| Genre: | Short story collection, children's fiction |
| Author: | Viktor Dragunsky |
| Pub Date: | 1961 |
| Language: | Russian |
The Adventures of Dennis (ru|Денискины рассказы, Deniskiny rasskazy) is a collection of short stories for children written by Soviet author Viktor Dragunsky. They deal with the life of an eight-year-old boy in Moscow in the late 1950s and 1960s,[1] modelled on the author's son.[2] The first story was written in 1959; by 1961 a collection was published as a book. The total number of stories is about a hundred.
The stories show a wide range of tone, with Dragunsky mixing the poetic, the satirical and the sentimental. A 1999 review in the New Zealand Slavonic Journal describes the stories as "beautifully written" and offering "a rich psychological profile of Russian children".[3]
The Adventures of Dennis were popular in India, where they existed in English and Marathi translations.[4] One reason for their popularity was that they were more relatable when compared to English children's literature.[5] In 2016 they were for the first time translated directly from Russian into Hindi and Marathi.