The first Russian poet of national importance belongs likewise to this epoch, namely KRYLOV (1769[2]-1844), although he had written a great deal for the stage in the preceding reigns, and continued to write for a long time after the death of Alexander I. Krylov is also a Russian classic, of quite a different kind. The son of an officer of the line, he started by being a clerk in the provincial magistrature. Many of his plays were produced with success, though none of them had any durable qualities. But it was not until 1805 that he found his vocation which was to write fables. The first of these were published in 1806 in the _Moscow Journal_; from that time onward he went on writing fables until he died in 1844.
His early fables were translations from La Fontaine. They imitate La Fontaine's free versification and they are written in iambics of varying length. They were at once successful, and he continued to translate fables from the French, or to adapt from Æsop or other sources. But as time went on, he began to invent fables of his own; and out of the two hundred fables which he left at his death, forty only are inspired by La Fontaine and seven suggested by Æsop: the remainder are original. Krylov's translations of La Fontaine are not so much translations as re-creations. He takes the same subject, and although often following the original in every single incident, he thinks out each _motif_ for himself and re-creates it, so that his translations have the same personal stamp and the same originality as his own inventions.
This is true even when the original is a masterpiece of the highest order, such as La Fontaine's _Deux Pigeons_. You would think the opening lines--
"Deux pigeons s'amoient d'amour tendre, L'un d'eux s'ennuyant au logis Fut assez fou pour entreprendre Un voyage en lointain pays"--
were untranslatable; that nothing could be subtracted from them, and that still less could anything be added; one ray the more, one shade the less, you would think, would certainly impair their nameless grace. But what does Krylov do? He re-creates the situation, expanding La Fontaine's first line into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps on it the impress of his personality and his nationality. Here is a literal translation of the Russian, in rhyme. (I am not ambitiously trying a third English version.)