Krilof and His Fables/The Cask

A certain man asked a friend to lend him a cask for two or three days. Now, in friendship, a readiness to oblige is a holy thing. You see, if the matter had been one of money, that would have been quite another question. In that case friendship would have been beside the mark, and it would have been possible to refuse. But as to lending a cask—why shouldn't one?

When it had been returned, they began carrying water in it again. And everything would have been all right about it if it had not been for this—that a spirit merchant had used it for keeping brandy in, and it had become so saturated with the spirit in a couple of days, that it communicated a flavour of brandy to everything that was put into it—to kvass or beer, whichever had been brewed, or even to eat­ables.

Almost an entire year did its owner bother himself about it: at one time scalded it, at another hung it out to air in the breeze. But let him pour into it what he liked, the spirit­uous flavour would not go out of it a bit. And so, at last, he was obliged to part with the cask.

​Fathers! try not to forget this fable. If in his young days one of us has ever happened to be steeped in the current of a hurtful teaching, then in all his actions and behaviour after­ wards, whatever he may be in words, there will always be perceptible a kind of after-taste of it.

[This fable seems only an expansion of the lines of Horace:

An idea which was expanded by St. Jerome as follows:

"Difficulter eraditur, quod rudes animi perbiberunt. Lanarum conchylia quis in pristinum colorem revocet? Rudis testa diu et saporem retinet et odorem, quo primum imbuta est."—Epist. ad Lætam.

In a quaint version published in 1630, the passage is thus translated:

"That is hardly scraped out, which young unfashioned mindes have drunke in. Who shall be able to reduce purple woolls to the former whitenes? A new vessell long retaynes

both the odour and taste, whereof it received the first im­pression."

Krilof felt strongly on the subject of education, to which he devoted three of his fables: "The Peasant and the Snake," "The Cask," and "The Education of the Lion," besides two comedies—the "Fashions Shop," and the "Lesson for Daughters." In his "Spirit Post" he says: "A hundred ​years ago people educated their children themselves, caring only about their being honest, brave in war, and firm under misfortune. Parents tried to be good in those days in order to set a good example to their children. People were not eloquent, but they spoke truths which stood in no need of eloquence. But now it is thought that a man cannot be a good citizen unless he can dance, play cards, talk French, and chatter away all the day long. And for all that French tutors are needed."

Krilof hated these French tutors, for he remained firmly attached to old-fashioned views about religion and politics. At the time when the fable was written, in the year 1814, the Empire had been greatly influenced by the teachings of the Mysticists on the one hand and the Freethinkers on the other. After 1812, so many Frenchmen remained in Russia as teachers, that French ideas spread widely among the younger Russians of the upper class.