Seventeenth-century Italian fiction is rich, compelling, and entirely unknown to the modern reader. *Brancaleone* is the first example of this tradition to appear in a Russian translation. It could be described as a *Bildungsroman*—a novel of education—though the subject being educated is… a donkey. The protagonist, sold away from his home stable in his youth, passes from one master to another, listening to a vast array of tales intended to impart wisdom; meanwhile, the author provides a moral and political interpretation of these adventures, aiming to instruct the reader. The narrative framework—the wanderings of a sentient donkey—is drawn from the novel by Apuleius, while the embedded tales are derived from Aesop’s fables, picaresque literature, and other sources. This whimsical fusion of disparate elements places *Brancaleone* somewhere between a novel and a genre well-established in Italian literature: the framed collection of short stories.