What is a fable: from Aesop to the present day

Originally from the people

One can very long argue about flattery as a vice, assert that both he who flatterers and those who "buy" on false words, both look foolish and act badly. And you can just tell a fable about the fox and cheese. In short, capacious and better no longer say.

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

Modern definition

And Aesop, denouncing the vices of people, used parables in his stories not because he was a slave and openly speaking was dangerous, but because he knew what a fable is and how it is customary to expound it. Nevertheless, Aesop went down in history as a master of allegory, he turned the genre of fables from folk to literary fiction. And after centuries, almost all the stories of his stories were used in his work by other fabulists.

And now the educational purpose of the fable remains the same, that's why this genre belongs to the didactic literature, the one that is called to teach, explain and teach. To a specific question: "What is a fable?" - a modern man 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 impact on the reader occurs with the help of comic (satire) and criticism, and the teaching (the main idea) is the derivation, which is called morality.

In Russia everything began with Aesop

If in Ancient Greece 600 years before Christ already knew what a fable is, then in Russia it was only learned about it in two thousand years. The definition of it as a genre was introduced at the beginning of the XVII century by Fedor Gozvinsky when translating Aesop's fables into Russian. Further fables can already be found in the works of Cantemir, Sumarokov, Chemnitzer. And yet it should be noted that almost all of their works were just a translation and adaptation of others' works: the same Aesop, as well as Lafontaine, Gellert and Lessing. Only Ivan Chemnitzer makes his first attempts to create his own fable, then Dmitriyev takes up this tradition, but when Ivan Krylov took up the job, the world of literature understood what a fable is from the pen of a classic. Until now, there is an opinion that Ivan Andreevich fable as a genre raised to such a height that it will take centuries, so that it turned out that someone has something new. The lines from his works were snapped up to aphorisms: if you analyze Krylov's fable, absolutely anyone, it becomes clear how the great fabulist of non-Russian subjects adapted to the Russian mentality, making his fables an expression of national traits.

Features of the analysis

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

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

- a summary (the main idea);

- heroes of the fable (positive, negative), as transmitted by their character;

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

- the relevance of the fable;

- whether there are in the fable expressions that have become proverbs or phraseologicalisms.