“If one were to write a Russian Tarzan and place him entirely within present-day Russian conditions,” Viktor Shklovskii asserted in the midst of the veritable Tarzan “craze” that swept across the Soviet Union during the early 1920s, “he would probably not prove to be successful.” Long before Edgar Rice Burroughs's popular series of Tarzan novels was ever published, however, a nineteenth century Russian tale had already treated this same theme of the child who, having been raised among apes in the jungle, returns to civilization to face the dilemma of choosing between two vastly different cultures: the comfortable but corrupt society of men or the company of primitive but noble and loving beasts.