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Trakhtenberg L.A. Allegory and daily life: Ivan Krylov’s fables interpreted by the artists of Budilnik. ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2026. Issue 3 (49). P. 118-136

This article considers the album Krylov’s Fables in Pictures, published in 1892–1893 in two issues as a supplement to the satirical magazine Budilnik (“Alarm Clock”). The album includes twenty fables by Ivan Krylov with illustrations by Konstantin Trutovsky, Mikhail Chemodanov, Konstantin Chichagov, Nikolay Bogatov, Konstantin Savitsky, Avel Levitan, and Ivan Klang. What is unusual about these illustrations is that each of them consists of two or sometimes three parts; in most cases, one part, the central one, is a genre scene, while another part, on the periphery of the picture, is an allegorical episode of Krylov’s fable. In line with such a structure, each picture has a double name. One is the title of the fable, and it is part of the picture; the other is a caption explaining the genre scene, and this name is placed outside the illustration. The correlation of a modern life scene with the fable serves as a means of satirical judgment. Some pictures are in line with the original ideas of the fables. For example, Trutovsky’s illustration to the fable “The Cuckoo and the Cock” satirizes the morals of the theater, plagued by flattery; it was precisely this vice that Krylov wrote about, as his fable was directed against dishonest journalists. But other fables are applied to situations quite unlike those Krylov could have thought of. For instance, Trutovsky, illustrating the fable “The Lion at the Hunt” with a picture entitled “Shareholders’ Affairs,” criticizes the heads of companies who ignore the interests of minor shareholders. While the principle is common to all pictures, their structure varies with regard to the positions of parts and their spatial interrelation. Elements of both parts often cross the border between them. In some cases, both parts share a common visual rhythm, as in Chichagov’s illustration to the fable “The Two Barrels.” A complex symmetry of three parts, each of them featuring three elements, is found in Savitsky’s picture of “The Elephant as Governor.” The idea of illustrating Krylov’s fables with genre pictures was not new. Trutovsky had done that in his drawings for the 1864 edition. Thus, the album is specific not in modernizing fables as such, but in uniting two scenes—genre and allegorical—on one sheet, though in different fictional spaces. This kind of structure is akin to mise en abyme, as if doubling the image, playing over the limits between its parts and, more broadly, between fiction and reality. However, in this case the image is not literally reproduced; the arrangement of participants is repeated, but the participants themselves are not. The resemblance of the allegorical and genre parts of the picture directs the viewer’s thought, thus expressing the satirical idea.

Keywords: Russian 19th-century literature, graphics, illustrations, satire, composition, mise en abyme