“The Little Beast May Be Plain, but His Conscience Is Clear...” The Cat in I.A. Krylov’s Fable Bestiary

The purpose of the article is to analyze the features of the allegorical and pictorial potential of the image of the Cat in the fables of I.A. Krylov, taking into account the general vector of their development from the normative-traditionalist to the individually creative type of artistic consciousness. The objectives of the work were: to display these images in nine books of Krylov’s fables; to determine the relationship between the traditional allegorical interpretation of the Cat’s images and the poet’s innovations related to the specifics of their allegorical interpretation and direct artistic representation; finally, to reconstruct the historical and literary context in which the image of the Krylov fable Cat exists. The conclusions of the work are related to the fact that one of the principles that determine the structure of the artistic image in Krylov’s fables is established: direct depiction and allegorical interpretation not only determine each other, but also collide in the text, as a result of which the genre-forming principle of the fable itself is actualized. Thus, it becomes an object of poetical comprehension, losing its unconditionality, which was not questioned within the framework of normative-traditionalist poetics. Krylov’s image of the Cat turns out to be one of the centers of the fabulist’s poetical research, which would later be developed in the works of many Russian writers who addressed it, and first of all Pushkin.