You’ve heard of the great Russian writers Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Pushkin, but another one you may not know about was born February 13, 1769 in Moscow. Ivan Andreyevich Krylov was the son of a military officer, but his father died when Krylov was 10. Krylov and his mother were left in poverty, and moved to St. Petersburg (at the time the set of government) to request a pension. Krylov managed to get a civil service job there, and also began his literary career when he sold a story, The Coffee-Grounds Fortune Teller, that he wrote at 14. In spite of his need for money, he used his sixty ruble fee to buy books of plays by famous authors. With those for inspiration, he wrote several plays of his own, all satirical comedies. He also tried to start a literary magazine — three times.
He wasn’t achieving much economic success, but his reputation in literary circles was growing. When he was about 21, he was hired by Prince Galitzine as a tutor for the prince’s children. He stayed until 1803, and then disappeared. Nobody really knows what he was doing for the next few years, but the story is he became a gambler and made his living traveling around various towns playing cards.
Krylov arrived back in St. Petersburgh around 1807 or 1808 and published some new plays he’d written, as well as some fables. He published his first collection of fables in 1809, and was finally successful — in fact, he was a best-selling author. His first fables included translations and adaptations of works by Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine, but he soon abandoned the translations and wrote original fables. By the end of his career he’d written over 200 of them.
But “the end of his career” came fairly early. He’d amassed a small fortune and won virtually all of the literary prizes that existed in Russia at the time, and around 1830 he just stopped. He was still a celebrity of sorts, and just like his time as (maybe) a nomadic gambler, plenty of stories arose about him. He was said to be a notorious glutton, the laziest person in the world, and never cleaned his house. At the same time, though, he wasn’t completely absent from the social scene in St. Petersburgh; if the nobility hosted a nice dinner or a fancy party, you could evidently count on Krylov to be there and entertain everyone with his witty remarks.
Krylov lived another 14 years, finally passing away when he was 75. There are a number of portraits of Krylov by well known artists, and he was commemorated on postage stamps and, in 1994, a silver coin worth two rubles. There are also countless streets named after him in Russia. In Russia, his fables and humor are still repeated in popular epigrams.
