What is a fable: from Aesop to the present day

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Come from the people

One can talk about flattery as a vice for a very long time, argue that both the one who flatters and the one who “buys” into false words both look stupid and act badly. Or you can just tell a fable about a fox and cheese. Short, concise and better than you can say.

Little instructive stories about animals appeared in the world a long time ago: some of them became parables, others - fables. For a long time, Aesop was called the “father” of the fable (about the sixth century BC), there is even such a thing as Aesopian language (allegory). But new research suggests that the oldest fable is the Babylonian-Sumerian fable, and only then came the Indian and ancient Greek.

Modern definition

And Aesop, exposing the vices of people, used allegory in his stories, not because he was a slave and it was dangerous to speak openly, but because he knew what a fable was and how it was customary to present it. Nevertheless, Aesop went down in history as a master of allegory, he turned the genre of fable from folk art into literary. And centuries later, almost all the plots of his stories were used in theirthe work of other fabulists.

And now the educational purpose of the fable remains the same, therefore this genre belongs to didactic literature, the one that is designed to teach, explain and instruct. To the specific question: "What is a fable?" - a modern person will answer that this is an allegorical work of a small size in verse or prose, where the vices of people and society are exposed. The heroes of such narratives are animals and objects (a person is extremely rare), the reader is influenced by comedy (satire) and criticism, and the lesson (the main idea) is the conclusion, which is called morality.

In Russia it all started with Aesop

If in Ancient Greece 600 years before our era it was already known what a fable was, then in Russia they learned about it only after two thousand years. Its definition as a genre was introduced at the beginning of the 17th century by Fyodor Gozvinsky when translating Aesop's fables into Russian. Further, fables can already be found in the work of Kantemir, Sumarokov, Khemnitser. And yet it should be noted that almost all of their works were only translations and adaptations of other people's works: the same Aesop, as well as La Fontaine, Gellert and Lessing. As soon as Ivan Khemnitser makes the first attempts to create his own fable, then Dmitriev picks up this tradition, but when Ivan Krylov got down to business, the world of literature understood what a fable is from the pen of a classic. There is still an opinion that Ivan Andreevich raised the fable as a genre to such a height that it will take centuries to be able to say at least something from someone.new. Lines from his works were snapped up for aphorisms: if you make an analysis of Krylov's fable, absolutely any, it will become clear how the great fabulist adapted non-Russian plots to the Russian mentality, making his fables an expression of national traits.

Analysis features

Analysis of a poetic fable differs significantly from the analysis of a poetic text, since, despite the presence of rhyme, the main thing in such a work is ways to achieve a didactic goal. The analysis of the fable, first of all, includes the following points:

– creation of a fable (author, year of writing, whose plot);

– summary (main idea);

- the characters of the fable (positive, negative), as their character is transmitted;

- the language of the fable (all artistic and expressive means);

– relevance of the fable;

- are there expressions in the fable that have become proverbs or phraseological units.