person
Ivan Krylov
Krylov
Russian fabulist (1769-1844), foundational figure of the Russian literary canon; his bust, alongside those of Pushkin and Gogol, furnishes the late General Voinitsev's study in Act Four as inert emblem of inherited cultivated taste.
Reading notes
- The House with the Mezzanine §110 A crow somewhere... God...
Lida is dictating the opening line of Ivan Krylov's fable "The Crow and the Fox" (\emph{Ворона и Лисица}, 1807), itself adapted from La Fontaine and Aesop, to her pupil Dasha; see the allusions sidecar for this work. The scene's broken, repeated dictation ("a crow somewhere... God sent... have you written it down?'') is left as ordinary interrupted prose rather than reset as verse, following the source.
- Buckwheat Porridge Praises Itself §9 Krylov's geese
A reference to the fables of Ivan Krylov (1769-1844), Russia's foremost fabulist, whose geese (as in "The Geese") are stock figures of self-important foolishness satirized by his verse.
- The Discovery §3 Krylov
Ivan Krylov (1769-1844), Russia's foundational fabulist, whose two-line couplet -- a rooster raking through a dunghill and turning up a pearl it cannot appreciate -- serves as the story's epigraph: the pearl is Bakhromkin's unsuspected artistic gift, and the joke of the sketch is that, like Krylov's rooster, he ultimately does nothing with it.
- To N. P. Chekhov, March 1886. Moscow. §16 Even Krylov said that an empty barrel is heard louder than a full one
A folk maxim associated with the fabulist Ivan Krylov (1769-1844), whose fables were a staple of Russian schoolroom memorization; Chekhov invokes it as proverbial wisdom to argue that showy self-promotion is inversely related to substance -- true talents, by contrast, "sit in the shadows."