I have added a new post to the Copy Book, Cat and Cook, a fable by Russian fabulist Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (1769-1844).
Krylov found his true calling when he was forty. In 1809, he published a collection of fables which at once captured the Russian public’s imagination. More fables followed, and he became something of a celebrity. He was friendly with Emperor Nicholas I, and was one of a handful of literary figures honoured with a place on the Millennium of Russia monument in Veliky Novgorod, unveiled on September 8th, 1862.
The translator, Englishman (John) Henry Harrison (1829-1900), was an English teacher living in St Petersburg. He admired Krylov’s “ardent patriotism, his sound judgment, his fearless exposure of all abuses, and his sympathy, though belonging, by his education and literary connections, to what may be called ‘the old school’, with all really great reforms; witness his advocacy of the rights of the serfs.” Harrison was also something of a conservative, who denounced Tolstoy as ‘a dangerous and revolutionary socialist whose theories were anti-religious’. He protested loudly when British-American actor Ira Aldridge brought The Merchant of Venice to St Petersburg and, in addition to littering his speeches with German words and breaking up Shakespeare’s carefully crafted speech-rhythms with emotional pauses and histrionic gestures, dropped the whole of the fifth act. “His Shylock is just a vulgar moneylender,” grumbled Harrison, though the St Petersburg intelligentsia was charmed by Aldridge, who was indeed most gracious, “not the person represented by Shakespeare as persecuted by Christianity”. It is easy to see why Krylov, as a patriotic reformer with a strong sense of Russia’s heritage, so appealed to him.
The fable of the Cat and the Cook dates from 1812.
Acknowledgements to ‘Ira Aldridge: The Last Years, 1855-1867’ (2015) by Bernth Lindfors.