![]() A “dying pheasant” convulses in the snow after humans raid the forest and meadow. ![]() In Bambi, Salten’s reportage often turns toward scenes of violence. ![]() ![]() But, as he wrote, “Bambi would never have come into being if I had never aimed my bullet at the head of a roebuck or elk.” He was also a hunter, criticized for his pastime by his contemporaries. Salten was a journalist, a theater critic, a short story writer, and, after publishing Bambi, the author of several other novels told from animals’ points of view, including Perri: The Youth of a Squirrel (1938), Bambi’s Children: The Story of a Forest Family (1939), and Renni the Rescuer: A Dog of the Battlefield (1940). “Tall maples, beeches, and oaks formed a green roof over the thicket, and ferns, vetches, and sage sprang from the firm dark soil.” ![]() “Blackthorn bushes and hazelnut, dogwood, and young elder trees grew all around,” Salten writes of the titular roe deer’s stretch of woods. The natural world is often portrayed frankly, in a tone of reportage so detailed it seems to reveal an obsession. IN FELIX SALTEN’S NOVEL Bambi - published in Berlin in 1923 and cutesified by Disney in 1942, around the same time that its author, whose work had by then been banned by the Nazis, fled Austria to Zurich with his family - there isn’t a single woodland creature with glistening eyes. ![]()
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