Ivan Andreevich Krylov was born on February 2, 1768. in Moscow, but spent the first years of his childhood in Orenburg, where, on the occasion of the Pugachev revolt, his father, who served in the army as a captain, was transferred. At the end of the rebellion, Krylov’s father moved to Tver, where a caring, although uneducated, wife took up his son’s education and, after the death of her husband in 1780, left without any means to live, she identified the boy first as a clerk in the Kalyazinsky district court, Tver city council.
In the year 1782, Krylov moved with his mother to St. Petersburg and enlisted in the state chamber, from where he moved to His Majesty’s Cabinet. Having lost his mother in 1788, Ivan Andreevich left the service and surrendered to literature, where he had long tried his strength, writing another 15 years of the opera “The Coffee House”, and then two tragedies: “Cleopatra” and “Filomela”, not unlike, no literary merit. In 1789 Krylov founded the magazine “The Post of Spirits”, in which, for the first time and with great success, satires appeared in the field; then in 1792 he began publishing the magazine “Spectator”, which was transformed the following year into “St. Petersburg Mercury”. These journals contain several well-known satirical articles by Krylov and many small poems.
On his true calling – fabulist – Krylov attacked only in 1808, writing, in imitation of Lafontaine, fables “Oak and Cane” and “Picky Bride”, and on the advice of the then famous poet-fabulist II Dmitriev devoted himself to this genus poetry, in which he acquired the immortal fame of our famous national writer. The first edition of his fables, among the 23rd, appeared in 1809. Then the editions followed quickly one after another, with the addition of new fables; The last, published during his life in 1843, contains them already 197.
In the year 1812. Krylov was assigned to the Imperial Public Library, where he stayed until 1841, and then retired, died in St. Petersburg on November 9, 1844, not writing anything for the rest of his life except fables. His literary merits are perpetuated by a monument erected to him in the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg.
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