Vanka

Nine-year-old Vanka has been bound as an apprentice to a harsh shoemaker in Moscow, where he works long hours and endures beatings and hunger. On Christmas Eve, alone in a cold workshop, he decides to write to his beloved grandfather, who lives far away in the countryside and once looked after him. He addresses the envelope with care and pours his misery and hopes onto the page, asking to be taken from the city. The short tale is told with a quiet, unsentimental eye, letting a child's simple words reveal the cruelty of poverty and the way working children are left unprotected. It is a brief, moving portrait of loneliness, longing and the wider inequalities of its time.