THE RUSSIAN FABULIST.*
NURSERY tales, popular songs, proverbs, fables,—all the natural artless literature that springs up mushroom-like from the soil of a country,—have long been acknowledged by the wisest knowers of men to exert the most powerful influence upon the character of a nation, an influence far more powerful than the intellectual and artistic literature produced by its greatest minds. For the former trains the minds of children and the uneducated class, while the latter appeals to minds already imbued with the lore contained in the former. Hence the artless literature affords to the foreigner in many respects the clearest and most reliable mirror of the life and character of the nation he is trying to understand. Since the time of Herder, who diligently collected the Stinimen der Volker in Liedern, our knowledge of the peculiar habits, legends, and character of the most various and distant tribes has been constantly increased by translations of their songs and collections of their legends ; so that any one with a knowledge of German and French may learn nearly all that is to be known on this field. It must be confessed, however, that England has added but little to this store of knowledge, beyond investigation into local British customs and dialects, and a few more remarkable elucidations of those of Indian tribes.
Fables might stand on the same footing as songs, if they were always as strictly local. But however general an acceptation they meet among the uneducated classes, their origin is seldom so clearly local. Most of the modern fabulists are avowed imitators or translators of .sop or Babrius, and thus the same stories wander from land to land, and become so acclimatized that their source is forgotten ; just as in Greece itself it was forgotten that Esop was only a translator of the Sanskrit fables. The Germans alone have a thoroughly national fable, that of " Reivard the Fox ;" which differs in almost every respect, except the fundamental idea of all these fables—that of using the beasts to hit off the foibles of men—from the fables of the Hindu and 2Esopic form.
The Russian fables offered to us in the present attractive volume appear on the first glance to be of the Esopic character. They are short, almost epigrammatic in tone, expressed in verse, and the follies they lash are much the same which we know from Esop himself or from Lafontaine. The animals which Esop loves are Krilof's favourites also ; the lion, wolf, fox, crow, cat, bear, ass, dog, and others. Yet a more careful reading will soon show that Krilof is very far from merely naturalizing .sop in Russia. On
the contrary, though sometimes imitating the fables of Florian and others, he is generally an independent fabulist, and his fables are intensely Russian, and give us glimpses into the life,— with, of course, the ignorance, credulity, and other weaknesses,—of the Russian peasantry which no less national book could do. His fables have thereby become truly national stories, and deserve a place among the Stinanzen der Volker. One publisher, we are told, printed, between 1830 and 1840, 40,000 copies of them in various forms. Yet Krilof is no ancient writer, whose works have been ignored by his contemporaries, and only delighted a late posterity. Mr. Ralston gives us an interesting memoir of him, from which we learn that he was born in or about the year 1768, and died in 1844. He was the son of a captain of infantry, whose income was, of course, very small, and whose removal from Moscow to places of less capabilities further east must have diminished the chance of a decent education being afforded to his son, to say nothing of political troubles and frequent flight from actual mortal danger. But the father died when the boy was only fourteen ; and all that could be obtained by his mother was a miserable pittance, two roubles (six shillings) a month, for her son at St. Petersburg. His mother, however, did all she could for him, and induced him to study hard, beginning with the little library that his father had carried about with him. This was evidently the solid foundation upon which his mastery of his native tongue, and the trained clearness of the ideas he expressed in it, were built up. His first literary attempts were not remarkable. He started with dramatic ideas, and afterwards tried journalism ; but his plays were seldom printed and never acted, and his various journals expired after a very short term. His intimacy with Prince Sergius Galitsin was an important event in his life, since his residence on that nobleman's estates in the province of Saratof threw him into constant intercourse with the peasantry, and did much to qualify him for writing the fabke which were to touch largely upon peasant life, and to form a unique kind of peasant literature. In 1806 he obtained a Government appointment at St. Petersburg, and in 1812 a post in the Imperial Library, which he held till about 1840; this seems to have afforded him good opportunities for indulging his literary tastes, with but little trouble in the official duties attached to it. He was never married, and the bachelor habits which he contracted seem out of keeping with a man whose works show him to have possessed literary power and refinement, with a very amiable and sympathizing character. We refer to his extreme untidiness and dirt, as to the state of his rooms, his clothes, and all that surrounded him. His male friends sought him out in his quarters, where everything was topsy-turvy, or in the wrong place,—the floor strewn with oats to attract the neighbouring pigeons, and where even such necessaries as pen, ink, and paper were not procurable without difficulty. But he could not endure new clothes, and was therefore seldom seen in society. Indolence and corpulence increased with age ; but he retained his full faculties to .the last. The dirtiness is attributed by common repute to the Slavonic nations generally, and perhaps to the Russians and Poles in particular ; and as we know that cleanliness is next to godliness, we are taught to think no good of people so wanting in that virtue. We hope that it will disturb no one's moral feelings on this point to find here a Russian of the Russians who had much good in him, who delighted his own people, and may delight others, by a simplicity and geniality which is its own best introduction. He did not find out his tree forte,—fable-writing,— till 1809, when he was forty-one years of age, but from that time "he was content to base his reputation on his fables." Of Mr. Ralston's translation it is hard to speak too highly. In most cases the experiment of translating verse into prose is very questionable ; perhaps we might say that in most cases it pleases no one but the translator, who knows how accurately he has rendered word for word, and from what trammels of rhythm and rhyme he has escaped ; whereas the reader would rather have poetical thoughts clothed in the form best suited for them, than insist on verbal accuracy. But the case of these fables is exceptional. We are accustomed to fables in prose ; and as the story is plain, and the language simple, we feel no incongruity between the thought and the language. Mr. Ralston says he has derived assistance from two German translations and one French ; but we are bound to say, that while these may have helped him 03 occasional difficult passages, his own is strictly and very liters. .11Y from the Russian, and renders it with a terseness and simplicity very different from the looseness and vulgarity of the others. It might be supposed from these remarks that the English vvas Russian, and would not be pleasant every-day English that a child I would read with pleasure. But it is emphatically the latter ; the
translator having seized the rare art of being at once literal to the language he translates from, and observant of the idioms of that he uses.
But we have already delayed too long to give a specimen of the fables, which will, we trust, bear out what has been said of their merit. The following may serve as a specimen of the fable of general application, though local colouring :—
0 The Piraskerr AND THE LABOURER.
"An old poasant and a labourer were going home through the forest to the village one evening, in the time of the hay harvest, when they suddenly found themselves face to face with a bear. Scarcely had the peasant time to utter a cry, when the bear was upon him ; it threw him down, rolled him over, made his bones crack again, and began looking about for a soft spot at which to commence its meal. Death draws
near to the old man. Stefan, my kinsman, my dear friend, do not desert me !' he cries, from under the bear, to the labourer. Then Stefan, putting forth all his strength like a new Hercules, splits the bear's head in two with his axe, and drives his pitchfork into its bowels. The bear howls, and falls dying. Our bear expires. The danger having vanished, the peasant gets up, and soundly scolds the labourer. Our poor Stefan is astonished. 'Pardon me, what have I done?'—' What have you done, you blockhead ? I'd like to know what you are so absurdly pleased about ; why, you've gone and stuck the bear in such a manner that you've utterly ruined his fur ! ' "
The following exhibits the quiet satire which Krilof possessed, and used with such boldness as to gain the greatest popularity for his crypto-political fables, yet so dexterously as not to incur the anger of the censor. This is said to refer to some grants of lauds made to the Governor of the province of Pskof during a terrible famine in that region :—
" Tns Rsix-CLoun.
"A great cloud passed rapidly over a country which was parched by heat, but did not let fall a single drop to refresh it. Presently it poured a copious stream of rain into the sea, and then began boasting of its generosity in the hearing of a neighbouring mountain. But the mountain replied, 'What good have you done by such generosity and how can one help being pained at seeing it ? If you had poured your showers over the land, you would have saved a whole district from famine. But as to the sea, my friend, it has plenty of water already, without your adding to it.'"
Previous page
