Ivan Krylov

• 1. Introduction

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  Ivan Andreyevich Krylov did not discover his true calling until he was 40 years old. By then he had already tried his hand at comedy writing, journalism, civil service, and what legend described as years of wandering from town to town playing cards. Yet when he finally turned to fables, he became something Russia had not seen before: a writer whose phrases passed so thoroughly into everyday speech that readers of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin recognized the very first line as a riff on Krylov's words. By the time Krylov died in 1844-77,000 copies of his fables had been sold in Russia. What drove a man to spend nearly four decades writing plays and launching magazines that folded, only to reinvent himself so completely? And what is it about these short animal stories that made emperors laugh, censors flinch, and composers from Anton Rubinstein to the young Dmitri Shostakovich reach for their manuscript paper?

• 2. From Moscow to the Margins

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  Krylov was born in Moscow on the 13th of February 1769, but his childhood unfolded far from the capital, in Orenburg and then Tver. His father, a distinguished military officer, resigned his commission in 1775 and died four years later, leaving the family without money. Krylov and his mother eventually moved to St. Petersburg chasing the hope of a government pension. He found a position in the civil service, but gave it up after his mother died in 1788. His literary instincts had surfaced far earlier. At 14 he wrote a comedy called "The coffee-grounds fortune teller" and sold the manuscript to a publisher for 60 rubles. The play was never published or performed, but Krylov spent the fee on the collected works of Moliere, Racine, and Boileau. Those French masters shaped the plays he wrote in the years that followed, including Philomela, composed in 1786 though not published until 1795. Three separate attempts to launch a literary magazine between 1789 and roughly 1801 all failed to last more than a year. The satire in those magazines, and the humor in his comedies, earned him a reputation in literary circles even without commercial success.

• 3. Patronage and Wandering

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  For roughly four years spanning 1797 to 1801, Krylov left the city entirely and lived at the country estate of Prince Sergey Galitzine. When the prince was appointed military governor of Livonia, Krylov accompanied him as secretary and tutor to his children, resigning that position in 1803. What followed is the haziest stretch of his biography. The commonly accepted story, regarded even at the time as a half-myth, is that he spent those years drifting between towns playing cards. By 1806 he had surfaced in Moscow, where he showed the poet and fabulist Ivan Dmitriev two translations he had made of fables by Jean de La Fontaine, "The Oak and the Reed" and "The Choosy Bride". Dmitriev encouraged him to write more. Krylov soon moved on to St. Petersburg, returned to the theater with greater success than before, and produced two plays that satirized the Russian nobility's taste for everything French. That satirical impulse, aimed at the same Francophile fashions he had mocked in his early magazines, would become a defining thread of his mature fables.

• 4. The Fabulist Takes Shape

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  Krylov's first collection of fables, 23 in number, appeared in 1809 and was greeted with such enthusiasm that he abandoned drama permanently. He went on to complete some 200 fables before the end of his career, revising them repeatedly with each new edition. From 1812 to 1841 the Imperial Public Library employed him, first as an assistant and then as head of the Russian Books Department. The position was undemanding enough to leave him ample time to write. Recognition accumulated steadily. The Russian Academy of Sciences admitted him as a member in 1811 and awarded him its gold medal in 1823. In 1838 a major festival was held in his honor under imperial sanction, and Emperor Nicholas, who knew Krylov personally, granted him a generous pension. Occasionally the fables ran into trouble with government censors, who blocked some of them entirely. "The Grandee," written in 1835, was only cleared for publication after it became known that Krylov had amused the Emperor by reading it aloud. Others waited even longer: "The Speckled Sheep" was not published until 1867 and "The Feast" not until 1869, decades after Krylov's death.

• 5. Fables as Weapons

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  "The wolf in the kennel" was understood by Russian readers almost immediately as a commentary on the French invasion of Russia in 1812, with the wolf's speech echoing the words of Emperor Napoleon so closely that the political point was unmistakable. The broadsheet artist Ivan Terebenev (1780-1815) followed it up with a caricature titled "The wolf and the shepherd" that drew on the same fable to celebrate Russia's resistance. Another fable, "The swan, the pike and the crawfish," in which three creatures each pull a cart in a different direction, began as a skeptical comment on the coalition against Napoleon in 1814. It was reused for a satirical print in 1854 commenting on the alliance between France, Britain and Turkey at the start of the Crimean War, and then again in 1906 applied to agricultural policy. Krylov's fable about the cat and the nightingale transposed an older story about a hawk into a satire on censorship, with the bird too terrified in the cat's grip to produce a single note. The story of the pig eating acorns under an oak while digging at its roots drew scholarly debate over whether its source was Aesop or Lessing's reworking of Aesop, but its target was plain: those who benefit from learning while refusing to honor it.

• 6. The Russian La Fontaine

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  The comparison between Krylov and Jean de La Fontaine runs deeper than the nickname suggests. Both men produced their best fables in maturity, after long incubation. Both distilled their work into the language and form most suited to the material. La Fontaine knew Latin and could consult classical versions of Aesop directly; Krylov compensated by teaching himself Koine Greek from a New Testament around 1819, which let him read Aesop in the original rather than relying on La Fontaine's Latin-derived recreations. The major distinction is one of creative ownership. La Fontaine invented very few fables himself, whereas after 1809 the bulk of Krylov's output was either loosely derived from a source only for its initial idea or was entirely original. Where La Fontaine tended to be an urbane moralist with lean narratives, Krylov characteristically added detail and turned the satirical temperature up. Yet on occasion Krylov moved in the opposite direction, condensing La Fontaine's lengthy "The Man who Runs after Fortune" into the spare economy of his own "Man and his shadow." Krylov's language in Russian is considered of unusually high quality: direct, idiomatic, and rhythmically varied, with many of his phrases becoming standard idioms in the language.

• 7. A Life in Stone and Ink

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  Portraits of Krylov began to appear almost as soon as the fame of his fables spread. Roman M. Volkov's 1812 painting showed him with one hand resting on books and the other gripping a quill, staring into space. An 1832 study by Grigory Chernetsov grouped his corpulent figure with Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky, and Nikolay Gnedich in the Summer Garden, a grouping that was eventually absorbed into Chernetsov's immense "Parade at Tsaritsyn Meadow," completed in 1837. The sculptor Samuil Galberg carved a portrait bust in 1830 that the Emperor presented to his son Alexander as a New Year's gift in 1831. The most celebrated monument came in 1854-55, when the sculptor Peter Clodt placed a massive seated figure in the Summer Garden, surrounded on all sides by relief panels designed by Alexander Agin depicting scenes from the fables. It was regarded at the time as the first monument to a poet erected in Eastern Europe. A monument in Tver, where much of his childhood was spent, was erected on the centenary of his death in 1944; it shows him standing and looking down an alley lined with metal reliefs of the fables mounted on plinths. Pushkin, who was a friend, borrowed the phrase "an ass of most honest principles" from Krylov's fable "The Ass and the Peasant" and adapted it into the famous opening of Eugene Onegin, where readers instantly caught the echo.

• 8. Music, Art, and Afterlife

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  Anton Rubinstein set 5 Krylov fables for voice and piano in 1851, including "The quartet," "The ant and the dragonfly," and "Parnassus"; the pieces were republished in Leipzig in 1864 in German translation. Alexander Gretchaninov followed with 4 Fables after Ivan Krylov for medium voice and piano, and then in 1905 with 2 Fables for mixed a cappella choir. Vladimir Rebikov's stage work based on Krylov's fables is reported to have been Sergei Prokofiev's model when he composed Peter and the Wolf. In 1922 the 16-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich set two fables for solo voice and piano as his opus 4, choosing "The dragonfly and the ant" and "The ass and the nightingale." A ballet drawn from the first of those fables, created by Leonid Yakobson for the Bolshoi, was withdrawn at the last moment in 1947 due to political infighting. In the visual arts, Heorhiy Narbut supplied Art Nouveau silhouettes for a 1911 edition, while Aleksandr Deyneka contributed Expressionist and Constructivist illustrations to a 1922 edition during the revolutionary avant-garde period. Later, Aristarkh A. Dydykin rendered fable scenes in Palekh lacquer miniatures during the 1930s, including a 1928 soup plate depicting "Demyan's Fish Soup" in three bands across the bowl. Krylov's fables last appeared on a Russian coin in 1994, a two ruble silver piece struck on the 150th anniversary of his death.