Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?

The Antikvárium.hu watermark at the bottom of the image is a pretty good indication of just how far back I had to dig into my memory to find Nyasszu and Tavi’s adventures.

And while I was at it, I discovered something else: the book was actually written by an Estonian author, not a Russian one as I had always assumed. The edition I grew up with, however, as well as the illustrations, came from the Soviet Union.

According to my friend ChatGPT, the illustrator was none other than Spartak Kalachev, a significant Russian graphic artist who illustrated 228 books.

That surprised me even more.

I’ve always had a tendency to like things that are a little different from the mainstream, but looking back at those blue and red pages now, I genuinely can’t understand how I connected with them so strongly as a child.

There’s something unsettling about them. Almost dreamlike in the wrong way. Slightly nightmarish.

It feels as though adults back then were actively trying to mess children up.

My own children can’t sit through many of the cartoons and stories that were considered perfectly normal in our childhood. They find them either frightening or unbearably sad.

There was another favourite of mine called The Tooth-Pulling Goblin. At one point I considered ordering a copy for them.

They took one look at it and said, “Absolutely not.”

Spooky.

And honestly, they may have had a point.

Looking back at the books and stories I was raised on, it’s a wonder any of us made it out emotionally intact.

Or perhaps we didn’t.

Nyasszu’s story has stayed with me all these years, although only in fragments.

I remember a little rubber dog named Nyasszu who spoke in whispers to Tavi, a preschool-aged boy. At some point Nyasszu got lost, which traumatised everyone involved: Nyasszu, Tavi, and almost certainly me.

That’s probably why I still remember it.

Pure horror.

Although I assume everything turned out fine in the end, as children’s stories generally do.

Probably.

I honestly don’t remember.

But if it hadn’t, I think even my generation would have struggled with it.

For that level of psychological damage we’d probably have to go back a few more generations, perhaps all the way to the Brothers Grimm.

They weren’t even trying to disguise the horror.

And so we soften, generation by generation.

To be honest, I don’t mind.

In fact, I hope one day we soften enough that, on the level of entire nations, we lose the desire to keep killing one another.

I wonder how many generations it will take to get there.

💟☮️💟