Fictional aphorist, 1850s–1860s · pen name of Count Aleksey K. Tolstoy and the three Zhemchuzhnikov brothers
Kozma Petrovich Prutkov never existed. He was a literary hoax — a pompous minor official with a towering opinion of himself, invented in the 1850s by the poet Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy and his cousins Alexei, Vladimir and Alexander Zhemchuzhnikov, who published his fables, doggerel and aphorisms in the magazine Sovremennik and elsewhere. The joke was that Prutkov announced the blindingly obvious with total solemnity, and it worked well enough that lines such as “Look in the roots!” and “Nobody will embrace the unembraceable” are still among his most-quoted — usually without anyone recalling they were written as parody.