Complete and unabridged, with 46 full-page plates by Rufin Sudkovsky, Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy and Nicholas Roerich. Russian tales as they were told rather than as they were tidied: Baba Yaga's hut on hen's legs, the frog princess, the seven Simeons, the girl sent to fetch fire from the witch. Verra de Blumenthal translated them in 1903 from the versions she had heard as a child, and kept the cruelty and the sudden mercies both. The Russian fairy world runs on rules that are stated once and never explained. Forty-six plates by painters including Venetsianov and Vasnetsov carry the peasant fields, villages and weather that ground these tales in the Russia that told them.