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dition that traveled around the world from 1803
to 1806. He graduated from the Imperial Naval
College in St. Petersburg in 1788, and in 1793 he
began a six-year tour of duty with the British
fleet. From 1803 to 1806 he commanded the
first Russian naval expedition to circumnavigate
the globe. Kruzenshtern commanded the ship
Nadezhda
(Hope), while Captain Iu. F. Lisianskii
commanded the
Neva.
Among the other partici-
pants in the expedition was the 16-year-old Otto
von Kotzebue, later to visit Easter Island and the
South Pacific on his own expeditions (1815-18),
and Fabian von Bellinghausen, who became the
first to circumnavigate Antarctica (1819-21).
Apart from detailed geographic and statistical
descriptions of Kamchatka, Russia's American
possessions, the Pacific Ocean islands, and the
coastal regions of southeastern China, the expe-
dition members conducted important ethnolog-
ical and oceanographic investigations. Their
descriptions from the voyage contain data about
the socioeconomic structure, religions, customs,
and traditions of the various peoples of Kam-
chatka, Sakhalin Island, and Oceania. Kruzen-
shtern's account of his expedition,
Voyage around
the World in 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806,
was first
published between 1809 and 1813. In subse-
quent years, he devoted himself to education and
the introduction of new pedagogical techniques,
as director of the Naval College from 1827 to
1842. An honorary member of the
ACADEMY OF
SCIENCES
since 1806, Kruzenshtern was one of
the founding members of the Russian Geograph-
ical Society and member of many foreign scien-
tific societies.
Krylov began working when he was 10 years old
as a merchant's clerk. A lonely boy, he wrote pro-
lifically and, by his teens, had tried his hand at
opera, comedy, and drama. Although he had no
formal education, he managed to learn several
languages. After a stint in Tver, Krylov moved to
St. Petersburg, where he was befriended by the
leading journalists of the day, Nikolai
NOVIKOV
and Aleksandr
RADISHCHEV
. With their assistance
he edited a satirical journal in 1789-90 with the
initial encouragement of the empress,
CATHERINE
II
. When Catherine abandoned her liberal sym-
pathies and imprisoned Novikov and exiled
Radishchev, Krylov was fortunate to receive only
a minor scolding from the censors. For the next
decade, Krylov withdrew into obscurity, reemerg-
ing in 1805 as a translator of La Fontaine's fables.
Inspired by this work, he began to compose his
own fables, the first volume of which,
Basni,
was
published in 1809 to great acclaim. Czar
ALEXAN
-
DER I
was impressed by the effort and offered him
a sinecure at the St. Petersburg library, where he
remained until 1840. Krylov used his free time
well, writing eight more volumes of original
verse fables, with the last one appearing in 1843,
one year before his death. All in all, he wrote
more than 200 fables.
As a fabulist, Krylov enjoyed great success in
his lifetime both in Russia, where school children
memorized his tales, and in Europe and England,
where his fame spread thanks to the efforts of
translators. The secret of his success seems to
have derived from his affable personality, which
his fables reflect, and his ability to write stories
that poke fun at private and public vices in a gen-
tle, rather than bitter manner. In the deceptively
nonthreatening genre of the fable and using the
colloquial language of peasants that he had first
heard while working near Volga River barges in
Tver, he was able to express his critical views in a
way that appealed to a wide audience. His fables
did not lose their appeal after the Russian Revo-
lution, and the centenary of his death was cele-
brated with great fanfare in 1944. A monument
to Krylov was erected at one end of Moscow's
famous Patriarch's Pond.
Krylov, Ivan Andreevich
(1769-1844)
writer
Known as the “Russian La Fontaine” and beloved
by generations of Russian children, Krylov was a
journalist, critic, and playwright who found his
niche in writing fables. Krylov was born into a
middle-class Moscow family that had fallen into
hard times; his father was an army officer who
died while he was still a child. To help his mother,
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