Receiving a sixty ruble fee, he exchanged it for the works of Molière, Racine, and Boileau and it was probably under their influence that he wrote his other plays, of which his Philomela (written in 1786) was not published until 1795.

Beginning in 1789, Krylov also made three attempts to start a literary magazine, although none achieved a large circulation or lasted more than a year.

[2] By 1806 he had arrived in Moscow, where he showed the poet and fabulist Ivan Dmitriev his translation of two of Jean de La Fontaine's Fables, "The Oak and the Reed" and "The Choosy Bride", and was encouraged by him to write more.

Soon, however, he moved on to St Petersburg and returned to play writing with more success, particularly with the productions of "The Fashion Shop" (Modnaya lavka) and "A Lesson For the Daughters" (Urok dochkam).

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.

[3] Portraits of Krylov began to be painted almost as soon as the fame of his fables spread, beginning in 1812 with Roman M. Volkov's somewhat conventional depiction of the poet with one hand leaning on books and the other grasping a quill as he stares into space, seeking inspiration.

An 1832 study by Grigory Chernetsov groups his corpulent figure with fellow writers Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky and Nikolay Gnedich.

This was set in the Summer Garden, but the group, along with many others, was ultimately destined to appear in the right foreground of Chernetsov's immense "Parade at Tsaritsyn Meadow", completed in 1837.

Regarded as a sign of the progress of Romanticism in Russian official culture, it was the first monument to a poet erected in Eastern Europe.

The sculptor Peter Clodt seats his massive figure on a tall pedestal surrounded on all sides by tumultuous reliefs designed by Alexander Agin that represent scenes from the fables.

It was erected on the centenary of Krylov's death in 1944 and represents the poet standing and looking down an alley lined with metal reliefs of the fables mounted on plinths.

By the time of Krylov's death, 77,000 copies of his fables had been sold in Russia, and his unique brand of wisdom and humor has remained popular ever since.

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 and in the burning issues of the day.

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,[2] many of them becoming actual idioms.

Again, in his "The Hops and the Oak",[19] Krylov merely embroiders on one of the variants of The Elm and the Vine in which an offer of support by the tree is initially turned down.

[22] In that some of the fables were applied as commentaries on actual historical situations, it is not surprising to find them reused in their turn in political caricatures.

[24] The fable of "The swan, the pike and the crawfish", all of them pulling a cart in a different direction, originally commented sceptically on a new phase in the campaign against Napoleon in the coalition of 1814 (although some interpreters tend to see it as an allusion to the endless debates of the State Council[25]).

Not all the fables confined themselves to speaking animals and one humorous human subject fitted the kind of genre paintings of peasant interiors by those from the emerging Realist school.

That depicts the aging maid accepting the proposal of a balding, hunchbacked suitor who kneels at her feet, while her anxious father listens behind a curtained doorway.

In 1911 Heorhiy Narbut provided attractive Art Nouveau silhouettes for 3 Fables of Krylov, which included "The beggar and fortune" (see below) and "Death and the peasant".

A decade later, when the artistic avant-garde was giving its support to the Russian Revolution, elements of various schools were incorporated by Aleksandr Deyneka into a 1922 edition of the fables.

In 1851, Anton Rubinstein set 5 Krylov Fables for voice and piano, pieces republished in Leipzig in 1864 to a German translation.

[36] The dragonfly, a ballet based on the first of these fables, was created by Leonid Yakobson for performance at the Bolshoi in 1947 but it was withdrawn at the last moment due to political infighting.

La Fontaine knew Latin and so was able to consult classical versions of Aesop's fables in that language – or, as in the case of "The Banker and the Cobbler", to transpose an anecdote in a poem by Horace into his own time.