Krilof, IVAN ANDREEVICH, the La Fontaine of Russia, was born at Moscow, February 14, 1768, the son of a penniless infantry captain. At fourteen he lost his father, next filled for some time a post in a public office at St Petersburg, but gave it up after his mother's death in 1788, to try in turn writing dramas, and the joint editing and publishing of literary magazines. For some years he found shelter at the country seats of Prince Sergius Galitzin, acted till 1804 as his secretary when military governor of Livonia, and next wandered aimlessly about the towns of Russia, finding his amusement in card-playing. About the close of the year 1805 at Moscow he showed some of his fables to the poet Dmitrief, who printed them in the Moscow Spectator. They were at once successful, and thus Krilof, at forty, found in what his strength really lay. The first collection of his fables (twenty-three in number) appeared in 1809; the second, containing twenty-one more, in 1811. He returned to St Petersburg in 1806, and soon after obtained a government appointment which in 1821 he exchanged for a congenial post in the Imperial Public Library under his friend Olenine. Honours were now showered upon his head; his years glided peacefully away; he was comfortably off, and much beloved by all ranks of society, no less for his kindness and good-nature than for his carelessness in dress, his laziness, his excessive smoking, and a thousand amiable eccentricities. He died November 21, 1844, and the vast spontaneous concourse at his funeral in the Nevsky Prospect showed how closely he had touched the popular heart of Russia. A fine bronze statue of him was erected in the Snummer Garden.
Krilof was careless of fame, but could not help being a consummate artist, and the Horatian curiosa felicitas is one of the most characteristic marks of his versification. His shrewd humour and keen though genial satire are all his own, no less than that insight born of sympathy which has given such reality and truth to his glimpses of Russian men and manners. His slightest fables, however light and merely humorous they seem, are stamped throughout by broad humanity and intense although enlightened patriotism. Yet he is never dull or tedious, and his moral never lacks the saving grace of spontaneity. Withal he is a genuine fabulist, with rich measure of that shrewdness wrapped in simplicity, that sense of the varied individuality veiled in the dumbness of the brute-world, and that mastery of the art of compressing the essentials of a story into a few concise and straightforward lines, which mark only the greatest masters of the art.
For Kriolof's life may be read the memoirs in Russian by Pletnef and by Grot, and the admirable sketch prefixed by the late W. R. S. Ralston to his Kriolof and his Fables, a prose translation; in its first edition (1868), of ninety-three fables; in its fourth (1883), of fifty-five more. There are good translations into French verse by Charles Parfait (1867); into German by Ferdinand Torney (1842), and an anonymous lady (1863). See also chap. vi. vol. I of Sutherland Edwards, The Russians at Home (1879).