Red Ridinghood: Russian

by Hanna Hutchinson, Edward Nofziger (Illustrator), Tatyana Gorskaya-Belova (Translator)

24 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book in Russian. It represents about the upper end of what I can read in Russian. To be honest, I wouldn't even have been able to follow the story without the pictures to help me out. It's reassuring that I haven't forgotten ALL the Russian I learned, at least. It's a children's book, most suitable for kids just learning to read, or for reading to very small children.

The story and art are nothing special, but I found it enjoyable enough to hold my interest as I worked through it. It is a rather sanitized version of the Grimm’s fairy tale – I always like the version in which the wolf actually eats Grandma and then the woodsman comes and cuts her out of the wolf’s hide with his axe, but most of what we see today are bowdlerized versions. I was also surprised by how often the text calls Little Red Riding Hood “Malenkaya Devotchka” (“little girl”) instead of “Krasnaya Shapotchka.” I thought part of the point of fairy tales was their redundancy, with characters always referred to in the same way. The variation seems to represent a more modern, grown-up style of writing.