concept
"The Elephant and the Pug" (Слон и Моська)
The Elephant and the Pug
also: Слон и Моська
Ivan Krylov's 1808 fable in which a small dog yaps at an elephant that pays it no notice, to the amused approval of onlookers; a stock Russian cultural reference for a small, noisy figure making a show of defying something far too large to be affected.
Reading notes
- To M. V. Kiseleva, 13 December 1886. Moscow. §8 literary lapdogs ... because it cannot make out the elephants
An allusion to Ivan Krylov's fable "The Elephant and the Pug" (Слон и Моська, 1808), in which a small dog yaps at an elephant that pays it no notice, to the amused approval of onlookers. Chekhov inverts the fable's usual moral (making a show of defying a power one cannot actually harm) into a complaint about a reading public that lavishes attention on flashy minor writers ("lapdogs," himself included) while overlooking genuinely serious ones ("elephants," a category in which he pointedly places Korolenko) -- an early, glancing statement of his ambivalence about being famous for his comic trifles rather than for serious literature.
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