The creation of the story began when in 1923 Alexei Tolstoy, being in exile, edited the Russian translation of the fairy tale by Italian writer Carlo Collodi "The Adventures of Pinocchio.

[1] This translation under Tolstoy's editorship stands out against the background of others by the presence in the text of a number of attempts to adapt Italian realities for Russian readers in the form of stylistic alterations (the text contains Russian proverbs, sayings, etc.).

[2] It is noteworthy that Tolstoy later transferred some of these adaptations to The Golden Key - in particular, in this translation, Geppetto was already renamed Carlo.

In October 1933, Tolstoy signed a contract with the publishing house "Detgiz" to write his own retelling of "Pinocchio" (co-authored with Nina Petrovskaya), but in December 1934 he had a myocardial infarction, because of which Tolstoy was forced to postpone work on the story and returned to it only in the spring of 1935 (for this he had to postpone work on the trilogy "Walking in Pains").

[5] In the end, he strayed quite far from the original story for the reason that it was outdated for the period of socialist realism, and also because Collodi's tale is full of moralizing and cautionary maxims.