KRUILOV, IVAN ANDREEVICH, the Russian La Fontaine, the undoubted head of Russian fabulists, was born at Moscow on the 2nd of February, Old Style (the 13th New Style) 1768. By a singular coincidence the same day half a century before was the birthday of Sumarokov, also a popular fabulist, but whose fables, says I'letnev, are as different from Kruilov's, as earth from heaven. His father was a poor officer of the army, who was continually on the move, and who chanced to be besieged in a fort along with his family by the rebel Pngachev, in the singular outbreak of the Cossaks in 1772, when he made such a resolute defence that Pugachev swore he would not leave one of the family alive if he got them in his power. Fortunately for Russian literature the defence succeeded, and the child of four years old, who was comprehended in the threat, escaped. The elder Kruilov died in 1780 at Tver, leaving behind him a very respectable miscellaneous library, which the boy, now left alone with his mother, devoured with eagerness. Among the books were several plays, and young Kruilov was smitten with the desire of writing one, and before he was fifteen bad produced an opera called the Kafeioitza,' or 'Fortune-Teller by Coffee.' When his mother removed to St. Petersburg to beg him a place as a clerk, he offered his opera to a German bookseller of the name of Breiskopf, who, struck with the youth of the author, offered him sixty rubles for the manuscript, which the boy took out in books, choosing the works of Racine, Moliere, and Boileau. He had already while at Tver learned French, by his mother's choice, from a French tutor there, but though be afterwards read it well, he was never in the course of his life able to speak it fluently. At St. Petersburg be became acquainted with the actors, and before he was eighteen wrote another play, a tragedy, called 'Philomela,' which he could not get acted, but which was printed in the collection called The Russian Theatre,' which the Princess Dashkov [aismcov] was bringing forth under the auspices of the Russian Academy, and in which everything in a dra matic shape was readily inserted, good, bad, or indifferent. For some years Kruilov, who had obtained a place as clerk in one of the public offices, pursued his career as an official and a dramatist, and also occa sionally as an essayist and a journalist, and in 1801, having been recommended to the Empress Maria, he was promoted to be secretary to Priuco Galitzin, governor of Riga, who took such a fancy to him that he invited him to his country-house at Saratov, where ho staid three years apparently in the enjoyment of complete indolence. He wrote four or five playa, among which the 'Modnaya Lavka,' or Milliner'e Shop,' and the Urok Doebkatu,' or Lesson to Ladies,' were tolerably successful, especially the former. But it was not till be was about forty years of age that he accidentally discovered in what his genius really lay. He translated some fables by La Fontaine, which he showed to Dmitriev the poet, who was eminent for his succesa in fable writing, and who at once told Kruilov to persevere. He produced some original fables which were aeon in every mouth, and from that time he confined himself to this kind of writing, in which he soon attained the most amazing popularity which has not diminished to the present moment. The whole number of fables in verse composed by him during his life amounted to 197, of which 37 only are taken from other authors, and 160 are of his own invention. They are written in so lucid a style that when read aloud they are at once understood and relished by the most illiterate Russian, and yet they are as much the delight of the critic as the fables of his great proto type La Fontaine. Innumerable hoes in them have become pro verbial, and many happy phrases coined by Kruilov have become part of the language. Several editiona have been printed of the most
splendid, and several of the cheapest character, and it was said in 1854 that no less than 80,000 copies of them had been put in circu lation. When the Imperial Library of St. Petersburg was first opened to the public in 1812, Kruilov was nominated to the post of one of the assistant officers, and the emperor Alexander assigned to him a p-naion of 1500 assignat rubles (about 601.) above his salary, and eight years after he doubled it, In the year 1834 the emperor Nicholas doubled it again. The new year's present from the emperor Nicholas to the hereditary prince, the present Alexander II, was in 1831 a bust of Kruilov. He was a frequent guest at the table of the empress Maria, and the honoured friend of Karamzin, Zhukoveky, Pushkin, and all the other celebrities of Russian literature. His duties at the library were far from onerous, and he went in fact into an indolence so complete that not even his passion for the drama remained, and be did not enter the inside of a theatre for ten years. On one occasion however he made a singular effort—one of his closest frieuds was his colleague at the library, Gniedich, tho translator of the Iliad,' and in a conversation with him one evening at the house of Olenio, the director of the library, Kruilov contested the justice of his opinion that it was impossible to acquire a knowledge of one of the ancieut languages late in life, and laid a wager that he would master Greek. The conversatiou dropped, and the wager, which was looked upon as a joke, was soon forgotten by all of the company, except Kruilov. Two years after he claimed the wager from Gniedich, and offered to be put through his examination, when it was found that be was a Grecian of no ordinary calibre. For these two years, Kruilov, then a man of fifty, had passed his evenings over this study instead of cards, and such was the result. He afterwards bought and read through a collection of the Greek classica, but as he used to throw the volumes underneath his bed, they were taken to light the fires, and he never interfered to prevent it. His duties as librarian were confined to the Russian books only, which are kept separate from those in all other languages, and in which Sopikov, the author of the 'Russian Bibliography,' was for some time his superior officer. On the 2nd of February 1839, his attaining his seventieth year was celebrated by a grand dinner of the literary men of St. Petersburg, at which 300 authors are said to have been present, and on that occasion the emperor, who had already conferred on him two orders of knighthood, bestowed a third. He retired from his librarianship in 1841, and died on the 11th (or 23rd) of April 1844, of the effects of indigestion. Numerous stories are current of his eccentricities of character, which are told in a very exaggerated form by his French biographer, Bougeault, to that in which they appear in the pages of his Russian biographer Pletnev.
In 1823 Count Gregory Orley printed at Paris a series of poetical versions from Kruilov in French and Italian, made by some of tho first poets of those countries from prose translations with which he had supplied them. The result was a failure, for the liberties taken by the poets destroyed iu many cases all resemblance to the original. It may be doubted if an author who is idiomatic can ever be satisfactorily translated, and a foreigner acquainted with Russian is often unable to see half the beauties which strike a native. It cannot be doubted however, from the effect that they have produced, that the fables of Kruilov are only second in excellence of execution to those of La Fontaine, and he has this pre-eminence over his French competitor, that he has displayed a merit to which the other has no claim—namely, that of invention.