Ivan Andreyevich Krylov is Russia's best-known fabulist and probably the most epigrammatic of all Russian authors. Formerly a dramatist and journalist, he only discovered his true genre at the age of 40. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop's and La Fontaine's, later fables were original work, often with a satirical bent.
Portrait of Krylov by Karl Briullov, 1839
Monument to Ivan Krylov in the Summer Garden (1854–55), by Peter Klodt von Urgensburg
Portrait of Ivan Krylov by Roman Maximovich Volkov (1812)
Ivan Krylov by Peter A. Olenin [ru] (1824)
Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson, which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying.
Anthropomorphic cat guarding geese, Egypt, c. 1120 BCE
Printed image of the fable of the blacksmith and the dog from the sixteenth century
Aesop, by Velázquez
Valmiki