Old Peters Russian Tales

This is a book of Russian folklore retold for young people and the young at heart.

The tales are a good sampling of Slavic marchen. The stories in this book are those that Russian peasants tell their children and each other. This is a book written far away in Russia, for English children who play in deep lanes with wild roses above them in the high hedges, or by the small singing becks that dance down the gray fells at home.

Russian fairyland is quite different. Under the windows of the author's house, the wavelets of the Volkhov River are beating quietly in the dusk.

A gold light burns on a timber raft floating down the river.

Beyond the river in the blue midsummer twilight are the broad Russian plain and the distant forests of Novgorod.

Somewhere in that forest of great trees--a forest so big that the forests of England are little woods beside it--is the hut where old Peter sits at night and tells these stories to his grandchildren.

In Russia hardly anybody is too old for fairy stories, and the author even heard soldiers on their way to the WWI talking of very wise and very beautiful princesses as they drank their tea by the side of the road. He believed there must be more fairy stories told in Russia than anywhere else in the world.

In this book are a few of those he liked best. The author spent time in Russia during World War I as a journalist for a radical British newspaper, the Daily News, meeting among others, Lenin and Trotsky and was also known in the London bohemian artistic scene.