A fable as a precursor of a short story (сollection of stories “El conde lu-Canor» by Juan Manuel as a model)

The paper deals with an issue of shaping the genre pattern of a short story while interaction with an ancestral genre formation, a fable. Both genres have a range of common features: ambivalence of perception, rather small narration’ span with a core episode, a limited number of characters, and the most important the final, which is the culmination of the story. Many fable stories then would be naturally expected to be short stories, in essence. However, a review of fables taken for "models" from the collection of Juan Manuel has shown that a fable once appeared as an antecedent of a short story, being expected to have a rather more developed plot and narrative to turn further into the short story. Being more conservative by nature a fable has preserved and still keeps proper features, and only few examples of this genre have altered in their pattern, taking a step forward in novelizing a story.