is probably due to the of a whole story, sometimes even a novella, into a few lines, and among Krasicki's best.

His extreme conciseness is best seen if one counts the number of words in the original author's version and compares it to that of Krasicki's on the same subject. published, but whatever he took was always completely transformed. He also borrowed from LaFontaine, especially in. Thus borrowed the subjects of his fables from the enormous body of fabular literature starting with Aesop and finishing with his own French contemporaries. Poetry for was a more concise and elegant prose, and originality of subject had no importance. Reason is exalted as the human equivalent of animal strength: the survive, the stupid perish.' Krasicki's, writes Czesław Miłosz, 'is a world where the strong win and the weak lose in a sort of immutable order. Instead, his parables point elegant moral lessons drawn from more quotidian human life. Krasicki's parables (e.g., ' Abuzei and Tair,' ' The Blind Man and the Lame,' ' Son and Father,' ' The Farmer,' ' Child and Father,' ' The Master and His Dog,' ' The King and the Scribes,' and ' The Drunkard') do not, by definition, employ the anthropomorphization that characterizes the fables. Krasicki would, unlike Frederick, survive to witness the final dismemberment of the Commonwealth. The First Partition had rendered Krasicki-an intimate of Poland's last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski-involuntarily a subject of that Partition's instigator, Prussia's King Frederick II ('the Great'). The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth would fall victim to the aggression of three powerful neighbors much as, in Krasicki's fable of ' The Lamb and the Wolves,' the lamb falls prey to the two wolves. Just seven years earlier (1772), the Commonwealth had experienced the first of three partitions that would, by 1795, totally expunge the Commonwealth from the political map of Europe. That view is informed by Krasicki's observations of human nature and of national and international politics in his day-including the predicament of the expiring Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. amongst the best ever written, while in colour they are distinctly original, because Polish.' They are, according to Czesław Miłosz, 'the most durable among Krasicki's poems.' Characteristics Įmulating the fables of the ancient Greek Aesop, the Macedonian- Roman Phaedrus, the Polish Biernat of Lublin, and the Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine, and anticipating Russia's Ivan Krylov, Poland's Krasicki populates his fables with anthropomorphized animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature, in epigrammatic expressions of a skeptical, ironic view of the world. Krasicki's fables and parables have been described as being, 'ike Jean de La Fontaine's.

Fables and Parables ( Bajki i przypowieści, 1779), by Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801), is a work in a long international tradition of fable-writing that reaches back to antiquity.

Frederick's fables