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Fox and Crow (fable - story)
"The Fox and the Crow" is one of Aesop's Fables,
numbered 124 in the Perry Index. There are early Latin and Greek
versions and the fable may even have been portrayed on an ancient
Greek vase. The story is used as a warning against listening to
flattery.
In the fable a crow has found a piece of cheese
and retired to a branch to eat it. A fox, wanting the cheese for
himself, flatters the crow, calling it beautiful and wondering
whether its voice is as sweet to match. When the crow lets out a
caw, the cheese falls and is devoured by the fox.
The earliest surviving versions of the fable, in
both Greek and Latin, date from the 1st century of the Common Era.
Evidence that it was well known before then comes in the poems of
the Latin poet Horace, who alludes to it twice. Addressing a
maladroit sponger called Scaeva in his Epistles, the poet counsels
guarded speech for 'if the crow could have fed in silence, he would
have had better fare, and much less of quarreling and of envy'.
Then in a Satire on legacy-hunting, we find the lines
A season’d Scrivener, bred in Office low,
Full often mocks, and dupes the gaping crow.
The poem has generally been taken as a caution
against listening to flatterers. Phaedrus prefaces his Latin poem
with the warning that the one 'who takes delight in treacherous
flattery usually pays the penalty by repentance and disgrace'. One
of the few who gives it a different interpretation is Odo of
Cheriton, whose lesson is that virtue is forgotten in the pursuit
of ambition. Babrius has the fox end with a joke at the crow's
credulity in his Greek version of the story: 'You were not dumb, it
seems, you have indeed a voice; you have everything, Sir Crow,
except brains.' In La Fontaine's Fables, the fox delivers the moral
by way of recompense for the tidbit. In Norman Shapiro's
translation:
Flatterers thrive on fools' credulity.
The lesson's worth a cheese, don't you agree?"
The crow, shamefaced and flustered swore,
Too late, however: "Nevermore!"
As was the case with several others of La
Fontaine's fables, there was dissatisfaction in Christian circles,
where it was felt that morality was offended by allowing the fox to
go unpunished for its theft. Therefore a sequel was provided in the
form of a popular song of which a version is recorded in
Saskatchewan. In this the fox’s funeral is dolefully
described but ends with the crow cawing from its branch,
I’m not at all sorry, now that he’s dead,
He took my cheese and ate it in my stead,
He’s punished by fate - God, you’ve avenged me.
The German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who
had decided views on how fables should be written, gave
Aesop’s Der Rabe und der Fuchs an ironic twist. In his
rewritten version, a gardener has left poisoned meat out to kill
invading rats. It is this that the raven picks up but is flattered
out of it by the fox, which then dies in agony. To emphasise the
moral he is drawing, Lessing concludes with the curse,
‘Abominable flatterers, may you all be so rewarded with one
poison for another!’.
An Eastern story of flattery rewarded exists in
the Buddhist scriptures as the Jambhu-Khadaka-Jataka. In this a
jackal praises the crow's voice as it is feeding in a rose-apple
tree. The crow replies that it requires nobility to discover the
same in others and shakes down some fruit for the jackal to
share.
What seems to be a depiction of the tale on a
painted vase discovered in excavations at Lothal from the Indus
Valley Civilisation suggests that the story may have been known
there at least a thousand years earlier than any other source. In
this scene, the bird is depicted perched on a tree holding a fish,
while a fox-looking animal is underneath.
Ivan Krylov
Ivan Andreyevich Krylov 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 Moliere, 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 Peasant) to provide the
opening of his romantic novel in verse, Evgenii Onegin. So well
known were Krylov's fables that readers were immediately alerted by
its first line, 'My uncle, of most honest principles'.
Other commemorations of the fabulist include the
two stamps issued on the centenary of his death and the stamp
issued on the 200th centenary of his birth. The 150th anniversary
of his death was marked by the striking of a two ruble silver coin.
Numerous streets have also been named after him including in St
Petersburg, Tver, Novosibirsk and other cities, as well as in
formerly Soviet territories: Belarus, Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia and
Kazakhstan.
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