The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales

Vasily Eroshenko was one of the most remarkable transnational literary figures of the early twentieth century: a blind multilingual Esperantist from Ukraine who joined left-wing circles in Japan and befriended the writer Lu Xun in China. This book presents a selection of his stories, translated from Japanese and Esperanto, to English readers.

Vasily Eroshenko (1890–1952) was a blind writer, translator, activist, and teacher who led an extraordinarily global life. After studying in Moscow and London, Eroshenko traveled to Japan, where he found fame for his fairy tales and public speaking. Deported from Japan in 1921 for his connections to political activists, Eroshenko moved to China, where well-known writers like Lu Xun were translating his stories to wide acclaim. The final decades of his life were spent in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and he died in obscurity.

Adam Kuplowsky is a translator based in Toronto.

Jack Zipes is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.

from the foreword by Jack Zipes:
[Eroshenko’s stories] are desperate cries for help by a writer who wants us to understand what we are doing to ourselves, and how we are destroying the world, when we could be cultivating more just and joyous ways of living.

Sho Konishi, University of Oxford:
This blind Ukrainian Esperantist captivated readers as he lived and travelled solo across Asia. He wrote nonimperial translingual tales as his medium of transnational communication in an imperial world. Eroshenko’s modern fairy tales finally reach English-language readers in Kuplowsky’s skilful translations and insightful introduction.

Lu Xun:
[Eroshenko] has a childish yet pure and beautiful heart, and the boundaries of this world cannot limit his imagination…. Upon reading him, I felt grateful that mankind has been gifted such a work by a person who has yet to lose his childlike heart.

Juwen Zhang, editor of The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales:
Kuplowsky’s remarkable translation unearths the long-buried treasure of the fairy tales by Vasily Eroshenko whose life and oeuvre not only bridge many cultures and peoples across Eurasia, but also awake our humanity to the light of hope through his multilingual account as a blind poet and storyteller. This indispensable collection deserves attention from any serious reader.

Amanda Leduc, author of Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space:
The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales is a marvel in every sense of the word. Adam Kuplowsky’s translation is a masterful homage to a storyteller whose own journey holds all of the hope and despair the best fairy tales contain. Read this book!