Fable

The fable is a short allegorical work of didactic content, mostly in verse, in which the characters are animals, plants, or objects embodying human traits and vices; the fable ends with a moral — a concise formulation of its conclusion. The genre reaches back to the semi-legendary ancient Greek Aesop, and its classic verse form was given by Jean de La Fontaine in France and Ivan Krylov. In Ukrainian literature the fable was developed by Hryhorii Skovoroda (the prose Kharkiv Fables), Petro Hulak-Artemovsky, Yevhen Hrebinka (The Bear's Court, The Fisherman), and especially by Leonid Hlibov, whose fables (The Pike; The Wolf and the Lamb; The Swan, the Pike and the Crayfish) became classroom classics, still relevant for their satire of injustice and social vice.