Fyodor Sologub

Sologub was a member of the symbolist movement, particularly in its early decadent phase. A schoolteacher and school official for many years, he began to publish in the 1890s. His first novel was Bad Dreams (1896), a depiction of a hero struggling against provincial surroundings. He attracted wide attention with his second novel, The Petty Demon (1907), in which another provincial town, brilliantly satirized, is the background for the brutish Peredonov's descent into paranoia. This novel, standing at the transition from realist to modernist fiction, has been widely translated and was for a long time the only Sologub work available to Soviet readers. The trilogy The Created Legend (1907--13) is an ambitious attempt to lay out in narrative form Sologub's highly integrated, quasi-mythological worldview: very controversial, it was not judged successful. Sologub also won recognition as a major Silver Age lyric poet, with verse notable for its economy and lyricism. Like much of his prose, it reflects Sologub's pessimistic, dualistic philosophy, which inverts traditional symbols of good and evil. However---moving in its simplicity, power, and authenticity---it is far more successful.