Come from the people
You can talk about flattery as a vice for a very long time, and argue that both those who flatter and those who “buy” false words both look silly and do wrong. Or you can just tell the fable about the fox and cheese. Briefly, capaciously and better you will not tell.
Little instructive stories about animals appeared in the world a long time ago: some of them became parables, others - fables. For a long time, the fables were called the "father" of Aesop (about the sixth century BC), even there is such a thing as Aesopian language (allegory). But new studies suggest that the most ancient fable is the Babylonian-Sumerian, and only then Indian and ancient Greek appeared.
Modern definition
And Aesop, exposing the vices of people, used the 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 expound it. Nevertheless, Aesop went down in history as a master of allegory; he turned the fable genre from folk art into a literary one. And after centuries, almost all the plots of his stories were used in his work by 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 teach. To a specific question: "What is a fable?" - modern man will answer that this is an allegorical work of small size in poetry or prose, where 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 comic (satire) and criticism, and the lesson (main idea) is the conclusion, which is called morality.
In Russia, it all started with Aesop
If in ancient Greece even 600 years
before our era it was already known what a fable was, then in Russia they only found out about it after two thousand years. The definition of it as a genre was introduced into everyday life at the beginning of the 17th century by Fedor Gozvinsky when Aesop's fables were translated into Russian. Further fables can already be found in the works of Kantemir, Sumarokov, Chemnitzer. And yet it should be noted that almost all of their works were only a translation and adaptation of other people's works: the same Aesop, as well as Lafontaine, Gellert and Lessing. As soon as Ivan Hemnitser 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 was from under 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 would take centuries to get someone to say at least something new. The lines from his works were grabbed into aphorisms: if you make an
analysis of Krylov’s fable, absolutely any, it will become clear how the great fabulist of non-Russian subjects adapted to the
Russian mentality, making his fables an expression of national features.
Analysis Features
The analysis of the poetic fable differs significantly from the analysis of the poetic text, because, despite the presence of rhyme, the main thing in such a work is how to achieve the didactic goal. Analysis of the fable, first of all, includes the following points:
- creation of a fable (author, year of writing, whose plot);
- summary (main idea);
- fable heroes (positive, negative), how their character is conveyed;
- fable language (all artistic and expressive means) ;
- relevance of the fable;
- are there fables in the fable that have become proverbs or idioms.