Evgenii Charushin (1901-1965) was an illustrator and author, known for his children’s books on nature and animals. He said, “More than anything else, I love to depict young animals, touching in their helplessness and interesting, because within them one can already see signs of the full-grown beast.”

This book is a cumulative story about a hole in an oak tree that is inhabited by a series of different animals as it gets bigger. It was published in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Russia at a time when children’s books became a mass media phenomenon. Over a ten-year period, almost 10,000 titles were published in several editions of up to 200,000. Many of these books took experimental approaches to storytelling, design and layout.