Malashka and Akulka, two little girls, are playing together happily when they get into a disagreement… and before you know it, the entire village is involved in an imbroglio! Little Girls Are Wiser Than Men is a book for all ages and times adapted from a poetic short story by one of the world’s greatest storytellers, Leo Tolstoy. This astute tale about conflict and resolution is illustrated with linocut art by Lebanese printmaker Hassan Zahreddine and printed on handmade paper, using a vintage 1965 Heidelberg letterpress. Digital files of the text and art were used to create plates that relief-printed on to the surface of paper. This technique captures the spirit of the times that the story was set in while connecting it to the context in which this edition was created. It also makes for a unique reading and viewing experience: the words are deeply etched on the page, the colours are solidly on the surface, and the texture of the paper invites exploration.
Author
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
