| Author: | Aleksey Tolstoy |
| Isbn: | 978-5-465-01370-3 |
| Pub Date: | 1936 |
| Language: | Russian |
| Genre: | Tale |
| The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino | |
The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino is a children's novel by Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoy, which is a literary treatment of Carlo Collodi's novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Tolstoy dedicated the book to his future fourth and last wife, Lyudmila Krestinskaya.
The creation of the story began when in 1923 Alexei Tolstoy, being in exile, edited the Russian translation of the fairy tale by Italian writer Carlo Collodi "The Adventures of Pinocchio. The Story of the Wooden Doll" (1883), realized by Nina Petrovskaya. A year later this book was published in Berlin, in the publishing house "Nakanune" (when Tolstoy had already returned to the USSR).[1]
This translation under Tolstoy's editorship stands out against the background of others by the presence in the text of a number of attempts to adapt Italian realities for Russian readers in the form of stylistic alterations (the text contains Russian proverbs, sayings, etc.).[2] It is noteworthy that Tolstoy later transferred some of these adaptations to The Golden Key - in particular, in this translation, Geppetto was already renamed Carlo.
In October 1933, Tolstoy signed a contract with the publishing house "Detgiz" to write his own retelling of "Pinocchio" (co-authored with Nina Petrovskaya), but in December 1934 he had a myocardial infarction, because of which Tolstoy was forced to postpone work on the story and returned to it only in the spring of 1935 (for this he had to postpone work on the trilogy "Walking in Pains").[3] [4]
Although Tolstoy had originally planned to simply produce his own translation of the original, he became fascinated by the original idea and created his own story, adding the story of the hearth painted on an old canvas and the golden key.[5] In the end, he strayed quite far from the original story for the reason that it was outdated for the period of socialist realism, and also because Collodi's tale is full of moralizing and cautionary maxims. On the other hand, Tolstoy wanted to infuse the characters with a more adventurous and fun spirit.
In 1936, Tolstoy wrote the play The Golden Key for the Central Children's Theater[6] at the request of its founder Natalia Sats, and in 1939 he wrote the screenplay for a film of the same name, which was directed by Alexander Ptushko.
Until 1986, the fairy tale was published in the USSR 182 times and was translated into 47 languages. The total circulation amounted to 14.587 million copies.[7]