The Golden Key. The Adventures of Pinocchio

For the first time, Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1883–1945) became acquainted with the story of Pinocchio by the Italian writer Carlo Collodi when he sat down in 1923 to edit a translation of this fairy tale, done by the well-known writer N. I. Petrovskaia at the end of the 19th century. He liked the fairy tale, and in 1933, Tolstoy took on his own rendition of the adventures of the living wooden puppet. However, he did not like Collodi's moralizing, who repeatedly instructed his readers, showing how Pinocchio's mistakes led to all sorts of troubles and misfortunes. So, Tolstoy decided to rewrite Collodi's fairy tale in his own way, and as a result, a real diamond was born — "The Adventures of Buratino" (from Italian Burattino — "puppet", "marionette"). The fairy from Collodi's tale transformed into Malvina, the kind master of the puppet theater Manjafoko into the wicked Karabas-Barabas, and Buratino himself became a mischievous jester and an incorrigible optimist. The whole story of his adventures acquired extraordinary dynamism.

The well-known image of Buratino was created in the 1950s by the talented graphic artist A. M. Kanevsky; perhaps these are some of his most famous works. In this collection, the illustrations are taken from two editions — Moscow, Children's Literature, 1971 and 1983.

Carlo Lorenzini (Collodi — his pen name) was born in 1826 in Florence to a poor family. He became early captivated by literature. Carlo supplemented his income through journalism, wrote stories and essays, published a satirical magazine, and translated Charles Perrault's fairy tales into Italian. The fairy tale he composed about the adventures of a wooden puppet brought the writer world fame. It is unlikely he expected such success when the first part of this story was published in the summer of 1881 in one of the first Italian weekly children's magazines. However, parents and children enjoyed the adventures of the puppet with a nose that grew longer from lying, although there was a lot of moralizing, instructive sayings, and quite a few cruel scenes. Readers demanded a continuation, and over the next two years, Collodi added more parts to the story of Pinocchio. By the end of the 20th century, "The Adventures of Pinocchio" (from Italian pino — "pine", occhio — "eye") had been translated into 260 languages.