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Ivan Krylov إلياس انطوان إلياس

Ivan Andreyevich Krylov Russian is Russia s best known fabulist While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop s and La Fontaine s, later fables were original work, often satirizing the incompetent bureaucracy that was stifling social progress in his time.Life.Ivan Krylov was born in Moscow, but spent his early years in Orenburg and Tver His father, a distinguished military officer, died in 1779, leaving the family destitute A few years later Krylov and his mother moved to St.Petersburg in the hope of securing a government pension There, Krylov obtained a position in the civil service, but gave it up after his mother s death in 1788 His literary career began in 1783, when he sold a comedy he had written to a publisher He used the proceeds to obtain the works of Moli re, Racine, and Boileau It was probably under the influence of these writers that he produced Philomela, which gave him access to the dramatic circle of Knyazhnin.Krylov made several attempts to start a literary magazine All met with little success, but, together with his plays, these magazine upstarts helped Krylov make a name for himself and gain recognition in literary circles For about four years 1797 1801 Krylov lived at the country estate of Prince Sergey Galitzine, and when the prince was appointed military governor of Livonia, he accompanied him as a secretary Little is known of the years immediately after Krylov resigned from this position, other than the commonly accepted myth that he wandered from town to town in pursuit of card games His first collection of fables, 23 in number, appeared in 1809 with such success that thereafter he abandoned drama for fable writing By the end of his career he had completed over 200, constantly revising them with each new edition From 1812 to 1841 he was employed by the Imperial Public Library, first as an assistant, and then as head of the Russian Books Department, a not very demanding position that left him plenty of time to write.Honors were showered on Krylov even during his lifetime the Russian Academy of Sciences admitted him as a member in 1811, and bestowed on him its gold medal in 1823 in 1838 a great festival was held under imperial sanction to celebrate the jubilee of his first publication, and the Tsar granted him a generous pension By the time he died in 1844, 77,000 copies of his fables had been sold in Russia, and his unique brand of wisdom and humor gained popularity His fables were often rooted in historic events, and are easily recognizable by their style of language and engaging story Though he began as a translator and imitator of existing fables, Krylov soon showed himself an imaginative, prolific writer, who found abundant original material in his native land In Russia his language is considered of high quality his words and phrases are direct, simple and idiomatic, with color and cadence varying with the theme many of them became actual idioms His animal fables blend naturalistic characterization of the animal with an allegorical portrayal of basic human types they span individual foibles as well as difficult interpersonal relations.Krylov s statue in the Summer Garden 1854 55 is one of the most notable monuments in St.Petersburg Sculpted by Peter Clodt, it has reliefs designed by Alexander Agin on all four sides of the pedestal representing scenes from the fables A much later monument was installed in the Patriarch s Ponds district of Moscow in 1976 This was the work of Andrei Drevin, Daniel Mitlyansky, and the architect A Chaltykyan The seated statue of the fabulist is surrounded by twelve metal relief sculptures of the fables in adjoining avenues.Krylov shares yet another monument with the poet Alexander Pushkin in the city of Pushkino s Soviet Square The two were friends and Pushkin modified Krylov s description of an ass of most honest principles The Ass and the P