The Three Fat Men

'All who used to work for you and were paid peanuts for it while you grew fat, all the unfortunate, the deprived, the hungry, the emaciated ones, the orphans, the cripples, the beggars - all are going to war with you, with the fat and the rich who have replaced their hearts with stone...'

So says Prospero the Armourer, captured leader of the people's revolt, from his cage inside the banqueting hall of the Three Fat Men, who rule with equal parts brutality and self-enriching gluttony. Written in the 1920s, The Three Fat Men is unmistakably a communist fairytale, an allegory of the Russian Revolution for good Soviet children. But it's not merely a historical curiosity, and nor should it be dismissed as crude propaganda: despite moments that ring hollow now, this is a brilliant, inventive and moving tale. Olesha wasn't comfortable in the propagandist straightjacket, and it shows: he later found himself out of favour with the regime, and this book was heavily bowdlerised by soviet censors. What springs off the page, in the end, is his rich and absurd visual imagination, his supernatural command of incident and absurdity, and an emotional intensity that ensures that The Three Fat Men, like all the best children's fables, has a surprising capacity to make adult readers weep.