"This brilliant parody of the Marxist dialectic serves not only as a delightful children's book but also as a shrewd political tract. The two little boys banter back and forth between the ideal and the real much as Communist Party members did in the early days of the Soviet State. The bright wrappers alone showing parrots on the front and monkeys on the back were enough to offend Russian bureaucrats. The subversive message was perhaps more obvious than Kharms intended, for it was for books like this that he was arrested for sedition in 1930 and his work banned.".