The fox or vixen, a trickster of fable and folklore, is a sly survivor of life’s vicissitudes and the natural alter-ego of the Fool. Within the Russian fox ménage, it is usually the female, or vixen, who stars. After a period of relative quietude during the last decades of the old regime, the fox came into her own in the Soviet era. The animals from Russia’s rich tradition of fables resurfaced as prominent voices in early Soviet literature. Works intended for children offered stories and pictures of foxes. Authors and illustrators exhibited wiles in their lives as well as their works. Alexei Tolstoy featured foxes in his work, but more to the point, managed to stay in Stalin’s good graces when many of his peers fell. Both Tolstoy and A. M. Volkov, the author of the strange 1939 Wizard of the Emerald City, cleverly adapted already well-established foreign works. And the fox was not just for children. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov let loose a fox in the person of their Ostap Bender. Readers could celebrate his wit and guile, as Russian émigré Andrei Sinyavsky noted in 1989 when he added Bender the Anti-Hero to his roster of Soviet foxes.