duced his first, and very creditable,
specimen of his future talent, though obliged, by extreme need, to enter
government service at the age of fourteen, at his father's death. He
filled several positions in different places at a very meager salary,
until the death of his mother (1788), when he resigned and determined to
devote himself exclusively to literature. He engaged in journalistic
work, became an editor, and soon published a paper of his own. But his
real sphere was that of fabulist. In 1803 he offered his first three
fables, partly translated, partly worked over from La Fontaine, and from
the moment of their publication, his fame as a writer of fables began to
grow. But he wrote two comedies and a fairy-opera before, in 1808, he
finally devoted himself to fables, to which branch of literature he
remained faithful as long as he lived. By 1811-1812 his fables were so
popular that he was granted a government pension, and became a member of
the Empress Marya Feodorovna's circle of court poets and literary men.
From 1812-1840, or later, Kryloff had an easy post in the Imperial
Public Library, and in the course of forty years, wrote about two
hundred fables. He is known to have been extremely indolent and untidy;
but all his admirers, and even his enemies, recognized in him a power
which not one of his predecessors in the literary sphere had
possessed--a power which was thoroughly national, bound in the closest
manner to the Russian soil. His fables bear an almost family likeness to
the proverbs, aphorisms, adages, and tales produced by the wisdom of the
masses, and are quite in their spirit. All the Russian poets had tried
their hand at that favorite form of poetic composition--the fable--ever
since its introduction from western Europe, in the eighteenth century;
and Kryloff's success called forth innumerable imitators. But up to that
time, out of all the sorts of poetry existing in Russian literature,
only the fable, thanks to Kryloff, had become, in full measure, the
organ of nationality, both in spirit and in language; and these two
qualities his fables possess in the most profound, national meaning of
the term. His language is peculiar to himself. He was the first who
dared to speak to Russian society, enervated by the harmonious, regular
prose of Karamzin, in the rather rough vernacular of the masses, which
was, nevertheless, energetic, powerful, and contained no foreign
admixture, or any exclusively bookish elem