hidden messages about how humans treat the animal kingdom. "A Spring Night's Dream" is about an elf and a nymph who want a goldfish's scales and dragonfly's wings. Lastly, in "For the Sake of Mankind," a human boy puts on a dogskin and becomes a dog. If I had to complain about 1 thing, I wish I knew why the translator, Adam Kuplowsky, said some of the poet's tales were not fit to read and didn't include them in the collection. If you're intrigued by the excerpt above, or if you're a fan of fairy tales, you can check out this book when it comes out in March!

The collection of stories here are a delightfully curious bunch. They are clearly modeled in classical fairy tale style, especially with their primarily non-human casts and frequent fantastical elements, but their intended lessons are clearly not the same as the you’d find in say, a Hans Christian Anderson collection. Some of them clearly jumped out at me, like a tale about a young fish and its thinly failed-stab at religion, but admittedly there are quite a few of them whose leftist themes I still haven’t figured out yet. However, that’s not meant as a criticism. These tales were clearly written for a particular context in history, and so far I’ve actually quite enjoyed the time spent reflecting and trying to discern their greater meaning and to see just how potentially applicable I find them today.

To be perfectly honest though, I think I would have just enjoyed this for the forward alone and for the opportunity to learn about Vasily Eronshenko, creator of these fairy tales. A blind man who spoke many languages but was strongly involved in the Esperanto movement, lived all around Europe, China, and particularly in Japan, and whose extensive resume included massage therapist, lecturer, musician, left-wing activist, and lecturer. To put it succinctly, the life he lived was a fascinating one, and I enjoyed being able to follow it in greater detail in the short biography that starts off his collection. And between that and the stories themselves, “The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales” has been making for a delightfully uniquely reading experience.