Fabulous

In the Summer Gardens in St. Petersburg there is a large monument which, unlike most statues in most big-city parks, seems to attract a lot of attention. When I was there a few weeks ago, Russian visitors, in particular, were constantly arranging selfies in front of it; so much so, I had to wait quite a while just to get a clear shot of it. The inscription simply says, "To Krylov". So, I wondered, who the hell is this Krylov guy, anyway?

The clue is in the crowded, wonderfully detailed bronze panels surrounding the statue's plinth, depicting animals in various unlikely combinations and peasants doing unsettling things with ladles of soup. We are clearly in the land of fable, that faux-folksy genre where speaking animals with peculiarly human motivations encounter and outwit each other in tales that convey an easily-digested (and usually quite conservative) form of wisdom. Ivan Krylov, it turns out, is a much-loved fabulist, often referred to as "the Russian La Fontaine".

When Wittgenstein declared, "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him", he probably had such fables in mind. By the same reckoning, if a fox could speak, I'd be amazed if a crow could understand him, either. No need, really: a fox's intentions are pretty straightforward to grasp. So, obviously, the various creatures acting out these exemplary tales are not representatives of their species, but people in disguise. Foxes don't eat grapes, sweet or sour, much less mutter memorable aphorisms about them as they scamper off. At least, not that we could understand. Famously, Isaiah Berlin borrowed the fable of the fox and the hedgehog to characterise human thinkers into two categories: foxes who know many small things, and hedgehogs who know one big thing. Personally, I prefer the mind-blowing version of this aperçu that fell out of my Christmas cracker in 1973: "There are two kinds of people: those who believe there are two kinds of people, and those who don't". No talking animals required.

Despite the success of the likes of Animal Farm and Watership Down, not to mention the oeuvre of Beatrix Potter, the fable has never really established itself as a genre in the English-language literary tradition, except in a defanged version for the consumption of children. It seems to be a very European thing, drawing on classical sources but recast in the image of the rural life of an all-purpose Euro-peasantry. You might say the fable is the literary equivalent of Marie Antoinette dressing up as a milkmaid. I suspect our early industrialisation and urbanisation put paid to the fable as a useful means of expression; talking animals are few and far between in English literature, post-Chaucer. Indeed, I suspect very, very few literate Britons will actually have read any Aesop or La Fontaine or Hans Christian Andersen, or even heard of Krylov. Whether the likes of Kafka are urban fabulists is an interesting question, but not one I'm inclined to pursue further without the prospect of a degree or a substantial cash payment at the end of the process.

Anyway, I couldn't resist extracting Krylov from his sunny park setting, and putting him in front of a more evocative St. Petersburg prospect, where he becomes a bloke absorbed in a book, oblivious to whatever is going on around him.