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I read this at least 100 times as a child in Romania, just found it (in my early 30s) again in English and am so excited! While doing some research, however, I was shocked to see that Olesha has been criticized for sentimentalizing communism. Actually, as a very young girl, I could never understand why this book was not censored in Romania: everything about the "three fat men" reminded me of the Ceausescus, everything about the plight of the people and the sentiments towards revolution signaled to me that perhaps something exciting would happen soon- it did, 1989 came a few years after I started reading The Three Fat Men. When The Revolution rolled into Bucharest, the only way my 9-year-old mind could grasp what was happening was by referencing this book. I was not politically sensitive, as most kids who are 6-9, yet by necessity living under that kind of regime, I had intuitions about the injustice placed on the Romanian people/my friends and family, and I felt these all addressed so elegantly, poetically, and colorfully in this fairy tale. I couldn't get enough of this book, it was the One and Major Work I read as a child under the communist regime which truly helped me articulate, even at such a young age, the necessity of revolution and freedom from oppression of dictatorial regimes. I would say, to anyone who sees this in any way as an endorsement of communism: Olesha is maligned as a Soviet sympathizer simply because he miraculously managed to not spend any time in the gulag, like pretty much every other major writer/artist during the time period. While direct dissent is powerful and admirable, I think Olesha's methods may be even more far-reaching and consequential - because his art actually made it into people's hands, and even naive children like me got a taste of the revolution, before knowing what it was.This is how communism worked in practice: nothing could be published if it wasn't endorsed by The State, and if The State didn't like your work, you'd be off for labor camps. The only ways to get messages across were between the lines, through cleverly disguised satire and humor: this novel/fairy tale does that BRILLIANTLY! Yes, maybe Olesha passed this book off as being about the ascendant communist revolution, but we the people living under the dictatorship of the proletariat saw it for what it was: a book about OUR oppression, OUR upcoming revolution. No way a literate person writing for a mass-audience didn't intend that, or understand that this is how it would be read by the average Ioan(a)-shmoe.Updated March 26, 2016