The Tragic Menagerie

Though published a decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, The Tragic Menagerie possesses a sensibility that is modern in its descriptions of a childhood of passionate affections and unsettling revelations. This fictionalized autobiography follows the tomboyish Vera, who counts among her friends bears, wolves, and a wild crane, as well as local peasant girls. Sent to a German boarding school and exiled from her kingdom, Vera turns into a demonic, disobedient student, rejecting a life she finds constraining and artificial. Only when she returns to her natural world can her deeper compassionate and imaginative self emerge.

"It ranks high among the classic depictions of childhood in world literature." --Slavic and East European Journal

"On the surface, this book is a period piece. . . . At a deeper level, the book is timeless. . . . [S]he can help us to understand the 'tragic menagerie' of the heart, the anarchic, insatiable needs felt by everyone, not only children." --Times Literary Supplement