Chapter Ten
OVER THE ASHES OF SYMBOLISM
“A Legend in the Making”: a beautiful failure. - Swings of the damn swing. - Lecture on art. - Return to the province, a new look. - Novel “Sweeter than Poison”
Submitting to the tradition of Russian literature, in which a great writer is first and foremost a novelist, Sologub, when he realized that he was close to completing one major text, soon began another. “Heavy Dreams”, “Little Demon” and, finally, “The Legend in the Making” are the writer’s most famous novels, the ideas and images of which for decades served as the background for his poetry, short prose, and drama. The trilogy “The Legend in the Making,” or “Navy Charms,” as Sologub first called it, was published in almanacs and collections in parts, from 1907 to 1913. Under the title “The Legend in the Making,” the revised novel was published in Sologub’s collected works in 1914. It was a belated attempt to create a symbolist novel, which came at the end of the movement, and besides, for it the author could not find a long enough breath that would correspond to the breadth of the plan.
His previous novel - begun in the provinces, "The Little Demon" - had a predominantly dark flavor, in particular because its heroes were alien to creative impulses. With the move to St. Petersburg and the beginning of his literary career, Sologub is trying to find a new balance of colors for his palette. “The Legend in the Making” is a hymn to the transformative principle in man. And although, in comparison with the previous novel, the structure of the new text seemed unconstrained and loose to critics, only it allowed the writer to embody the merging of worlds: the local, everyday - and the magical, otherworldly. Sologub's drama was that his novel about creativity was not at all perfect in form. Like Gogol, he reached the heights, describing the dark sides of life, and stopped before the bright ones. Fortunately, this drama did not develop into a tragedy for Sologub; darkness suited him as his habitat.
The first novel of the trilogy, “Drops of Blood,” began publication in the same year when the victorious “Little Demon” was published as a separate edition, and, in isolation from other parts, led the public into complete bewilderment. Science fiction and social issues were combined in it in unexpected proportions. The action took place in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1905 in the city of Skorodozh. The main characters of this storyline are the magician, poet Georgy Trirodov, who has been living in the city for about a year, and the proud beauty Elisaveta Rameeva. In his estate, which looked more like a medieval castle with underground passages and high towers, Trirodov placed a school for orphans, in which he established a decidedly free order: students and teachers (some of the teachers had difficult, scandalous stories in the past) went naked; science lessons were taught outdoors; the children were unaware of the custom of breaking their hats in front of their superiors. This is how the inhabitants of the school escaped from the city - the kingdom of the Beast. Next to these simple, lively and well-read children, other children lived on Trirodov’s estate - pale, quiet, always wearing light clothes. They caused particular bewilderment among the townspeople. Numerous but unfair rumors about Trirodov’s depravity, his connections with teachers, and the murders on his conscience set the city against him. Participation in revolutionary activities gave his image additional mystery. For the reader and for Elizabeth, who loves the hero, but not for the townspeople, the image of Trirodov gradually becomes clearer. The informer and police agent Ostrov believes that he can blackmail Trirodov with his involvement in the murder of Dmitry Matov, a traitor who once infiltrated the revolutionary circle. But, as it turns out, Trirodov in this story went beyond human understanding, not killing the spy, but only temporarily compressing his body with the help of his knowledge of chemistry.
The issue of the ability to kill is discussed more than once in the novel and in Sologub’s work in general. Dubious stories weigh heavily on the souls of almost all the main characters of Sologubov’s novels. In “Heavy Dreams,” Login takes upon himself the sin of murdering Motovilov; in “The Little Demon,” Peredonov kills Volodin. In “The Legend in the Making,” Trirodov, who himself was not involved in the murder, tests Elisaveta, who seems ready to make an attempt on a person’s life. Towards the end of the trilogy, he outlines with his hand a button on the column of the gazebo, by pressing which Elizabeth, according to him, will hasten the death of the vice-governor. But she lowers her hand, feeling that even this apparently easy method of killing is not given to her.
The question of the morality of the heroes and the dark sides of their psyche in this novel is especially interesting, since the exquisite poet Trirodov is very close to the author both in his lyrical style and in the nature of his life’s daring. As the action progresses, it turns out that his “quiet children” are half-dead boys and girls dug out of their graves. But why does Trirodov need the souls of the innocent, why does he save them from the cold of the grave? Throughout the entire first part, this remains a mystery, only partially revealed: a multi-layered soul lives in Trirodov. The souls of “angels” live in his house, and on his table there is a flask with the compressed body of a scoundrel. The weak plot thread has so far broken off, leading to nowhere, and the only clue to the plot is that Sologub with his literary “cemetery” of child suicides, as critics called the collections of his stories, is one of the projections of Trirodov’s infinitely fractional soul .
Elizabeth, the protagonist’s beloved, is sometimes troubled by vague memories of another life. She inherited her love for dresses of simple cuts and yellowish, joyful shades as if from the previous reincarnation of her soul. Just as in the play “Vanka the Keymaster and the Page Zhean” the fates of the heroes repeat one another, in this novel each character is perhaps only one of the dreams of his alter ego, who lives many kilometers away from him. One day, in a vision, Elizabeth sees the image of Queen Ortrud, the beautiful ruler of the hot United Islands. Together with the heroine, the reader is transported to the world of the second part of the trilogy - to the kingdom of the gentle Ortrud and her treacherous husband, Prince Tancred.
The Kingdom of the United Islands, washed by warm waves, was located in the Mediterranean Sea. There lived black-haired people with warm, ardent hearts who knew how to love sweetly. The queen lived in a medieval castle, in which, like in the Trirodov mansion, an underground passage and many other secrets were hidden. The second part of the trilogy, called “Queen Ortrud,” turned out to be more successful than the first and more complete, since it outlined the bright character of the main character and her entire path - from the happy accession to the throne to the tragic death.
“Queen Ortrud” is a novel about love, and above all about love for a bright, sun-filled life. In the image of Ortrud, Sologub saw and reflected not only the ideal of female charm, but also a model of a political leader. At the same time, he did not praise the monarchy as a political system, but a model of noble behavior of a representative of power. Ortrud combines the age-old traditions of her kind with the looseness of true anarchy. She is not embarrassed by the gossip about her dancing naked on the seashore, calling upon the storm, or worshiping the Radiant - her own free deity, different from the god to whom the hypocritical church of her homeland offers prayers.
But over the years, more and more “counterfeelings” appear on the bright path of the young Queen Ortrud. The word, borrowed by Sologub from the poems and letters to him of Vyacheslav Ivanov, clearly defined the queen’s path - “high and mournful.” Her passionately beloved Prince Tancred turns out to be not only an unfaithful husband, but also a state traitor who wants to usurp the throne of the United Islands for himself. A hot sting pierces the heart of the queen, royally proud and steadfast in the face of betrayal.
Oddly enough, in reflecting the banal plot of love betrayal, Sologub turned out to be to some extent an innovator. In Russian classical literature, this plot was repeatedly shown from the position of the hero committing treason, but not from the position of the one who was betrayed. The favorite heroines of Russian writers - Anna Karenina and Natasha Rostova in Tolstoy, Katerina in Ostrovsky - are certainly described more sympathetically than the victims of their betrayal. Fyodor Sologub, who in many ways stands out from the Russian literary tradition, was one of the few our writers who did not hesitate to be touchy and demonstrate it in their works. He did not consider human vulnerability to be pettiness and weakness. Probably, for Russian culture, with its myth about the breadth of the soul of the Russian person, any suffering inflicted on a lover is a too mundane subject and not worth describing. Perhaps only on the basis of conventional “foreign” material about the life of Queen Ortrud could such a conflict arise.
Despite the ulcer nesting in her heart, the heroine of this novel is one of the main contenders for an ideally bright image in Sologub’s work. She plays like a child and finds the same way out of the current situation as the child heroes in Sologubov’s stories. Only death is certain to the end, the queen understands, and is rapidly approaching the end of her journey. It no longer makes sense for her to remain faithful to her husband and her life for the sake of the prosperity of the crown. Before giving herself to the young page Astolf, the queen orders him to kill Countess Margarita Kamai. Margarita is only one of Tancred’s many lovers, but it was she who, out of revenge, opened Ortrud’s eyes to the prince’s betrayals. Ortrud's hands are now stained with blood, but aren't monarchs free to dispose of the lives of their subjects? It is not for nothing that the islands know the legend about Queen Ginevra, who once personally cut out the heart from the chest of her unfaithful husband. However, a curse falls on the head of the beautiful Ortrud, and from now on everyone she had the misfortune to love and bring closer to her perishes or comes close to death.
Meanwhile, on Dragonera Island - one of the islands of the kingdom - a volcano is smoking, foreshadowing an imminent disaster. The workers are preparing an armed uprising, Prince Tancred is making plans to overthrow his own wife. The love plot in this novel intersects with a fascinating political intrigue, reminiscent of the modern times of the author and his hero, Trirodov. The action takes place in a transitional historical period akin to the beginning of the 20th century in Russian history. In the capital of the United Islands, the city of Palma, many religious sects appeared, as if an electric tension hung in the air. Not only public, but also private and family life became dramatic. Many poets appeared, extremely narcissistic, but doomed to be forgotten within a few years. Sologub, who perceived the Silver Age from the inside, veiledly ironized the glory of his fellow writers, and thus a reverse projection arose: the kingdom of Ortrud was the dream of the Russian girl Elizabeth, but our reality of the pre-revolutionary years became an unsteady haze for the author.
Queen Ortrud and Prince Tancred sometimes think that their lives could be spent in distant and wild Russia, on the banks of wide rivers. Thus, the treacherous Tancred becomes another, dark alter ego of the author and hero. But the transmigration of souls for him is just a story with the help of which it is convenient to seduce another simpleton. "My first love! How long ago it was! - he tells young Imogene Mellado. - She died... but I knew that her pure soul moved into a girl born at the hour of her quiet death, into a girl born on this blissful shore... And when I saw you, oh Imogen, you on this shore of my sweet dreams, prophetic dreams, I realized that it was you, that her pure, bright soul had moved into you.”
Meanwhile, the volcano on Dragonera Island is smoking more and more. Various political parties, the opposition and the government, are trying to benefit from the impending disaster. Finally, the fearless Queen Ortrud, who has already lost too much, decides to do everything possible to save her people, whom the weak-willed government has given up on, and she herself goes to the dangerous island.
In general, the brewing thunderstorm on the islands is discharged more safely than in Russia at the same time. Nature, with its energetic surge, suppresses part of the dark energy of people. Perhaps this happens because, as Trirodov said, the forces of the dead, accumulating over centuries, make nature more and more animated and wise. In the dream world, on the southern islands, she does an evil deed for a person and thereby removes sin from the souls of many.
The third part of the trilogy, “Smoke and Ashes,” calls Trirodov and Elisaveta on their way to the country of the United Islands. The storylines of the first and second parts are intertwined. In the third novel of A Legend in the Making, it is difficult to identify a single conflict. The school authorities of Skorodozh are going to close the Trirodov educational institution. The fate of the revolutionary movement in Russia is precarious. And so the main character, a proletarian by birth, decides to nominate himself for the post of King of the United Islands in order to realize his political dream there.
He and Elisaveta try to travel to the world of dreams by drinking a magic drink and going to the planet Oyle. There their souls are embodied in new images and live an entire life during an earthly moment, devoid of local unrest.
The connection between Tancred and Trirodov, Ortrud and Elizabeth is not the transmigration of souls in the classical sense. These characters live in the same time, Trirodov reads Mediterranean newspapers and plans to fly to the United Islands with Elizabeth - however, only after the death of Ortrud and Tancred. The two realities are compatible in the same time, but not in the same space, since for each of the pairs one country is real, the other is a dream.
In the city of Skorodozh, they furiously mock Trirodov’s dream of becoming a king. By closing his school, the local authorities encourage the rude and cruel teachers of the surrounding educational institutions. In church schools for boys, they are beaten mercilessly, and after filing complaints with the highest clergy, the situation does not improve. In a nearby monastery, fat, overfed monks do not want to listen to Trirodov’s warnings about the impending theft of the icon. Finally, the earthly embodiment of vulgarity - Ardalyon Peredonov, the main character of the novel "The Petty Demon", appears on these pages as the local vice-governor and tries to dissuade Trirodov from his daring nomination for the post of constitutional monarch of a foreign power.
Elisaveta and Trirodov have nothing more to do among these people. Elizabeth’s soul rushes “from hopelessness to desires,” and the young lady’s body is rocked on a swing by the “quiet children” of her betrothed. The swing is Sologub’s favorite image, which runs through his work. In different works of the writer, the driving force behind emotional swings (metaphorical swings) are different entities. In the famous poem “Devil's Swing” the devil plays with the soul; in “The Legend in the Making” it is controlled by the bright sadness of half-dead children whose energy has been taken over by the heroes; in Sologub’s next novel “Sweeter than Poison” the heroine Shan, the builder of her own destiny, swings alone on a swing.
Elisaveta and Trirodov love mathematics, just like the author who created them. With the help of her lover, Elizabeth delves into the mechanism of the transparent ball-planet he invented, on which the heroes will fly to the United Islands. To lift this device into the air, you can use the psychic powers of obsolete, half-living and living bodies. Trirodov knows how to put the latter into a state close to hypnotic. The poet and his young wife leave Skorodozh at a dangerous moment, when a crowd of Black Hundreds sets fire to their estate. In the wonderful, hot Palma, Trirodov was elected king, and here, in northern and wild Russia, evil people are rampaging in front of his house, killing those who tried to hide in Trirodov’s castle, and mutilating the corpses.
In the finale of the trilogy, the southern world turns out to be kinder and simpler, although the main characters in it are more vicious - but all the emotions of this world are brighter, since it is unreal. As soon as Trirodov's airship happily arrives on the Islands, the narrative ends: the dream cannot be realized.
As a whole and individually, these parts of the trilogy were charming in their own way, but very far from artistic perfection. The original interpretation of the novel was proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin, who in the 1920s gave lectures on Russian literature, including the work of Sologub. Most likely, he gave these lectures without preparation, impromptu, which is why the scientist’s manuscripts have not survived. In the notes of one of his then listeners we read: “From the point of view of style, the novel is not finished and cannot be finished. The fact is that there are heroes who cannot be completed, because the author lives in them. The author will die, then the hero’s life will end... Peredonov is more distant from Sologub, and therefore the author was able to part with the hero and almost finish the novel.”
Newspaper and magazine criticism showed less sensitivity and did not mince words when discussing the “Legend in the Making” trilogy. Even with Alexander Izmailov, Fyodor Kuzmich had a disagreement over this affair. The editors of Ogonyok demanded parodies from their critic, and Sologub’s novel, which Izmailov immediately did not like, the style of which the publicist compared with notes in a notebook, was suitable material for ridicule. Thus, the poetic parody “Smoke and the Bogeyman” appeared in the magazine. It was preceded by a quote from Izmailov’s own review: “a monstrous mixture of styles, real and fantastic.” By the way, Zinaida Gippius spoke about Sologub’s entire work in almost the same terms, but with the exact opposite assessment: “After all, in his novels, and in his stories, and in his poems, there is one distinguishing feature: a close interweaving of the real, everyday, with the magical . A fairy tale goes around in life, a fairy tale dines with us at the table, and never ceases to be a fairy tale.”
In Izmailov’s parody, the plot of the trilogy was freely changed, the hero and the author were mixed, as if Sologub, and not Trirodov, was laying claim to a certain throne; the island of Dragonera, on which the volcano smoked, was called Camembert, like a gourmet blue cheese:
A terrible decadence has penetrated everything,
There was a chaotic, sologabial style throughout.
Everything has lost its measure and balance.
And Camembert, smoking, gave a trumpet sound...
Sologub was very upset; it seemed to him that parodies could only be written on the texts of graphomaniacs and that life, in which you cannot distinguish friend from enemy, is not worth loving more than death. He wrote to Izmailov: “And the drawing above your article! Some vulgar mug with my features, however, sitting in an obscene pose - some naked woman with rods!” “A naked woman with rods” - this was said not about the portrait of Sologub, but about the figure of one of the heroines, indicated by the cartoonist in the background. The writer himself was depicted in royal robes, sitting on a piece of Camembert cheese.
Not only friends, even faithful Chebotarevskaya did not consider the novel successful. True, both then and later everyone around him recognized that “Little Demons” could not be created constantly, but this did not console Sologub. He complained that the best novel devalued the rest of his work: critics only insisted that the writer had not created anything better.
In addition to the subjective reasons for creative failure, there was also the atmosphere of the era. No matter how much Sologub wanted to go beyond the boundaries of time and space, bringing the principles of symbolism everywhere, but in the 1910s the literary situation was not conducive to writing a symbolist novel, the direction gradually faded into history. By the end of the 1900s, the magazines “Libra” and “Golden Fleece” were closed, and publications of “Scorpio” ceased. Almost all of the most advanced symbolist texts had already been created; the initiative passed to new authors and new directions - Acmeism and Futurism.
The Sologubs stubbornly did not want to believe in this, especially since for Fyodor Kuzmich, whom the public did not want to recognize for a long time, the flowering of his work faded too quickly. She and Chebotarevskaya found complete support in their circle. In December 1913, Bryusov wrote to Anastasia Nikolaevna: “Of course, like you, I don’t believe in any ‘Acmeism’, and I don’t see anything serious in… the claims of the ‘Acmeists’.” Nevertheless, he recognized the talents of Akhmatova, Gumilyov, and Gorodetsky. Bryusov spoke with disappointment about other young poets: “Our futurists, on whom I pinned so many hopes, are engaged in defamation of Pushkin.”
Sologub came to an open conflict with the Acmeists. A letter to him from Mandelstam, dated April 27, 1915, has been preserved: “Dear Fyodor Kuzmich! I read your letter with extreme amazement. In it you talk about your intention to stay away from futurists, acmeists and those associated with them. Without daring to judge your relationship with the futurists and those “adjacent,” as an Acmeist, I consider it my duty to remind you of the following: the initiative for your alienation from the Acmeists entirely belonged to the latter. You were not invited to participate in the Workshop of Poets (regardless of your desire), as well as to collaborate in the magazine “Hyperborea” and publish your books in the publishing houses: “Workshop of Poets”, “Hyperborea” and “Akme”. The same applies to public speeches of Acmeists, as such.” Nevertheless, the Acmeists visited Sologub’s house; Gorodetsky largely considered Fyodor Kuzmich his teacher.
Judging by the memoirs of Irina Odoevtseva, the relationship between the Acmeists and Sologub was clouded by purely everyday misunderstandings. One day, Gumilev and Gorodetsky came to Fyodor Kuzmich for poetry for a new almanac (which, as Odoevtseva writes, never appeared in print). But due to the fact that the young poets could not offer a substantial fee, Sologub gave them some unfinished trifle, although literally before that he gave the guests to read yet unpublished poems that delighted Gumilyov. The Acmeists then made fun of Sologub’s stinginess for a long time.
Fyodor Kuzmich called the futurists, all except Igor Severyanin, “unreadable” poets, looked down on them, and was not alone in this. Gippius despised the Futurists on a purely human level and did not allow them into her house. When Fyodor Kuzmich gave his poems and translations for the futurist collection “Sagittarius” (Blok, Remizov, Kuzmin also took part in the collection), he explained that he did this after much persuasion and that the futurists themselves were looking for an opportunity to enlist his support. At this time Sologub was getting used to the status of a master, a venerable “old man”. He chaired one of the literary evenings dedicated to the history of symbolism. Chebotarevskaya, inviting Vyacheslav Ivanov to the meeting, included on the agenda, in particular, the question of what from the experience of symbolism is “expropriated” by the futurists.
In 1913, Fyodor Kuzmich decided to publicly declare that symbolism is alive, and went on a tour of Russian cities with a lecture “The Art of Our Days.” At first he traveled with his wife and Igor Severyanin, then alone. The lecture was conceived and largely composed by Chebotarevskaya. A diligent student of the master and his diligent secretary, she compiled into a detailed and relatively coherent text all the aesthetic theses of Sologub and the symbolists close to him. The lecture turned out to be long and very rational; they don’t usually talk about art like that. It began with the assertion that “the art of our days” is not a poster for one season, that “symbolism” is not only a trend of the last twenty years, but also all classical literature, since a work, being fully interpreted, immediately dies. Expanding the concept of “new art” and art in general to the limit, Sologub said: we are not living people, but a set of other people’s thoughts and opinions, borrowed from books. He imagined life as a “legend in the making,” like the struggle of the dirty wench Aldonza and the imaginary beautiful lady Dulcinea. The writer also contrasted world-accepting “irony” with bold “lyricism” that creates a new reality. True art seemed to him democratic and inclusive, bearing something of the barbarians and their irrational spirit, which cannot be interpreted and, therefore, must be recognized as symbolist. The democratism of art in the lecture was skillfully linked to Sologub’s constant themes - the themes of individualism and death. Democratic art, he said, requires a feat, and the greatest feat is sacrificing one's life. Finally, Sologub argued that the solipsism of his poetry is not at all selfish, since if “everything is in me,” then both pain and responsibility for everything in the world lie with the creative person. The lecture was permeated by the conviction of the possibility of creating life like a fairy tale, transforming the world through the effort of the artist’s will.
But all this was presented long and sluggishly; most of the audience came only to gawk at Sologub as a metropolitan celebrity. The 1913–1914 tour was more a confirmation of the death of symbolism than its resurrection.
Traveling was difficult for the writer; the return to the province, albeit temporary, made him sad; the only consolation was the proceeds from lectures and the task of bringing symbolism to society. During his life together with Chebotarevskaya, he completely lost the habit of a bachelor lifestyle and desperately missed his wife. While giving a lecture in Kursk, the writer found the house where Anastasia Nikolaevna once lived, his letters to his wife at that time were saturated with concern for her, Sologub asks Chebotarevskaya not to forget about taking pills and to send telegrams every day - at least one word at a time. In these letters he sometimes writes the pronoun “To you” with a capital letter. As soon as Fyodor Kuzmich leaves St. Petersburg, the value of the capital's entertainment immediately increases for him; he advises his wife to have fun and go to the theater. At this time, he himself is exploring provincial attractions: in Penza he visits the art museum, in Vologda - the museum of northern exploration and the house of Peter the Great. All expositions seem poor and boring to the writer.
A separate entertainment for Fyodor Kuzmich was the search for gifts for his wife and memorable souvenirs for himself. He was partly disappointed by cities like Chisinau and Saratov, where there were no antique dealers at all, but even where he managed to find junk dealers, Sologub was difficult to please. In Penza, he was interested in half a dozen plates - but the writer considered them fake and did not buy them. “I only took a cheap ring, silver, a pink stone, green during the day, and a pair of Chinese shoes.” First of all, Sologub writes about how the ring looks outside the light of the Serpent. Day and night for him follow in reverse order, night is loved, day is dangerous. In Vyatka, Sologub was glad that he had found a makeshift warehouse, but only wooden products were stored there, and uninteresting ones at that. “The lace is woven in Kukarka,” he explained to his wife, “130 versts from here, but the zemstvo warehouse has almost none of it - they sell it directly to buyers. I only bought a small piece of lace as a sample - it was bad and cheap, much worse than the ones from Vologda.”
Meanwhile, the province warmly welcomed the writer, often not paying attention to the content of his speech. “The work of Sologub is one of the noblest phenomena of our literature,” the Tambov press praised the lecturer. Young writers dreamed of meeting him. Fyodor Kuzmich, who himself was once such a provincial writer without connections and prospects, easily made contact. In Vologda, the young poet Alexey Ganin came to him, with whom Sologub talked for a long time. In Voronezh, Fyodor Kuzmich himself found Vasily Matveev, a publicist whose articles attracted his attention in the Don magazine. He was a 54-year-old widower, father of six children, a local singing teacher, who lived in a “crappy” government apartment. Matveev later wrote to Chebotarevskaya that Sologub’s visit was something fantastic for him. Sologub thought of inviting his protégé to St. Petersburg for a literary debate, and twice arranged for him to publish in the Writers' Diaries.
In Saratov, Fyodor Kuzmich witnessed an anecdotal incident that once again convinced him of the insignificance of futurist claims. Before Sologub’s lecture, four “rogues,” as Fyodor Kuzmich called them, spoke here and decided to play a fun prank on the audience. Having released the almanac “I” and calling themselves “psycho-futurists,” the entertainers from the Polygon group attracted the interest of readers, and Saratov newspapers began writing about them. But when they were given a platform for a public lecture, the stylists announced that they did not believe in any futurism, that it was absurd, and their little book was just a hoax.
Moving from city to city, Sologub at the same time managed to redo a lot of things. In Penza, he attended rehearsals of the New Theater, which staged “Hostages of Life” in the same room where Fyodor Kuzmich was supposed to give a lecture. “What could have been corrected, but on the whole it was not as bad as could be expected for the province,” Sologub wrote to his wife. For Lilith's dance they chose “Moonlight Sonata”. The actor who played the main character Mikhail resembled the performer of the same role from the Alexandria Theater, “only rougher.” The playwright's intervention in the production not only did not embarrass the troupe, but flattered it. The program later indicated that the performance was released “under the personal direction of the author Fyodor Sologub.” The playwright kindly condescended to the troupe: the costumes, scenery, furnishings - all this seemed very “poor” to him.
The reputation of the famous decadent did not always benefit Sologub. Thus, in Kursk and Chisinau, students were not allowed to attend a lecture, which was very restrained in tone, suspecting Fyodor Kuzmich (even though he was a former teacher) of promoting debauchery. But where students were admitted, the figure of the writer attracted special attention from high school students.
In Tambov, the organization of the lecture caused a small scandal. Initially, the performance was supposed to take place in the Naryshkin Reading Room, but just at that time, State Lady Alexandra Nikolaevna Naryshkina, the widow of a prominent figure in public education, arrived in the city. She didn’t like the idea, and at the insistence of the courtier, Sologub’s performance was hastily moved to another place. Newspapers wrote that holding a lecture could violate the charter of the Society for the Organization of Public Readings in the Tambov Province. Fyodor Kuzmich, in a letter to his wife, made fun of this: “The violation of the charter, which was referred to by the director of public schools, is that the Society of Public Readings in the Tambov province should pursue religious and moral goals. And the organizers say that even gypsy concerts were held in this reading room.” The lecture “The Art of Our Days” did not contain anything harmful to morality. Except that the writer made the ethics of art dependent on aesthetics, but this thought was expressed in a tone that could not offend anyone.
The public came to see Sologub willingly, but listened to him mostly absent-mindedly; newspapers noted his lack of lecturing talent, which was strange for a former teacher. A Poltava journalist wrote that the goal of “dulcinating” life is illusory: “Our life does not need decoration, but beauty.” But Sologub did not feel well about the reaction of the audience and was generally pleased with his tour as a great and necessary, albeit hard, work. He asked Chebotarevskaya to prepare extracts for future lectures on the topics: “The Price of Life and Suicide”, “Dulcinea Nekrasova”, “About Woman” - the writer considered the last of these topics to be in demand in the provinces. However, further historical events will force him to come up with completely different, more relevant ideas.
Sologub's tour of provincial cities could not revive the former flourishing of symbolism also because the literary practice of the writer himself did not contribute to this. After the publication of parts of “The Legend in the Making” began, Fyodor Kuzmich released another major text. The 1912 novel “Sweeter than Poison” is called Sologub’s return to reality: indeed, fantasy, it would seem, is leaving his work. However, from everyday life he still creates an individual myth. Unlike “A Legend in the Making”, the plot here is simple and clear, the ends easily meet. In terms of its themes, “Sweeter than Poison” is less a novel than an extended story. The main idea here is so clear that one is involuntarily surprised at the discrepancy between Sologubov’s theory (the thesis from the lecture “The Art of Our Days” that, once interpreted, art immediately dies) and the practice of his writing.
The title of the novel again, as often happens in Sologub’s stories (in the stories “Zador”, “Consolation”, “The Charm of Sadness”), reflects the emotional state of the hero prevailing in the text. This time it is love that is sweeter than life, sweeter than poison. But, as in “The Little Demon,” the title probably contains an oxymoron: poison cannot be truly sweet, since those who taste it will not be able to enjoy it for long. Only for Sologub and his heroes is poison so attractive. This oxymoron contains the main intrigue of the novel. Sologub tells an ordinary love story between a young man and a girl from different classes - the nobleman Evgeniy and the bourgeois Shani. For the heroine, this is a feeling that regenerates the world, love-creativity, without which life itself is unthinkable. But falling in love turns out to be self-deception; from the beginning of the story it is obvious that the narcissistic egoist Evgeniy is not a match for Shane. A sure sign of the author's sympathy for the heroine is that he gives her an unusual name, albeit derived from the common “Alexander” (most likely, according to the principle of love distortion: Sasha - Sanya - Shanya). The writer leaves Evgeniy with his ordinary, earthly name, which has appeared more than once in Russian literature and has become worn out from repeated repetition. The hero, in Onegin's style, is cold, but not as noble as his literary predecessor. Only a challenge to the world and stubbornness can make Shanya devotedly love her chosen one.
Over time, Evgeny hardly changes, remaining a worthy son of his pompous and caricaturedly money-loving parents, while Shanya grows above herself and her own love. Coming to the big city to pick up her fiancé, she reads books, meets the best actress in the city, Manugina, and learns from her how to dance in the style of Isadora Duncan, revered by Sologub. The gap between the ideal image of his beloved and the real greedy, petty barchuk can no longer be ignored, but Shanya hopes that the love in his soul will prevail over family character traits. Evgeniy, through the cracks in the wall of the restaurant office, shows Shanya's naked dance to his drinking companions - and Shanya guesses about this, but continues to make an idol out of him. When he comes to the store to buy a gift for her, he spares money - and she gives him all of herself, although her relatives, in a merchant’s manner, tell her that innocence is a valuable “capital” for a girl.
The lovers have to hide from everyone, making a masquerade out of their relationship. But, as Manugina says, only masquerade is a triumph of true frankness, because with its help we want to hide our random moods from others and show only what is deep in us. For Sologub, love and creativity are more important and truer than reality. Maybe that’s why Manugina, understanding the true state of affairs (in one of the episodes she finds Evgeniy discussing Shanya with his comrades), helps her young friend transform into a poor seamstress and get hired under a false name in Evgeniy’s house. In the spirit of “The Young Peasant Lady,” Sologub paints a cheerful adventure of a brave girl. But the informers reveal her secret - and Shanya is kicked out of the house in disgrace.
The entire novel is built on the contrasts of fate, which, like the swings of a swing, either lifts up the heroes, then quickly drops them, or even throws them out. Of course, this is a “damn swing”, and the devil rocks it. This children's fun is Sologub's favorite image, which we have already examined and appeared in his mind even before the famous poem about infernal trials. In his first collection of poems, he placed the poem “Swing”:
And submitting with inspiration
My fate is destined.
I'm transported alternately
From hopelessness to desires.
In the novel “Sweeter than Poison,” teenage Shanya tests her boyfriend’s courage with the help of a swing. Later, Evgeny’s heart flies between hope and despair as if on a swing, when he, having cheated on Shana in his thoughts, wooed her friend Marusa Karakova. A swing is installed in her garden by Shanya, who was kicked out by her relatives for not maintaining her maiden purity. Meanwhile, Sologub, through the mouth of Marusya, says that people need a new morality, which a woman will bring - not the morality of slaves and masters, but the morality of comrades. When she prevails, love will not humiliate anyone, the girl Aldonsa and the lady Dulcinea will merge into one for their lover.
There is also social pathos in the novel - the author ridicules Evgeniy’s social circle, in which men are considered half-human. But if it were not for the difference in class, there would have been other obstacles on the path of the heroes. In the finale, the trampled Shanya, who has lost her child, love, and hopes for marriage, is ready to join the string of Sologubov’s murderous heroes and is already raising a revolver at Evgeniy, but cannot overcome her disgust for his cowardice. The novel ends with her fainting or - rather - death, because love and life are one for Shani.
This novel was too simple for Sologub, unlike “The Legend in the Making,” which was too complex. But it also became more of an experiment than a literary achievement. Both novels could please Sologub’s devoted readers only because they bore traces of the charm of his former prose and were part of the system of his thoughts and images. For Sologub, as for all symbolism, it was time to take stock.
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A representative of the older generation of Symbolists was F. K. Sologub (pseudonym of Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov) (1863-1927), the son of a tailor and a peasant woman. Having gone through a difficult life path, having experienced all the vicissitudes of fate (the early death of his father, the hard everyday life of a rural teacher, the suicide of his wife, unrequited love for a young woman already in his mature years), F. Sologub preferred loneliness. The poet strives to escape from reality into the world of the legend he himself creates; gray everyday life weighs down on the artist. The most complete picture of the poetry of F. K. Sologub is given by the collection “The Flame Circle” (1908), which contains the best poems from the poet’s seven previous books and also previously unpublished ones. Highly appreciating the poetry of F. Sologub, A.A. Blok wrote: “The subject of his poetry is rather the soul, refracting the world in itself, and not peace refracted in the soul." The main motives of Sologubov’s poetry are the struggle of fantasy, dreams with reality. The symbolist poet glorifies death as a deliverer from earthly misfortunes, conveying sad, melancholic feelings. The poetry of Fyodor Solo-guba is painted in deeply pessimistic tones:
I work like a slave, but for freedom I call the night, peace and darkness. (“I am the god of the mysterious world...”)
The leading images of Sologubov's poetry are the symbols of night, peace, darkness, which the poet conjures and calls upon. The image-symbol of death is of particular significance:
Death staggers in the world and waves like a whip, woven tightly in a net near every head. (“Children are alive, only children...”)
The symbolist glorifies death as a liberator from the spell of vulgarity and everyday life. He contrasts the created legend with the vile reality, trying to get away from the absurd and wild life:
Someone calls in the silence: “My brother, come closer to me! It’s easier together, If you can’t walk, Together we’ll die on the way, Together we’ll die!” (“You can’t see a thing in the field...”)
Trying to free himself “from the shackles of everyday life,” the poet creates an image-symbol of the “land of Oyle,” where “in the radiance of the clear Mayr, everything blooms, everything sings joyfully.” F.K. Sologub writes poems in a form accessible to the reader, without experimenting with rhyme or meter, preferring a clear lyrical composition. The poetic word itself, F. Sologub believed, is “a means of persuasion and charm.” The poet sees his destiny in reward after death, when the creator is forgiven and goes to heaven, since his voice “flows like fragrant smoke into the fragrance of paradise herbs”: Material from the site
When at the entrance to Paradise the Stern Peter, rattling his keys, asks me: “What have you done?” - He won’t throw me down with an iron staff. I will say: “I composed novels and poems, And consoled, but also led into temptations, And in general, my sins, Apostle Peter, are manifold. But I am a poet." And he will smile, And he will tear up the handwriting of sins, And I will boldly enter heaven, forgiven, Hear the holy rejoicing. (“I have experienced the vicissitudes of fate...”)According to critics, F. Sologub's poetry does not evolve, remaining unchanged throughout his entire creative career. Sologub considered his life, which ended on December 5, 1927, not the first and not the last. She appeared to him in an endless chain of transformations. Faces change, but the unchanging I always remains: “For everything and in everything is I, and only I, there is no other, and there never was, and there never will be.”
What is peace to me! He will condemn
or insult with praise.
My dark path will remain
unsociable and hidden.
There is some kind of eternal and painful mystery in his poetry. It contains wonderful music, the secret of which no one can unravel.
I am the god of the mysterious world,
The whole world is in my dreams.
I will not make myself an idol
Neither on earth nor in heaven.
Of my divine nature
I won't open it to anyone.
I work like a slave, but for freedom
I call night, peace and darkness.
Poet, novelist, playwright, publicist, Fedor Sologub For more than 40 years of creative activity, he left an extensive literary legacy, numbering dozens of volumes. He had a significant influence on his contemporaries. I had great respect and sympathy for his work A. Akhmatova. S. Gorodetsky considered himself his student. O. Mandelstam wrote: " For people of my generation, Sologub was a legend already 20 years ago. We asked ourselves: “Who is this man whose old voice sounds with such immortal power?»
From memories G. Chulkova: “Sologub could then have been given the age of fifty or more. However, he was one of those whose age was determined not by decades, but at least by millennia - such ancient human wisdom shone in his ironic eyes.”
Zinaida Gippius: « In the face, in the heavy-lidded eyes, in the whole baggy figure - calmness to the point of immobility. A person who could never, under any circumstances, “fuss.” The silence suited him surprisingly. When he spoke, it was a few intelligible words spoken in a very even, almost monotonous voice, without a hint of haste. His speech is the same calm impenetrability as silence. This is how he remained in the memory of many: “impenetrably calm, stingy with words, sometimes angry, without a smile, witty. Always a bit of a wizard and sorcerer.”
Cook's son
Sologuba's real name was Teternikov, but in the editorial office, where he submitted his first works, he was advised to come up with a pseudonym.
- It is inconvenient for the muse to crown Teternikov’s head with laurels.
And then they came up with a more “euphonious name” - Fedor Sologub. With one "l" so as not to be confused with a writer-graph V. Sollogub.
In terms of his ancestral roots, F. Sologub is not like the other luminaries of symbolism, who came primarily from wealthy social strata. Fyodor Teternikov's childhood passed where many of the heroes of his beloved were raised Dostoevsky- at the very bottom of life. He was one of the “cook’s children” in the literal sense of the word.
A son was born to a poor man.
An angry old woman entered the hut.
The bony hand was shaking,
Sorting out gray hairs.
Behind the midwife's back
The old woman reached out to the boy
And suddenly with an ugly hand
She lightly touched his cheek.
Whispering unintelligible words
She left, banging her stick.
Nobody understood witchcraft.
The years have passed in their own order, -
The command of the secret words came true:
In the world he met sorrows,
And happiness, joy and love
They fled from the dark sign.
("Fate")
He was born March 1 (old style - February 17) 1863 V St. Petersburg in the family of a tailor, a former serf. At the age of four he lost his father, who died of consumption, and was raised by his mother, who remained a widow with two children.
Tatyana Semenovna Teternikova (1832-1894), mother of the writer. 1890s
Fedor grew up in extreme poverty and experienced many difficulties and humiliations. In the rich house of the mistress for whom his mother served, he picked up some fragmentary knowledge, the beginnings of culture, often went to the theater, but studied his lessons in the corner of the hallway fenced off by a closet, slept in the kitchen on a chest. The painful atmosphere of a “double life” between masters and servants largely determined the character of the future poet. On the one hand, Fyodor and his sister were almost pupils in the family of a collegiate assessor, where it was customary to play music, attend theaters, and the opera, but at the same time, the children of the servant strictly had to know their place.
The mother worked hard, taking out her fatigue and irritation on her children. She was very harsh with them, punished them for the slightest offense, beat them, flogged them with rods. The hero of Sologub’s very first poems is a barefoot, whipped boy: “ Like a boy, quickly covered in bees // all covered, screaming - // his heart groans under the pricks // of evil and petty insults" The poems were born as a cry in response to insults and insults:
"Whine, whine, whine!" -
The little one is used to whining.
Last time I saw you, -
You were proud
Who offended you now?
God or devil?
"Whine, whine, whine! -
The little one is used to whining.-
Oh, wherever, wherever you go,
There are lies everywhere.
Involuntarily, even if you don’t want to,
You will roar.
Whine, whine, whine!" -
The little one is used to whining...
F. Sologub in childhood
The experiences of childhood can be judged by the tone and mood of his works, by the fates of the child heroes, and, apparently, in conversations with close people something broke through that made A. Bely utter terrible words after one of these stories: “ I had the feeling that I was being scalded with boiling water... it’s such a horror that it’s better not to think about it.”
Who was it next to me that laughed so quietly?
My dashing, one-eyed, wild Dashing!
Dashingly became attached to me a long time ago, from the cradle,
Dashingly stood near the baptismal font,
Dashingly follows me like a persistent shadow,
Dashingly will put me in the grave.
Dashingly terrible, enemy of both love and oblivion,
Who gave you this power?
Dashingly clings to me, whispers to me quietly:
“I am the mediocre Dashing, persecuted by everyone!
In whose house I find a corner for myself,
Everyone drives me, not knowing a moment of peace.
Only you don’t have time to fight with me, -
Strangely dreaming, you strive for torment,
That's why I am so friendly with your soul,
Like an echo with sound."
In "bearish corners"
In those days, it was not easy for a person of such origin to “come out into the public eye.” This must not have been easy for Fedor Sologub either. But he got out, received a higher education, and became a teacher. For 25 years he taught in district towns, in the most remote corners: Krestsy, Velikiye Luki, Vytegra. Hence Sologub’s knowledge of provincial life.
How much snow has fallen!
The houses are not visible behind the hills.
But it’s bright here because of the snow,
And in the fall it’s as dark as a pit.
Melancholy and slush, even howl -
No wonder it’s called Vytegra, -
Or sulk at cards, drink vodka,
If you have a penny in your pocket.
Vytegra. 1810-1910
Poverty was such that Sologub, being a teacher, asked permission from his superiors to go to class barefoot - he had nothing to buy shoes with.
F. Sologub. 1880s
In the village of Kresttsy, the building of the city 3-grade school has been preserved; currently school No. 1 is located there.
Poet, prose writer, playwright of the Silver Age, Fyodor Sologub (Teternikov) taught mathematics here.
The house where Sologub lived has also been preserved.
The sacrum at this time, as she wrote A. Chebotarevskaya, « “represented a genuine type of “bear corner”, where from every house you can see a field, on dark evenings they walk along the streets with their own lanterns, risking drowning in the unclimbed mud, and shopkeepers receive sausage and canned food once a year.”
Sacrums in the 20s
Sacrums today
The nightmarish life of provincial district towns with their poverty, drunkenness, dullness and savagery, the impressions from all this later formed the basis of Sologub’s novels “ Hard days" And " Little devil" Moreover, there, according to him, he significantly softened the colors ( “there were facts that no one would have believed anyway if described”).
There Sologub began to write poetry, sending them to the capital's editorial offices with a hidden hope and dream of breaking out of this backwater.
Sometimes a strange smell will waft, -
His reasons cannot be understood -
Long faded, foggy day
I'm experiencing it again.
As of old, you rise sadly again
On the dilapidated porch,
You pull back the creaky bolt again,
Rotating the rusty ring, -
And you see the close quarters,
Where the floorboards creak a little,
Where is the damp wallpaper?
They rustle quietly in the corners,
Where the boring pendulum looms,
Listening to boring, angry speeches,
Where someone is praying and crying,
Cries for so long at night.
The magic of word music
The harmony and music of Sologubov’s verse makes him similar to the most “musical” poet A. Fetom. « I don’t know anyone among modern Russian poets whose poems would be closer to music than Sologub’s poems, - wrote Lev Shestov. - Even when he told the most terrible things - about the executioner, about the howling dog - his poems are full of mysterious and exciting melody. How can you sing about a dog howling, how can you sing about an executioner? I don’t know, this is the secret of Sologub, maybe even not of Sologub himself, but of his strange Muse».
All these words of yours
I've been tired of it for a long time.
If only the skies were blue,
Noisy waves and spruces,
If only I could cling to my feet
Foam of the wild wave,
Sweetly whispering to the shores
Tales of unprecedented love.
There is some kind of magic in every thing of Sologub, even the obviously weak ones. I. Ehrenburg wrote: " Sologub learned the highest secret of poetry - music. Not Balmont’s musicality, but the thrill of rhythm.”
Foggy day
It's coming
My desired one is not coming.
There is darkness all around.
On the threshold
I am standing,
All in anxiety
And I sing.
Where is my friend?
The cold is blowing
My garden is empty
Orphaned
Every bush.
I'm bored.
Said goodbye
You're easy
And he sped away
Far
On horseback.
On the way to
I see
All in anxiety
I'm trembling all over -
My dear!
I'll be gone for a long time
Shedding tears
A wound in the heart
To irritate -
God be with you!
Schopenhauer from underground
The lyrical hero of Sologub’s poetry is in many ways a small man Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. The enormous personal experience of suppressing the human personality of the future great writer allowed him to embody personal suffering in the metaphysical image of a humiliated and insulted people.
Everything has been given to me in abundance, -
The fatigue of labor
Expectations are evil torture,
Hunger, cold and trouble.
The tar of ardent reproaches,
Strict glory bitter honey,
The poison of insane temptations,
And despair ice,
And - the crown of memory,
A cup drunk to the bottom -
Unforgettable kissing lips, -
That's it, only joy is not given.
Sologub absolutized personal suffering, elevating it to the suffering of humanity, giving it a certain cosmic character. One of the critics said about him: “ This is some kind of Russian Schopenhauer, emerging from a suffocating basement" The tragedy and ugliness of the underground man discovered by Dostoevsky were lyrically revealed in Sologub's poetry. No wonder in the West he was perceived as the heir Dostoevsky.
Like the incoherent story of an idiot,
Life is boring and dark.
I'm waiting in vain for something -
Its depth is unrequited.
The roads are strangely mixed up.
And for some reason I’m wandering somewhere.
Before me in crimson delirium
Golden towers, palaces.
In 1892 Sologub moved to Petersburg, there he gets a job as a mathematics teacher, and then becomes an inspector at St. Andrew's School and a member of the St. Petersburg School Council.
Atypical Symbolist
In St. Petersburg, Teternikov meets a poet and philosopher Nikolai Minsky, secretary of the magazine Northern Herald” and becomes an employee of this magazine. Minsky introduces him to the circle of “senior symbolists”: Z. Gippius, D. Merezhkovsky, K. Balmont.
Sologub becomes a representative and promoter of this trend in poetry. However, there was also something in his work that distinguished it from classical symbolism: irony, sarcasm - this is what broke Sologub’s muse out of these canonical frameworks.
Then mocking my genius
He told me a lot
Non-poetic comparisons.
I went out into the field by moonlight, -
On the pulp of a ripe watermelon
Looks like a red moon
And sometimes belly toads
She reminded me. -
these comparisons were clearly not from the symbolist vocabulary. Or, for example, the poem “ ads»:
We need doctors and paramedics, -
That's what all the newspapers say,
We need master tailors.
But who needs poets?
Where can you find the ad:
“We invite the poet to your home
Then it became unbearable
The usual explanation is the warehouse,
And we want beautiful words
And we are ready to give up our souls into captivity!”
“I’m ready to buy the estate.”
"We need dairy cows."
Or here’s an absolutely amazing poem from the cycle “ Pipe»:
“Fear, daughter, Cupid’s arrows.
These arrows stung more painfully.
He will see that he is walking around like a fool,
Aims right at her heart.
He won't touch smart girls
It will go far around them,
Only drives stupid people online
And it leads to destruction.”
Lisa clung to her mother,
Tears in three streams,
And, blushing, she confessed:
“Mom, mom, I’m a fool!..”
So Fyodor Sologub was not an ordinary symbolist. His poetic creativity is not limited to the reputation of a militant decadent and esthete; it is more complex, richer and more significant. The main thing in his aesthetic principles was the requirement of “external simplicity,” universal intelligibility and transparency of art. This was also noted Block, emphasizing " simplicity, severity and absence of any spice or tinsel”, which distinguished symbolist poetry at that time.
You can't see a thing in the field.
Someone calls: “Help!”
What I can?
I myself am poor and small,
I'm dead tired myself
How can I help?
Someone calls in silence:
"My brother, come closer to me!
It's easier for two.
If we can't go,
Together we will die on the way,
Let's die together!"
K. Chukovsky wrote that he first read this verse “as a boy”:
« I was struck by the ascetic simplicity of these lines. Not a single epithet, not a single metaphor, no panache with chimes, no eloquence, no pathetic gestures, verbal ornaments, a beggarly poor vocabulary - but in this absence of any effects lay the strongest effect: the more artless the form of these outwardly wretched verses was, the more accurately they reached to the heart. That’s why these verses struck me: I realized that such artlessness requires great art, that in this extreme simplicity there is beauty:
What I can?..
How can I help?
And this was at a time when almost all young poetry cultivated pretentiousness, dislocations and twists of speech, when the empty eloquence of Balmontism was already beginning to reign in literature. And other poems by Sologub, which I happened to read at that time, seduced me with the same noble-classical beauty of simplicity - a beauty that shuns all embellishments».
Sologub in Saratov
From 1913 to 1916, Fyodor Sologub made a lecture tour giving lectures on art (“ Art of our days", "Russia in the dreams and expectations of poets"). He traveled with them to 39 cities. The trips were widely covered in the press.
February 3, 1914 he gave a lecture at Saratov in the premises of the former Commercial club on the street Radishcheva(now the House of Officers).
Here is a quote from the newspaper “ Saratov leaflet” from February 5, 1914 (№30):
“Fyodor Sologub's lecture at the Commercial Club was held in a crowded hall, arousing significant interest among the public. From the outside, Sologub’s speech, although monotonous, was beautifully constructed and consisted of a series of aphorisms of sorts. After the message, F. Sologub read several of his own poems, causing noisy applause. There were no late debates”.
And here is what Sologub writes to his wife about the same lecture: Anastasia Chebotarevskaya: “The lecture was not public, but only for club members and guests; members are free, and guests are 50 kopecks each (characteristic statements in his letters: “The audience was 205 rubles"). There was a Babylonian pandemonium, such a crowd as they had never had before at their meetings - more than 1000 people. There are a lot of young people, but there are also a lot of respectable people. They listened unusually attentively for such a crowd. After the lecture they asked for poetry”.
Sologub describes in this letter a funny episode that happened then in Saratov:
“On Thursday before me there was an evening about futurism. Four local young scoundrels published a stupid almanac under futurists, calling themselves psycho-futurists. The public and local newspapers took it seriously; there were many articles in the newspapers, the public greedily bought up the almanac. At an evening at the Commercial Club, these gentlemen revealed that they were joking to prove that futurism is an absurdity. Now Saratov residents are very angry that they were fooled”.
Simplicity and truth
Georgy Ivanov believed that Sologub’s poems are “ some of the most truthful in Russian poetry" They are true both artistically and humanly. And with their restraint, alien to everything external and ostentatious, and with the clear chastity of the poet’s childish soul reflected in them.
My quiet friend, my distant friend,
Look -
I'm cold and sad
The light of dawn.
I'm waiting in vain
Deities,
In a pale life I don't know
Celebrations.
Will soon rise above the ground
Clear day,
And will sink into the silent abyss
Evil shadow -
And silent and sad,
In the morning,
My secret friend, my distant friend,
I will die.
The emphasized everyday life makes Sologub similar to I. Annensky(who also devoted half his life to the cause of school education). Here is a wonderful poem " A simple song" In fact, this is a terribly complicated song about how simply a child was killed during the dispersal of a demonstration in 1905.
Under the razor's edge
Enemy peak
Svetik is dead,
Svetik, killed, drooped.
Cute boy
My little,
You won't come back
You won't come home.
They beat, they shot,
You didn't run
You're on the road
You were lying on the road.
Officer's horse
Enemy forces
Straight to the heart
He stepped right on the heart.
Nice little boy
My little,
You won't come back
You won't come home.
Having enthusiastically greeted the February Revolution, Sologub did not internally accept the October Revolution. Although his origin should have been close to this power, but in the essence, the spirit of his creativity, he was alien to it. " There seems to be something humane in their ideas,- he said, remembering his humiliated youth and recognizing himself as the son of a working people. - But you still can’t live with them!"And he wrote about it in verse:
The verse does not sound as before.
Need new props.
Jets, trills, groves, distances
The dirty pigs ate it.
Silver rivers of light
It drowns the stinking goodness.
There was once velvet in poetry,
And now he's all cackling,
And for the sweet aroma
Reeked of Soviet obscenities.
The charm of the nightingale's song
Now covered in urine.
Romantic moon
Drunk with that moisture.
The word "face" sounded proudly,
And now we need a muzzle.
At one time Sologub was friends with Block. They often went together and often took pictures.
Then, during the period Twelve", he has already lost interest in Blok.
We all admired the courage of political poems Mandelstam 1934 " We live without feeling the country beneath us
..." But much earlier - in the spring of 1921, these lines by Sologub were written:
A wide ax will not cut off
His criminal head
And the glory will trumpet about him,
But all his works are dead.
This poem was excluded from the preliminary composition of the volume of Sologub’s works in the BP series, because under it was the date of its composition: April 22, 1922, leaving no doubt that it was addressed to the leader of the revolution.
A legend in the making
But still, these verses do not constitute the essence of Sologub’s poetry. And he himself expressed his credo in art this way:
Whatever the government,
and no matter what the law says,
we know your guidance,
O luminous Apollo!
“Apollonian” art, the art of a comforting and seductive dream, the “veil of Maya,” hiding from us a truth terrible in its nakedness, creating “another world, desired” - this is what Sologub’s poetry is. But life constantly tears apart the saving and seductive cover of illusions, and through its holes its essence seems even more terrible.
You live crazy and nasty
A street accessible to everyone -
The dusty roar, the laughter of a hooligan,
A drunken prostitute rusty laugh.
Vile friends are swarming -
Anger, dirt, depravity, poverty.
How can it arise in this circle
An inspirationally bright dream?
But it will arise! Always arises!
The life of the people is full of creativity,
And erects above the muddy foam
Worldwide wave of beauty.
The dominant theme in Sologub’s work is the theme of dreams, transforming the world. He stated: " There is no real happiness. There is only created happiness" In his novel " A legend in the making» Sologub writes:
« I take a piece of life, rough and poor, and create a sweet legend from it, for I am a poet. Stale in the darkness, dull, everyday, or rage with a furious fire - above you, life, I, the poet, will erect the legend I create about the charming and beautiful».
Along the cruel paths of life
I am wandering, homeless and sire.
But all nature is mine,
The world is dressing up for me.
It may be impossible to change anything in this world, but
What's stopping me
Raise all the worlds,
Whichever he wishes
The law of my game?
Live and believe the lies
and fairy tales and dreams.
To your mental wounds
there is a pleasant balm in them.
Even if real life is rude, cruel, unfair, the poet will contrast it with his “created legend” - other worlds where the soul goes after death and where everything that we lacked on earth will come true. This is his cycle “ Star Mair"(1898), praising the light of a star Mair on beautiful land Oyle where the magic river flows League.
The star Mair shines above me,
Star Mair,
And illuminated by a beautiful star
Distant world.
The earth of Oyle floats on the waves of the ether,
Land of Oyle,
And the shining light of Maira is clear
On that land.
River Ligoi in the land of love and peace,
Ligoi River
Quietly the clear face of Maira wavers
With its own wave.
Sologub creates a myth about a distant, beautiful country where “ everything that we lacked here, everything that the sinful earth was sad about.”. There is some connection here with Dostoevsky, with his " Funny man's dream”, with a “golden dream” about a distant star, where sinless and happy “children of the sun” live in great love and eternal joy.
On Oila, distant and beautiful
All my love and all my soul.
On Oila, distant and beautiful
A sweet-voiced and consonant song
Glorifies all the bliss of existence.
There, in the radiance of clear Mair,
Everything is blooming, everything is singing joyfully.
There, in the radiance of clear Mair,
In the sway of light ether,
The other world lives mysteriously.
Quiet shore of blue Ligoi
All in flowers of unearthly beauty.
The quiet shore of the blue Ligoi -
Eternal peace of bliss and peace,
The eternal world of a dream come true.
A. Blok especially loved this cycle. He gave Sologub his collection “ Poems about a beautiful lady" with an inscription: " F.K. Sologub - the author of the star Mair - Consolation - fairy tales - as a sign of deep consolation and gratitude.”
Many-faced Sologub
Mandelstam, who highly valued Sologub, wrote about him: “ At first, due to our youthful immaturity, we saw in Sologub only a comforter, muttering sleepy words, only a skilled cradle-maker who teaches oblivion - but the further, the more we understood that Sologub’s poetry is the science of action, the science of will, the science of courage and love "
Open your door
And go around the fence.
It's restless now -
Don't lie down, don't fall asleep, wait.
Maybe this night
And someone will call you.
Will you rush to help?
And will you go on an unknown path?
And is it possible to sleep?
Just think: in the darkness, behind the wall
Someone will call
Lonely, tired, sick.
Come out to the gate
And carry a lantern in front of you.
Even if you yourself perished,
But save the one who calls.
Many artists painted Sologub’s portrait. Here's a portrait B. Kustodieva(1907), where Sologub is a modest high school teacher in pince-nez with a “teacher’s” beard and mustache.
Many noted its resemblance to F. Tyutchev. Sologub in this portrait is only 44 years old, but he looked much older than his years. This marks Teffi in his memoirs: “ He was a man, as I now understand, about forty years old, but then, probably because I myself was very young, he seemed old to me, not even old, but somehow ancient. His face was pale, long, eyebrowless, there was a large wart near his nose, and a thin reddish beard seemed to pull down his thin cheeks and dull, half-closed eyes. Always tired, always bored face. I remember in one of his poems he says:
I myself am poor and small,
I'm dead tired myself...
It was this mortal fatigue that his face always expressed. Sometimes, somewhere at a table at a party, he would close his eyes and, as if he had forgotten to open them, remain for several minutes. He never laughed. This was Sologub’s appearance».
Another portrait of him is no less popular - K. Somova (1910).
Here Sologub is depicted no longer as a modest teacher, but as a venerable master of decadent salons. A sarcastic grin, fatigue and skepticism in the wrinkles around his mouth, a strict, straight posture make him look like a Roman emperor from the times of decline. This was Sologub’s favorite portrait, he said: “I look exactly like there.” This portrait is kept in Russian Museum In Petersburg.
Portrait of Sologub by N. Vysheslavtsev
Irina Odoevtseva Sologub seemed “white marble”, reminded her of a tombstone statue, the Stone Guest, a monument to himself. " Brick in a frock coat " - that's what he called him V. Rozanov.
« In appearance he’s really not a person – he’s a stone, - echoes him G. Ivanov. - And no one realizes that under this coat, in this “brick” there is a heart. A heart ready to burst from sadness and tenderness, despair and pity».
I composed these measured sounds,
To drown out the hunger of the soul,
So that eternal torment of the heart,
Drown in silvery streams,
So that it sounds like a nightingale's tune,
Your enchanting voice, dream,
So that, burned by the long steepness,
They smiled at least with a song on their lips.
Lunar Lilith and Grandmother Eva
Sologub could not stand the rough life; he could say to himself, along with Dostoevsky, that he felt as if his skin had been flayed off. Every touch from the outside resonates in him with excruciating pain. Life seems to Sologub like a ruddy and plump woman - Eva, in contrast to the beautiful lunar Lilith- his dreams.
She seems vulgar, vulgar, popular to him.
The poet wants to remake it in his own way, to erase from it everything bright, strong, colorful. He has a taste for everything quiet, dim, soundless, incorporeal. In some ways Sologub in this sense resembles Baudelaire, who preferred a painted and whitened face to a living blush and loved artificial flowers. He was afraid of life and loved Death, whose name he wrote with a capital letter and for which he found tender words. He was called Deathjoy, the death knight.
The Charm of Death
I walk the cold path alone,
I have forgotten the earthly and am waiting for the hidden, -
and silent death will kiss me,
and will lead you to you, in the silence of autumn.
Sologub develops a death cult. He creates a myth about death as a bride, friend, savior, comforter, saving a person from hardships and torment.
O Death! I am yours. I see it everywhere
only you - and I hate
the charm of the earth.
Human delights are alien to me,
battles, holidays and trades,
all this noise in the dust of the earth.
« There is a certain fascination with death in the very style of his writings., - wrote Korney Chukovsky. — These frozen, quiet, even lines, this, as we have seen, the soundlessness of all his words - isn’t this the source of Sologubov’s special beauty, which will be sensed by everyone who is given the ability to sense beauty? His poems are always cold, no matter how the heavenly serpent flares up in them, cold and quiet.”
Little devil
But if in poetry Sologub most often speaks about beautiful life, about beauty, then in prose he tends to embody the monstrous nature of life. In 1905, Sologub’s novel “ Little devil", which he wrote for 10 years.
Its success exceeded all expectations - in the five years since the book was published, it has been republished five times. This is one of the outstanding novels of the century. There are suggestions that it was written based on the impressions of Sologub’s stay in Vytegra.
The monotonous dull everyday life of a provincial town, its “animal life”, the ugly morals of the inhabitants - all this spilled out onto the pages of Sologub’s novel from his many years of personal experience.
To be continued.
FEDOR SOLOGUB (1863-1927)
The poet, prose writer, playwright, translator, symbolist theorist F. Sologub is associated with the classics in his creative work, but he presented the problems of life, the meaning of creativity and ways to solve artistic problems differently than his predecessors. The realities of art in his works are combined with phenomena of reality and fantasy. Behind the first plan of his narration of life events is another plan, a mysterious one, which ultimately determines the movement of events. As a philosopher, Sologub sought to express the essence of “things in themselves,” ideas beyond sensory perceptions. His style is largely intuitive; he builds his artistic world by combining elements of impressionism, expressionism, mysticism, naturalism and various space-time layers. Critics who did not understand the playful manner of this modernist’s work perceived his works as “devilishness”, “fooling”.
Creative biography and artistic world of F. Sologub
The childhood and youth of Fyodor Sologub (Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov) were difficult. The father, a tailor, died when his son was four and his daughter two years old. After this, almost until her death in 1884, the mother worked in a wealthy family as “one servant.” In the manor's house, high school student and then student Fedya Teternikov could visit the "hall" in which literary and musical evenings were held, communicate with celebrities, read in the family library, could use the master's private box in the theater, naturally, while remaining the "cook's son" . It is possible that the dual consciousness inherent in Sologub’s characters is partly due to the ambiguous social position of the future writer himself at the beginning of his adult life.
Sologub had to “split into two” later, “making his way into the people” on the pedagogical path. Having graduated from the Teachers' Institute in 1882, he taught natural disciplines for a quarter of a century in provincial and then in metropolitan schools and gymnasiums, wrote a textbook on geometry, while his soul was drawn to belles-lettres. Before returning to St. Petersburg in 1893, he published his poems and translations. His favorite French “damned” books are still published in translations by Sologub, a teacher from the Russian hinterland. Sologub was called “Russian Verdun” in literary circles. He also translated from English, German, and Ukrainian. The first novel, “Heavy Dreams” (1882-1894, published in 1895), about the dramatic life of a teacher in a provincial town, was almost entirely written in the provinces.
However, Fedya Teternikov felt himself a poet and prose writer very early. He wrote his first poems at the age of 12, and at 16 he began working on a novel in the genre of a family chronicle. However, Sologub won a place on the literary Olympus for a long time and with difficulty. The novel “Poems: Book One” (1895), “Shadows: Stories and Poems” (1896) had already been published, the name had already become familiar on the pages of fashion magazines such as “Northern Herald”, “World of Art”, “New Path” , “Golden Fleece”, “Pass”, “Northern Flowers”, but there was still no recognition. It came only with the publication of the novel “The Little Demon” (1907)2. Later, this success eclipsed Sologub's other perfect creations.
The list of magazines to which the recent provincial contributed his works speaks volumes about his established literary taste. Together with other senior symbolists, Sologub created paradigms of “new art,” while at the same time, in the camp of close artists, he, like no one else, expressed a decadent worldview3. The symbolists strove for the divine absolute, the all-conquering beauty of truth, goodness, justice, believing in the future unity, overcoming the evil of the empirical world. Sologub followed his own religious and aesthetic path, bypassing Sofia. It is noteworthy that in his poems there is an unnamed female figure endowed with mystical power. But Sologubov’s “She” is contradictory, harsh... Solovyov’s “flower of foreign lands” is “crumpled” (“On the sand of whimsical roads...”, 1896). “She” may be associated with “obsessions of evil” (“Every day, at the appointed hour...”, 1894), at best “does not regret, but spares” (“Your names are not false...”, 1896) , rarely “comforts” (“You came to me more than once...”, 1897), does not forgive love for an “earthly wife” (“I cheated on you, unearthly...”, 1896).
A lot has been said about Sologub’s “innate” decadence, but there is another side to this problem. The authors of the statements looked at his artistic world through the prism of the classics, and there is a bit of limitation in their assessments. Sologub began a different art, in which, among other innovations, reality and the realities of previous fine literature are almost balanced in their meaning for the artist. Overcoming the mimetic, he moved toward “playful art.”
An example of Sologub's misunderstanding is the discussions around the theme of death in his work. For decades, critics have been outraged by the “poeticization of death.” Very few allowed another version of the author’s interpretation of death - a “bridge”, a “transition” from the empirical world to another. Sologub creates a virtual world where life and death have a special aesthetic dimension3. He absolutizes the mythologies of immortality that live in the subconscious, in the beliefs of tribes that cry at birth and rejoice at the death of a person, in religious teachings. The writings grow from the idea of the transmigration of the soul, the genetic memory of a past life1. The idea that real life is hell is an axiom, just like the fact that man is a martyr and creator of suffering2. This idea is clearly visible in the finale of the poem “I had a terrible dream...” (1895), where the lyrical hero perceives the very possibility of continuing earthly life as a “cruel” sentence:
And, having finished the long journey, I began to die, And I hear the cruel judgment: “Rise up, live again!”
The only thing that Sologub contrasts with “life, rough and poor” is a dream. In a dream, he overcomes the “innate” decadence: the objective world is nothing, the subjective world is everything. His positive heroes are attracted by what is not in the world. 3. N. Gippius noted: “Dream and reality in eternal attraction and in eternal struggle - this is the tragedy of Sologub.” Dream, art, beauty - his trinity formula, in which “art... is the highest form of life.” In his imagination, the artist created the happiest “country of love and peace” on the planet Oil, illuminated by the “beautiful star” Mair. The heroes of his prose also dream of living on this planet. The lyrical cycle "Star Mair" (1898-1901) is one of the most spiritual in our poetry.
Sologub is a rare case of a long life in art without any visible evolution of ideological and aesthetic views - only the mastery of words has evolved. In his rich poetic heritage, it is rare, but quite bright poems are found: “Believe, the bloodthirsty idol will fall, / Our world will become free and happy...”; “No, it’s not just grief, - / There is in the world...” (1887, 1895). “O Rus'! exhausted in anguish, / I compose hymns to you. / There is no dearer land in the world, / O my homeland!..” - with these words begin the heartfelt “Hymns to the Motherland” (1903), dating back to the poetic tradition of the 19th century. Nekrasov’s motifs are recognizable, denouncing “humble little people” (“The Eighties”, 1892), social inequality: “Here at the ostentatious window / Stands, admiring, a poor boy...” (1892). There is a poetic confession of “faith in man,” ending with the words: “But still joyful hope / There is a place in my heart!” (“I am also the son of a sick century...”, 1892). In Sologub one can find a Fetov-Bunin declaration of love, as he put it, for “living beauty” - nature:
And how joyful I am of the sands, the bushes, and the peaceful plain, and the clay tender with moisture, and the colorful bugs.
(“What is most dear to me in life?..”, 1889)
However, this pathos rarely fuels Sologubov's verse. His lyrical hero is characterized by the confession: “Oh death! I am yours. Everywhere I see / You alone, and I hate / The charms of the earth...” (1894). His vision of life is conveyed by the extended poetic metaphor “Devil's Swing” (1907).
V. F. Khodasevich explained these paradoxes of his contemporary: “Sologub knows how to love life and admire it, but only to the extent that he contemplates it without regard to the “ladder of perfections”.”
Sologub did not think of phenomena outside the dialectic of antinomic principles. Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, in their struggle he sees the guarantee of the “movement of things,” the dramatic mode of life. I think this largely explains his shocking poetic vacillation between light and darkness, God and Satan. “I will glorify you, my father / In reproach to the unjust day, / I will raise blasphemy over the world, / And by tempting I will seduce” - this is how Sologub’s lyrical hero addresses the Devil (“When I swam in a stormy sea...”, 1902). And he also claims:
To encroach on the truth of God is the same as crucifying Christ, to block the immaculate lips with earthly lies.
("I know with the last knowledge..." from the collection "Incense", 1921)
Sologub's poetry is philosophical; It is difficult to find an analogy for the worldview expressed in it. As the author admitted, in his poems he “opens his soul,” and without attention to the makeup of his soul, it is difficult to understand and love them. One is struck by the apparent simplicity of this poetry, with a limited range of ideas, without minorities, allegories, almost without metaphors, and - the abundance of turns of spoken language, the clarity of judgments. There are almost no complex epithets; the range of others is limited. Key words: tired, pale, poor, sick, angry, cold, quiet - determine the corresponding mood. Sologubov’s stanzas really resemble “crystals in severity<...>lines." Why did they attract admirers, artists from I. Annensky to M. Gorky? First of all - the music of verse and only then, probably, the original interpretation of the obvious and hidden paradoxes of life.
The structure-forming device of this poetry - “unadorned music” - is repetition. The author addresses it at different levels: thematic, lexical, sound. Many poems are in the nature of divination and spells. The latter can convince of the incredible, even of the “charm of death,” the deliverer from an evil life. This is facilitated by rich rhyme, sophisticated metric and stanza, and an appeal—rare in Russian poetry—to a solid poetic form, the triolet. As V. Ya. Bryusov noted , Sologub’s rhyme coordinates not only the supporting consonant, but also the previous vowel, and in the first volume of his works “there are 177 poems with more than a hundred different meters and stanza structures.” The poet himself, he understands with what talent and “tireless work” Sologub’s simplicity”, calls it “Pushkin”.
Sologub's poetry reflected his knowledge of history, literature, mythology, religion, science - culture in the broad sense. For this he was “one of our own” for the Acmeists too.
The one returning from paradise looked at the overturned jug. There is only one moment in the desert, And there the centuries flowed, burning.<...>
How long has Kazan been dark?
Was a haven of inspiration
And he shook the edge of Euclid
Our Lobachevsky, bright genius!
(“On an overturned jug...”, 1923)
These stanzas were born of the author’s “extraordinary interest” in the problems of the structure of the world, astronomy, the fourth dimension, and the principle of relativity3. The impetus for poetic reflections on the boundaries of knowledge and the significance of Einstein’s discoveries is the Muslim legend that in an earthly moment, during which the water did not have time to pour out of the vessel, the Prophet made his wonderful journeys and had 70 thousand conversations with Allah.
For a quarter of a century, Sologub walked toward prosperity and the opportunity to devote himself to his main business. This was facilitated by his marriage to the writer Anastasia Chebotarevskaya in 1908. Their house became a literary salon, and the “seer” Sologub became a trendsetter1. His poetry collections “The Serpent: Poems, Book Six” (1907), “The Circle of Flame” (1908), collections of stories “Rotting Masks” (1907), “The Book of Separations” (1908), “The Book of Charms” (1909) were published. In 1913, a collection of works was published in 12 volumes; in 1913, a 20-volume collection of works began to appear (for a number of reasons, some volumes were not published). But the prosperity did not last long. After the October Revolution of 1917, Sologub fell into the category of semi-banned writers whose worldview did not correspond to the “normative” one. In a relatively liberal period for publishing, his collections “Blue Sky”, “One Love”, “Cathedral Annunciation”, “Incense” (all - 1921), “Road Fire”, “Pipe”, “The Magical Cup” (all -1922), "Great Good News" (1923). However, later, until the beginning of the 1990s, when Sologub’s books began to be published in significant editions, isolated cases of publication of his lyrics and “The Little Demon” were noted, while the novel was subjected to a vulgar sociological interpretation. In general, Sologub’s work was assessed negatively, and Sologub studies almost disappeared for seven decades.
Perhaps the most complete and adequate idea of the work of Fyodor Sologub was expressed by Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky in his work “The History of Russian Literature from Ancient Times to 1925”:
“All the writers we talked about in this chapter came from cultured metropolitan families - from the upper middle class - but the best, most refined poet of the first generation of Symbolists was a native of the lower classes, whose strange genius blossomed under the most unfavorable circumstances. Fyodor Sologub (real name - Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov) was born in St. Petersburg in 1863. His father was a shoemaker, and after the death of his father, his mother became a servant. With the help of her mistress, Sologub received a relatively decent education at the Teachers' Institute. Having completed his studies, Sologub received a position as a teacher in provincial town. Over time, he became an inspector of primary schools, in the nineties he was finally transferred to St. Petersburg. Only after the huge success of his famous novel The Petty Demon was he able to leave teaching service and live on literary earnings. Like other symbolists, Sologub was apolitical and, although in 1905 he was revolutionary, in 1917 and later he was coldly alienated from what was happening. In 1921, Sologub’s wife, known in literature under the name Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, died under tragic and mysterious circumstances, but other than that, there were no major events in Sologub’s personal life and his biography consists of the history of his work.
He began writing in the eighties, but for the first ten years he had no connections with the literary world. His first books were published in 1896 - three at once: a collection of poems, a collection of short stories and the novel Heavy Dreams, on which he worked for more than ten years. The next collection of poems and the next collection of stories appeared only in 1904. For his best novel, The Petty Demon, on which he worked from 1892 to 1902, Sologub could not find a publisher for many years. It finally began to be published in 1905 in supplements to the magazine, but the magazine closed. And only in 1907 the novel was finally published in book form and was received with a bang. The little demon brought Sologub universal recognition and all-Russian fame. But in later books, Sologub began to give too much free rein to his moods, which readers did not like; his books were no longer as successful, and after 1910 it was decided that his talent had declined. A Legend in the Making (1908-1912) - a very interesting and strangely unique book - was met with indifference. Sologub's last novel, The Snake Charmer, is decidedly weak, but Sologub's poems, which he continues to publish, still remain at a high level, although lovers of novelties and sensations will not like some of their monotony.
In Sologub’s work, it is necessary to distinguish two aspects that are not interconnected and independent of each other - this is his Manichaean idealism and a special “complex” that is the result of a suppressed, vicious libido. There is no doubt that many of Sologub’s works, especially of the last period, would not have been written if not for the need to satisfy this “complex”, expressing it in material form. To study this issue requires an experienced psychoanalyst, not a literary historian. Enjoyment of cruelty and humiliation of beauty is one of its main symptoms. The second is the ever-repeating “bare feet” detail. It's like an obsession. In all Sologub's novels and stories, barefoot heroines wander around. Sologub's Manichaeism, on the contrary, is purely idealistic - in the Platonic sense of the word. There is a world of Good, consisting of Unity, Peace and Beauty, and a world of Evil, which consists of confusion, desires and vulgarity. Our world is a creation of Evil. Only within yourself can you find a world of Unity and Peace. The goal of man is to free himself from the evil shackles of matter and become a peaceful deity. But man projects his dreams of heaven onto the outside world - this is the “romantic” irony of life. Sologub symbolically depicts this irony with two names taken from Don Quixote: Dulcinea and Aldonsa. The one we thought was the ideal Dulcinea turns out to be the vulgar Aldonsa. Matter and desire are the main exponents of evil, and Beauty - the ideal beauty of the naked body - is the only embodiment of the highest world of ideals in real life. At this point, Sologub's idealism meets his sensuality. His attitude towards carnal beauty is always twofold: simultaneously platonically ideal and perversely sensual. The taste of Sologubov's sensuality is so disgusting to many readers that it becomes an obstacle to enjoying his work. But besides this perversity, Sologub’s philosophy itself gravitates towards nihilism, close to Satanism. Peace and Beauty are identified with Death, and the Sun - the source of life and activity - becomes a symbol of evil power. In his attitude to the existing religion, Sologub takes a position opposite to his medieval predecessors - the Albigensians: he identifies God with the evil creator of the evil world, and Satan becomes for him the king of the calm and cool world of beauty and death.
Sologub's poetry did not develop in the same direction as the poetry of other symbolists. His vocabulary, his poetic language, his imagery are closer to the eclectic poetry of the Victorians. He uses simple dimensions but refines them to perfection. Sologub's vocabulary is almost as small as Racine's, but he uses it with almost the same accuracy and precision. He is a symbolist in the sense that his words are symbols with a double meaning, and are used in a second - unusual meaning. But the completeness of his philosophical system allows Sologub to use these words with almost classical precision. This applies, however, only to that part of his poetry that reflects his ideal heaven or the desire for it. In other cycles, for example, in the Underground Songs, the evil discord of the world is darkly and cruelly depicted, and the poetic language in them is rougher, more colorful and richer. The Underground Songs include a strange cycle of the Face of Experiences - memories of the different forms that the soul took in its previous incarnations. One of them is the complaint of a dog howling at the moon, one of Sologub’s best and most original poems. It is useless to try to translate Sologub's idealistic lyrics - only a master of English verse can do this. Of course, it is Sologub’s lyrical poetry that is the best that he wrote - its classical beauty comes from the elusive properties of rhythm and meaning. As in all classical poetry, the poet's silence is as important as his words: what is left unsaid is as important as what is said. These are the most exquisite and subtle poems in all modern Russian poetry.
Although Sologub's poems are the most perfect and rare flower of his genius, his fame in Russia and especially abroad is based more on his novels. Sologub's first novel, Heavy Dreams, is lyrically autobiographical. The hero of the novel, the provincial teacher Login, is haunted by the same perverted obsessions and the same ideal visions that fill Sologub’s poetry. This is the story of a man who is able to achieve an ideal in the midst of a world of vulgarity, cruelty, selfishness, stupidity and lust. Russian provincial society is depicted with devastating cruelty, reminiscent of Gogol. But this is not realism - in the good old Russian sense of the word - since not only Russian breadth is symbolized in the life depicted. Sologub's second novel - The Little Demon (the English translation of the title - The Little Demon - is not good at all, the French - Le Demon Mesquin - is better) - the most famous of all his works, it can be considered the best Russian novel after Dostoevsky. Like Heavy Dreams, The Little Demon is outwardly realistic, but internally symbolic. The novel goes beyond realism not because Sologub introduces the mysterious imp Nedotykomka into it (after all, he could be explained as a hallucination of Peredonov), but because Sologub’s goal is to describe the life not of a Russian provincial town, but life in general - the evil creation of God . Sologub's satirical drawing is delightful, a little more grotesque, and therefore more poetic, than in the previous novel, but the city depicted turns out to be a microcosm of all life. The novel has two plans: Peredonov’s life is the embodiment of life’s joyless evil, and the idyllic love of the boy Sasha Pylnikov and Lyudmila Rutilova. Sasha and Lyudmila are an emanation of beauty, but their beauty is not pure, it is infected with the bad touch of life. In the scenes of Sasha’s relationship with Lyudmila, there is a subtle flavor of sensuality, which is introduced not only due to compositional and symbolic necessity, but also according to the internal need of the poet’s libido. Peredonov became a famous character, the most memorable since the time of the Karamazov Brothers, his name became a household name in Russia. It denotes sullen evil, a person who is alien to joy and who is angry that others know this feeling; the most terrible character a poet could create. Peredonov lives hating everyone and believing that everyone hates him. He loves to cause suffering and crush other people's joys. At the end of the novel, persecution mania completely takes possession of him, he finally goes crazy and commits murder.
Sologub's third novel, A Legend in the Making (the English translator of the first part, Mr. Kurnos, aptly noted that this is “a legend in the making”) is the longest. It consists of three parts, each of which is a completed novel. In the first part, the action takes place in Russia in 1905. The hero of the novel, Trirodov, is a Satanist, one of those whom Sologub loves so much. Trirodov is also a revolutionary, although only a contemplative one. At that time, Sologub himself was very revolutionary: naturally, with his philosophical system, the existing order of things, the forces of reaction and conservatism are presented in the novel as the embodiment of evil. The first part is full of terrible and cruel scenes of the suppression of the revolutionary movement - hence its name Drops of Blood. Trirodov is an ideal person, almost approaching the tranquility of death, he creates around himself an atmosphere of peace and coolness, symbolized by his colony of “quiet boys” - a strange vision of Sologub’s sick imagination. In the second and third parts (Queen Ortrud and Smoke and Ashes), the action moves to the kingdom of the United Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. The islands are fictional, of volcanic origin. These books have a powerful and subtle - but somehow suspicious - charm. Unlike most Russian novels, they are simply interesting to read. This is a very complicated plot, with love and political intrigue. The situation is exacerbated by the constant presence of danger - a volcano, which finally erupts in the third part. The story is symbolic, as I already said, in addition to symbolism, it has charm. At the end of the trilogy, Trirodov is elected king of the Republic of the United Islands!
Sologub's stories are a link between poetry and novels. Some of them are short sketches in the style of Heavy Dreams and Little Devil. Others, especially those written after 1905, are frankly fantastical and symbolic. In them, Sologub gives complete freedom to his pathological sensual demands. Typical examples are The Sweet Page and the Lady in Bonds translated into English. And the Miracle of the Youth Lin - a revolutionary plot in a conventionally poetic setting - is one of the best examples of modern Russian prose. In general, Sologub’s prose is beautiful: transparent, clear, balanced, poetic, but with a sense of proportion. In later works, however, an irritating mannerism appears. Political Tales (1905) stand apart: delightful in the causticity of sarcasm and in the rendering of the folk language, rich (like any folk speech) in verbal effects and reminiscent of Leskov’s grotesque manner.
Sologub's plays are incomparably worse than his other works. They have little dramatic merit. The Victory of Death and the Gift of the Wise Bees are magnificent spectacles that symbolize the author's philosophical concepts. They have less sincerity than his poetry, their beauty is false. More interesting is the play Vanka the Keykeeper and the Page Jehan: a funny and ironically told familiar plot about a young servant who seduces the mistress of the house, develops in two parallel versions - in medieval France and in Muscovite Rus'. This is a satire on Russian civilization, with its rudeness and poverty of forms, and at the same time a symbol of the deep imagery of the bad confusion of life throughout the world and in all centuries."
