The Presidential Library illustrates Ivan Krylov

Every year February 13 marks the birthday of the Russian classic Ivan Krylov. The Presidential Library presents on its portal an extensive electronic collection dedicated to the great fabulist marking his 250th anniversary in 2019. It includes three sections: “Life and Career”, “Oeuvre”, “Memory of Ivan Krylov”, which includes digital copies of rare books, articles, archival documents and visual materials.

Ya. G. Grot in the publication “Krylov’s Literary Life”, available on the Presidential Library’s portal, wrote: “Talent, the most precious gift of nature, is a seal of the highest distinction of a person in a crowd of ordinary mortals. Krylov is the most brilliant example. At birth, he received from fate nothing but talent; in his life he gained neither wealth nor dignity. But he was honored by the tsar and the people, and the entire educated world...".

Ivan Andreevich Krylov had difficulties towards the success of the “fabulist”. He was born in Moscow in 1769 in the family of a poor army officer. After the death of his father, a 14-year-old boy was forced to go to the office as an office clerk in order to save his family from poverty.

It was during this period that Krylov’s multifaceted talent was formed: “Service and early need very early brought him some everyday experience, or at least developed his ability to understand human properties and a complex network of social relations”, - writes L. N. Maykov in the publication "The First Steps of Ivan Andreyevich Krylov in the World of Letters".

However, the fables were not Krylov's first literary experience. “From childhood, he felt a particular desire for dramatic art; then they looked at the opera as the most perfect performance, and the boy Krylov boldly takes up the composition of the opera. Then he tries himself in a tragic way, and finally he goes on to comedy”, - says Grot. “At the end of 1805, he suddenly appeared in Moscow, publishes three fables and, almost 40 years old, realized his true vocation in the field of poetry”.

The electronic collection, available on the Presidential Library’s portal, contains both publications by Ivan. Krylov's fables from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, as well as illustrations to them.

Marking the year of the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, satirical posters from the Second World War, issued in 1944 to the centenary of the death of the fabulist, which depict leaders of the Third Reich in the form of Krylov’s characters, are of particular interest.