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Цветята на малката Ида

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"Цветята на малката Ида" е приказка от датския писател Х. Кр. Андерсен. Историята за танцуващите цветя е разказана с присъщата изящност на майстора. Малката Ида случайно научава за баловете, които си организират цветята в кралския дворец. И ето че една нощ тя попада на един такъв бал. Освен че присъства на великолепни танци, малката Ида научава, че цветята могат да бъдат спасени, ако се посадят в земята...

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First published May 8, 1835

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About the author

Hans Christian Andersen

7,802 books3,535 followers
Hans Christian Andersen (often referred to in Scandinavia as H.C. Andersen) was a Danish author and poet. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories — called eventyr, or "fairy-tales" — express themes that transcend age and nationality.

Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Little Mermaid", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Nightingale", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and many more. His stories have inspired plays, ballets, and both live-action and animated films.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
Profile Image for Bionic Jean.
1,383 reviews1,563 followers
December 9, 2023
Little Ida's Flowers is one of the earliest fairy stories by Hans Christian Andersen, first published in 1835, along with three others, "The Tinderbox", "Little Claus and Big Claus", and "The Princess and the Pea". "Little Ida's Flowers" was unusually from his own original idea, and not based on an earlier folktale, as the others were. Hans Christian Andersen said,

"Little Ida's Flowers" ... came into being one day while visiting the poet Thiele, when I was telling his daughter Ida about the flowers at the botanical gardens; I kept and adapted a few of the child's remarks when I later wrote the fairy-tale down."

Matthias Thiele was a folklorist and an early benefactor of Hans Christian Andersen. As well as including the little girl, Ida, in his story, the author also included himself as the "student". It is perfectly clear that he is the student who tells Ida such wonderful stories, as the student,

"could cut amazing pictures out of a piece of paper - hearts with little dancers in them, flowers and great castles with doors that opened."

And Hans Christian Andersen himself was very talented and artistic, specialising in these intricate paper cutouts, often on fairytale themes. Here is one he made:



Hans Christian Andersen's cutout shows a windmill-shaped miller with two hearts, plus a ballerina dangling from one arm. He is flanked by two sandmen (from his story) each holding an umbrella

At the beginning of the story it is early Autumn. Ida, a little girl, is worried because her flowers are wilting. A "student", tells her why. It is because her flowers are exhausted, he says. They have been dancing all night at a ball. Ida is keen to see these dancing flowers for herself.



This is an extremely fanciful and whimsical tale by Hans Christian Andersen. The images of the dancing flowers are lovely. I especially liked the idea of butterflies being flowers who dreamed they could fly. Flowers always seem to be symbols of perfection in Hans Christian Andersen's stories, which is interesting because in most folk tales they symbolise death and decay, because they wither and die. Yet in this particular author's stories, time and time again we come across the transcendent beauty of flowers.

There is a psychoanalytical interpretation of this story, in which each episode, and each character, is a metaphor for a little girl’s sexual fantasies and overnight discovery of real sexuality. The student, in this interpretation, functions as the teacher, who knows all about flowers and butterflies. However this might be, I remain of the opinion that this is an inconsequential, but charming enough, little story.
Profile Image for Книжни Криле.
3,601 reviews202 followers
October 28, 2019
Приказките, включени в този том са едни от най-нежните и трогателни произведения на Андерсен, многопластови истории, които заслужават да бъдат четени отново и отново както от деца, така и от възрастни. Кои се те? Вгледайте се в корицата и ще разберете! „Дивите лебеди”, „Храбрият оловен войник”, „Цветята на малката Ида” и „Грозното патенце” – до една неостаряващи приказки, омагьосващи и пълни с омая и въображение, но и с мъничко тъга. Невъзможно е да останем безучастни към съдбите на Андерсеновите герои, защото в тях неизменно откриваме и самите себе си. Прочетете ревюто на "Книжни Криле": https://knijnikrile.wordpress.com/201...
Profile Image for Steff Fox.
1,558 reviews167 followers
March 9, 2021
| Reader Fox Blog |


I've been on a Hans Christian Andersen kick lately, reading a bunch of his stories on this site I found, partially out of curiosity and partially because I want to be able to say that I've read his entire works. This led me, most recently, to Little Ida's Flowers, an incredibly adorable tale about a young girl and her imagination. The story begins with Ida and a university student as she asks him to tell her why a pair of flowers are wilting.

Not to bog her down with the sadness that comes alongside the knowledge that the flowers may be dying, the student proceeds to inform Ida of a rather magical tale about how the flowers all go to grand balls, sometimes up at the castle, and dance themselves into exhaustion so that the next day they are simply far too tired to keep their leaves and petals standing up straight. A lawyer soon finds this imagination nonsense unacceptable to tell a child and eventually Ida is left to imagine the truth of the story on her own. And imagine it she does.

I loved the whimsy of this story, the adorableness of Ida's imagination, and so much more. It's funny, in a way, because I could also identify with the stuffy old lawyer who does not fully believe in lying to children because I understand the importance of teaching them the truth about the world and not pushing them into too much magical thinking, but children do need their imagined worlds as well. And Ida, I'm sure, would eventually grow up to learn the truth of her dancing flowers even if she doesn't quite know it just yet.

This is a fairly quick and fun read, something I would love to read to kids. There's a lot of fun in a book with a story like this and I definitely enjoyed it.

| Reader Fox Links |
Profile Image for Abigail.
7,958 reviews262 followers
January 23, 2019
Although we owned the complete Hans Christian Andersen when I was a child, and I spent hours poring over it, I have no memory of Little Ida's Flowers, which made its picture-book debut here. The story of a young girl, who wonders why her flowers seem wilted in the morning, and who listens to her friend's tales of midnight flower-balls in the king's castle with growing wonder, it includes a dream sequence in which Ida witnesses just such a dance in her own home...

Although the story was sweet, and Linda Allen's pastel watercolor illustrations were pretty, I found the overall effect of Little Ida's Flowers rather uninspiring. The whole production seemed rather bland and uninteresting, and I had no trouble understanding why this tale - unlike so many of Andersen's more popular stories - had never before been made into a book of its own. I did enjoy Andersen's poke at his critics, in the guise of the "tiresome lawyer," who demands at one point: "How can anyone put such notions into a child's head?" but that one moment of sharp humor stand out like an exclamation point in an otherwise oppressively smooth narrative. All in all, this is a book (and a tale) I would only recommend to the Andersen completist.
Profile Image for Tabbitha Rivera.
448 reviews5 followers
December 30, 2015
This is one of my favorites of Hans Christian Anderson. This magical stories tells of flowers that come to life when one is sleeping and more. Absolutely love
Profile Image for Ioana.
1,309 reviews
December 19, 2020
"Arătându-i un buchețel de flori ofilite de tot, Ida îl întrebă din nou:
-De ce par să se simtă atât de rău azi?
-Știi de ce? îi răspunse studentul. Florile au dansat toată noaptea, iar acum sunt obosite și stau așa, cu capul atârnând.
-Dar florile nu pot să danseze! sări Ida.
-Ba pot! îi răspunse studentul. Atunci când toată lumea doarme, iar afară este întuneric, florile se trezesc și țopăie fericite peste tot și dansează pentru un timp ce pare o eternitate."
Profile Image for K. Anna Kraft.
1,175 reviews38 followers
August 9, 2023
I have arranged my takeaway thoughts on this short story into a haiku, as best I could:

"Like seeds put to soil,
Oddball stories take root in
The dreams of children."
Profile Image for Preetam Chatterjee.
6,741 reviews356 followers
August 24, 2025
#Binge Reviewing My Previous Reads #Classic fairy tales with Modern Implications

This story is often passed off as a sweet, early fairy tale—an innocent child wonders at the ephemeral lives of flowers, only to be consoled with a narrative that amalgamates death, imagination, and fleeting beauty.

Nevertheless, if one reads past the gauzy veil of childish enchantment, the story reveals itself as a meditation on temporality, the commodification of beauty, and the ideological tension between innocence and decay.

In many ways, Little Ida’s Flowers serves less as a pastoral lullaby and more as a primer on how societies narrativise loss in ways that mask their own complicity in destruction.

Ida’s flowers are not static ornaments but active participants in a secret world. By night they dance, and by day they droop, tired from their revels. Already, Andersen destabilises the conventional anthropocentric ordering of life by giving to the vegetal world both autonomy and theatricality. The flowers’ nocturnal agency suggests a counter-life—an existence hidden from utilitarian human eyes.

Yet this magical agency is paradoxically tethered to fragility: the flowers, we are told, will die soon, and Ida’s tender tears confirm the irreversibility of loss. The tale thus introduces a dual logic of enchantment and grief: life is most alive when it is on the cusp of its demise.

Postmodern readings must linger here, for the dance of the flowers functions as an allegory for the circulation of cultural objects in late capitalism. Beauty, like the flowers, is consumed quickly, packaged as spectacle, and exhausted by performance.

Andersen anticipates this economy of exhaustion: the flowers perform, they wither, they are mourned, and their disappearance produces a surplus of narrative affect.

Ida’s sadness becomes a rehearsal of aesthetic consumption itself, where every act of wonder carries the promise of inevitable loss. The 21st-century reader cannot but think of Facebook culture—images blooming on feeds, radiant for a moment, before sinking into the archive, decayed by the algorithmic flow.

The child’s innocence, then, becomes a cypher for modern spectatorship: enchanted, credulous, and willing to invest emotionally in fleeting displays. But Andersen’s irony is sharp. The flowers’ death is not tragic in a metaphysical sense; rather, it mirrors the condition of human narrative-making itself, which thrives on decay.

The fairy tale seduces its reader into mourning what was already scripted to vanish. The “beautiful funeral” given to the flowers foreshadows contemporary practices of staging sustainability campaigns while continuing ecological devastation—rituals of grief masking the system that generates loss.

Ida’s uncle, the student, provides another layer of postmodern irony. His playful explanation—that flowers dance at night—is both comforting and destabilising. It reveals the constructedness of narrative: adults manufacture stories to manage a child’s grief, but those very stories are what outlive empirical truth.

The uncle’s tale within the tale signals Andersen’s metafictional genius; Little Ida’s Flowers becomes not merely a fairy story but a demonstration of the act of storytelling as consolation, as cover, and as displacement.

The student both acknowledges the flowers’ mortality and transforms it into spectacle. This double gesture mirrors contemporary society’s obsession with aestheticising tragedy—whether through commodified grief on social media or through the packaging of climate collapse as beautiful photography.

The flowers’ burial itself deserves closer inspection. Ida lays them in a box, adorns them with paper cut-outs, and mourns them as though they were kin. The performativity of the funeral underscores Andersen’s deep proto-postmodern instinct: rituals of mourning are as much about the mourner as about the dead. Ida’s affect is real, but the burial is already theatrical, a symbolic reorganisation of decay into form.

What Andersen stages here is nothing less than the genesis of culture: humans turn loss into ritual, grief into narrative, and absence into meaning. For 21st-century readers, this anticipates our incessant need to curate memory—whether through digital memorials, funeral selfies, or archived feeds. The flower funeral is a child’s prototype of Instagram memorialisation.

Moreover, the temporality of the tale resists linear progression. Night and day, bloom and wither, dance and funeral—these cycles collapse distinctions between vitality and death. Postmodern temporality thrives on such recursive patterns: the tale becomes an endless rehearsal of loss, where meaning exists only in the oscillation between spectacle and its disappearance.

The flowers are already dead in their dancing; their vitality is an advance payment on their absence. To live is to be already scripted for elegy.

This anticipatory mourning resonates with the contemporary ecological condition, where every blossom in the Anthropocene is shadowed by its probable extinction.

Ida herself, often dismissed as a passive child, emerges as a paradigmatic postmodern subject. She is at once a believer and mourner, an audience and ritualist, a child and proto-archivist. Her flowers’ funeral is an act of archiving—an attempt to preserve the ephemeral through symbolic closure. The lesson here is not childish consolation but rather the impossibility of permanence.

The flowers will rot in their box; the paper cut-outs will fade. Ida’s act is both meaningful and futile, and it is in this paradox that Andersen locates the essence of human culture: the ceaseless attempt to fix what cannot be fixed.

For the 21st-century reader, Little Ida’s Flowers should not be seen merely as a quaint fable but as a profound allegory for our digital condition. We, too, watch our flowers dance—our viral moments, our curated beauty, our commodified aesthetics. We, too, mourn their disappearance, ritualise their death, and tell stories to console ourselves.

Andersen shows that the condition of modernity was already latent in the 19th-century child’s tear: the recognition that every spectacle is haunted by its own decay.

Thus, the tale is not simply about flowers or children but about the structure of loss in culture itself. It anticipates postmodern scepticism toward grand narratives by staging the impossibility of permanence. Ida’s flowers teach us that beauty is inseparable from its death, that narrative is always already elegiac, and that our rituals—whether in fairy tales or Instagram posts—are not antidotes to mortality but its aesthetic accomplices.

Little Ida’s Flowers endures, then, not because it consoles but because it refuses to. Its lesson is devastating: every bloom is already a funeral, and every child’s wonder is already mourning.

Andersen, in miniature, gives us the blueprint for understanding our own entanglement with ephemerality, spectacle, and decay.
Profile Image for Connie.
921 reviews7 followers
Read
June 17, 2009
This month's library feature is Denmark, so I thought I would read a little of Hans Christian Andersen. I was not familiar with this story of cut flowers that droop at the end of the day because they have been dancing the night before at a ball at the king's castle. Several different flowers are named and delicately illustrated.
Profile Image for Amina (ⴰⵎⵉⵏⴰ).
1,564 reviews300 followers
May 14, 2017
Did you know flowers came to life when we sleep? Did you know they have balls and dance?
This story is amazing, your imagination will work hard while reading!
Profile Image for Kayleigh.
1,085 reviews
January 11, 2018
This story is wonderful and full with beauty. I loved the whole idea of dancing flowers in the moonlight. I highly recommend this little gem.
Profile Image for Suzanne.
126 reviews
January 26, 2018
can't find the Danish edition in good reads. read it in Danish...& went on a happy cozy fantasy trip full of flowers & innocence ❤
Profile Image for Elinor  Loredan.
660 reviews29 followers
Read
August 15, 2021
I don't understand why this one is not more popular. Sure, it doesn't have a gripping, dramatic plot, but what's wrong with a story that simply celebrates beauty and magic, as this one does? What could be more enchanting than watching a flower ball in the moonlight? Besides, there is tension in the councilor's disapproval of the student's fancies and in the doll Sophy feeling left out of the dance. The story contains the additional theme of mortality--flowers have such a short lifetime, which makes them a little tragic, and yet the flowers in this story say if Ida buries them they will wake up again in the spring, hinting, perhaps, at the resurrection of Andersen's Christian faith. So, definitely not an empty, shallow story to me.
It is one of my top favorites, and I find a lot more value in it than some more popular ones such as The Princess and the Pea.
Profile Image for Amelia Bujar.
1,791 reviews1 follower
July 12, 2024
FULL REVIEW ON MY WEBSITE
https://thebookcornerchronicles.com/2...

This one was really not for me. Maybe reading children stories as an adult isn’t the best thing to do for some people.

I personally found this story to be very boring and uninteresting. I really had hard time reading it because I just couldn’t get into the story.

The story is pretty quick read, but that’s the only good thing about this story for me personally.

The writing style in this one was very generic which every fairytale has.
Profile Image for Benjamin Rowe.
7 reviews13 followers
February 3, 2022
Moving along with the Andersen read-alouds with two short ones about flowers. Andersen's earliest stories were criticized at the time for their conversational tone and lack of moral. I like that he can insert a sense of whimsy into stories about the absolutely ordinary but that alone only goes so far.
Profile Image for Overlady.
547 reviews9 followers
February 18, 2019
Not a book that I personally enjoyed. However it's definitely something that I would read to a small child. Probably a girl as it has a flowers/doll coming to life theme. Very imaginative and creative story.
Profile Image for Mari.
76 reviews3 followers
March 14, 2019
A menta da criança é algo fértil e incrível , pois ela pode enxergar algo que os adultos já não podem mais , ou não querem mais enxergar .
.
Só queria completar dizendo que esse conto é um prelúdio a Toy Story !
Profile Image for Natalie.
834 reviews62 followers
January 7, 2020
This one was a bit of a miss for me, and not at all one I enjoyed I’m afraid. Seemed just too childish and fantastical and just... ridiculous... for my taste. And there wasn’t really a message or hidden layer to it (or at least... not one I could see? 8’D)

Just... not for me.
Profile Image for Sierra.
507 reviews5 followers
December 22, 2023
This one is a cute story. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before as it reminds me of several stories combined; nutcracker, toy story, the 12 dancing princesses. I could see this being reimagined into a movie like Thumbelina or The Little Mermaid.
Profile Image for Erin.
395 reviews1 follower
July 13, 2022
Such a silly story. Perfect for bedtime
Profile Image for Satur♄o.
393 reviews
February 12, 2023
Muy correcta. Se trata de una historia sobre las flores que puede dejar volar la imaginación de nuestros hijos
Profile Image for Liliana Gulyasik.
50 reviews7 followers
March 26, 2023
So adorable.

*Note: not the edition I read. The coming HCA tales I will add on this site are not true to the edition I am physically reading, for the collection is not verified on goodreads.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews

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