Fyodor
Sologub
Fyodor Sologub (Russian: Фёдор
Сологу́б, born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov,
Russian: Фёдор Кузьми́ч Тете́рников;
March 1 [O.S. February 17] 1863 –
December 5, 1927) was a Russian
Symbolist poet, novelist, playwright and
essayist. He was the first writer to
introduce the morbid, pessimistic
elements characteristic of European fin
de siècle literature and philosophy into
Russian prose.
Early life
Sologub was born in St. Petersburg
into the family of a poor tailor, Kuzma
Afanasyevich Teternikov, who had been a
serf in Poltava guberniya, the
illegitimate son of a local landowner.
His father died of tuberculosis in 1867,
and his illiterate mother was forced to
become a servant in the home of the
aristocratic Agapov family, where
Sologub and his younger sister Olga grew
up. Seeing how difficult his mother's
life was, Sologub was determined to
rescue her from it, and after graduating
from the St. Petersburg Teachers'
Institute in 1882 he took his mother and
sister with him to his first teaching
post in Kresttsy, where he began his
literary career with the 1884
publication in a children's magazine of
his poem "The Fox and the Hedgehog"
under the name Te-rnikov.
Sologub continued writing as he
relocated to new jobs in Velikiye Luki
(1885) and Vytegra (1889), but felt that
he was completely isolated from the
literary world and longed to be able to
live in the capital again; nevertheless,
his decade-long experience with the
"frightful world" of backwoods
provincial life served him well when he
came to write The Petty Demon. (He said
later that in writing the novel he had
softened the facts: "things happened
that no one would believe if I were to
describe them.") He felt sympathetic
with the writers associated with the
journal Severnyi vestnik (Northern
Herald), including Nikolai Minsky,
Zinaida Gippius, and Dmitry Merezhkovsky,
who were beginning to create what would
be known as the Symbolist movement, and
in 1891 he visited Petersburg hoping to
see Minsky and Merezhkovsky, but met
only the first.
Early literary career
In 1892 he was finally able to
relocate to the capital, where he got a
job teaching mathematics, started
writing what would become his most
famous novel, The Petty Demon, and began
frequenting the offices of Severnyi
vestnik, which published much of his
writing during the next five years.
There, in 1893, Minsky, who thought
Teternikov was an unpoetic name,
suggested that he use a pseudonym, and
the aristocratic name Sollogub was
decided on, but one of the ls was
omitted as an attempt (unavailing, as it
turned out) to avoid confusion with
Count Vladimir Sollogub. In 1894 his
first short story, "Ninochkina oshibka"
(Ninochka's Mistake), was published in
Illustrirovanny Mir, and in the autumn
of that year his mother died. In 1896 he
published his first three books: a book
of poems, a collection of short stories,
and his first novel, Tyazhelye sny (Bad
Dreams), which he had begun in 1883 and
which is considered one of the first
decadent Russian novels.
In April 1897 he ended his
association with Severnyi vestnik and,
along with Merezhkovsky and Gippius,
began writing for the journal Sever
(North). The next year his first series
of fairy tales was published. In 1899 he
was appointed principal of the
Andreevskoe municipal school and
relocated to their premises on
Vasilievsky Island; he also became a
member of the St. Petersburg District
School Council. He continued to publish
books of poetry, and in 1902 he finished
The Petty Demon, which was published
partially in serial form in 1905 (in
Voprosy zhizni, which was terminated
before the final installments). At this
time his "Sundays," a literary group
that met at his home, attracted poets,
artists, and actors, including Alexander
Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Alexei Remizov,
Sergei Gorodetsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov,
Leon Bakst, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and
Sergei Auslender. Teffi wrote of him at
this period:
His face was pale, long, without
eyebrows; by his nose was a large wart;
a thin reddish beard seemed to pull away
from his thin cheeks; dull, half-closed
eyes. His face was always tired, always
bored... Sometimes when he was a guest
at someone's table he would close his
eyes and remain like that for several
minutes, as if he had forgotten to open
them. He never laughed... Sologub lived
on Vasilievsky Island in the small
official apartment of a municipal school
where he was a teacher and inspector. He
lived with his sister, a flat-chested,
consumptive old maid. She was quiet and
shy; she adored her brother and was a
little afraid of him, and spoke of him
only in a whisper. He said in a poem:
"We were holiday children, My sister and
I"; they were very poor, those holiday
children, dreaming that someone would
give them "even motley-colored shells
from a brook." Sadly and dully they
dragged out the difficult days of their
youth. The consumptive sister, not
having received her share of motley
shells, was already burning out. He
himself was exhausted by his boring
teaching job; he wrote in snatches by
night, always tired from the boyish
noise of his students...
So Sologub lived in his little
official apartment with little icon
lamps, serving his guests mint cakes,
ruddy rolls, pastila [fruit candy], and
honey cakes, for which his sister went
across the river somewhere on a horsecar.
She told us privately, "I'd love to ride
on the outside of the horsecar sometime,
but my brother won't let me. He says
it's unseemly for a lady."... Those
evenings in the little apartment, when
his close literary friends gathered,
were very interesting.
Fame and marriage
At the time of the 1905 Revolution
his politically critical skazochki
("little tales") were very popular and
were collected into a book,
Politicheskie skazochki (1906). The
Petty Demon was published in a
standalone edition in 1907 and quickly
became popular, having ten printings
during the author's lifetime. Sologub's
next major prose work, A Created Legend
(1905-1913) (literally "the legend in
the making," a trilogy consisting of
Drops of Blood, Queen Ortruda, and Smoke
and Ash), had many of the same
characteristics but presented a
considerably more positive and hopeful
description of the world. "It begins
with the famous declaration that
although life is 'vulgar . . . stagnant
in darkness, dull and ordinary,' the
poet 'creates from it a sweet legend . .
. my legend of the enchanting and
beautiful.'"
His increasing literary success was
tempered for him by his sister's
tuberculosis; in 1906 he traveled with
her to Ufa Guberniya for treatment, and
in June 1907 he took her to Finland,
where she died on June 28. The next
month he returned to St. Petersburg and
retired after 25 years of teaching. In
the autumn of 1908 he married the
translator Anastasia Chebotarevskaya
(born in 1876), whom he had met at
Vyacheslav Ivanov's apartment three
years before. Teffi wrote that she
"reshaped his daily life in a new and
unnecessary way. A big new apartment was
rented, small gilt chairs were bought.
The walls of the large cold office for
some reason were decorated with
paintings of Leda by various painters...
The quiet talks were replaced by noisy
gatherings with dances and masks.
Sologub shaved his mustache and beard,
and everyone started to say that he
resembled a Roman of the period of
decline." He continued publishing poems,
plays, and translations; the next year
he traveled abroad for the first time,
visiting France with his wife, and in
September the dramatized version of The
Petty Demon was published.
Between 1909 and 1911 The Complete
Works of Fyodor Sologub were published
in 12 volumes, and in 1911 a collection
of critical works appeared, containing
over 30 critical essays, notes, and
reviews by famous writers. In 1913 he
presented a lecture, "The Art Of These
Days," that was so successful in St.
Petersburg he took it on tour all over
Russia. In 1914 he started a magazine,
Dnevniki pisatelei (Writers' Journals),
and went abroad with his wife, but the
outbreak of World War I put an end to
the magazine. In 1915 two collections of
his stories and tales were published in
English, and in 1916 The Petty Demon,
all translated by John Cournos.
Sologub continued touring and giving
lectures, and in 1917 he welcomed the
February Revolution. During the summer
he headed the Soyuz Deyatelei Iskusstva
(Union of Artists) and wrote articles
with a strong anti-Bolshevik attitude.
He was opposed to the October Revolution
but remained in Petrograd and
contributed to independent newspapers
until they were terminated. In 1918 he
spoke on behalf of the Union Of Artists;
published Slepaia babochka (The Blind
Butterfly), a collection of new short
stories; had a play produced in Yalta;
and joined the Petersburg Union of
Journalists. But by the end of the year,
because of Bolshevik control of
publishing and bookselling, he did not
have any outlets for his writing. Lev
Kleinbort wrote of that period: "Sologub
did not give lectures, but lived by
selling his things."
Even though he was in principle
opposed to emigration, the desperate
condition in which he and his wife found
himself caused him to apply in December
1919 for permission to leave the
country; he did not receive any
response. Half a year later he wrote to
Lenin personally, again without result.
In mid-July 1921 he finally received a
letter from Trotsky authorizing his
departure, and he made plans to leave
for Reval on September 25. But on the
evening of September 23 his wife,
weakened by privation and driven to
despair by the long torment of
uncertainty, threw herself off the
Tuchkov Bridge and drowned. His wife's
death grieved Sologub for the rest of
his life, and he referenced it often in
his subsequent writing. (A poem dated
November 28, 1921, begins "You took away
my soul/ To the bottom of the river./ I
will defy your wishes/ And follow you.")
He gave up any thought of leaving Russia
and relocated into an apartment on the
banks of the Zhdanovka River, in which
his wife had drowned.
In 1921 the New Economic Policy was
begun, and from the end of the year his
books (which had been published abroad
with increasing frequency, notably in
Germany and Estonia) began to appear in
Soviet Russia. In December Fimiamy
(Incense), a collection of poems, was
published; the next two years more
poetry collections and translations were
published (Balzac's Contes drolatiques,
Paul Verlaine, Heinrich von Kleist,
Frédéric Mistral), and in 1924 the
fortieth anniversary of Sologub's
literary activities was celebrated at
the Alexandrinsky Theater in Petersburg,
with speeches by Yevgeny Zamyatin,
Mikhail Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, and Osip
Mandelstam, among others. In April of
that year he was elected the honorary
chairman of the Division of Translators
in the Petersburg Union Of Writers, and
two years later he became the chairman
of the board of the Union. He had
literary gatherings in his apartment,
attended by such writers as Anna
Akhmatova and Korney Chukovsky. His new
poems, which had a classic simplicity,
were appreciated by those to whom he
read them, but they were not printed
anymore.
Death and legacy
In May 1927 Sologub became seriously
ill, and by summer he could leave his
bed only rarely; his last poem was dated
October 1. After a long struggle, he
died on December 5. Two days later he
was buried next to his wife in Smolensk
Cemetery.
While Sologub's novels have become
his best-known works, he has always been
respected by scholars and fellow authors
for his poetry. The Symbolist poet
Valery Bryusov admired the deceptive
simplicity of Sologub's poetry and
described it as possessing a Pushkinian
perfection of form. Innokenty Annensky,
another poet and contemporary of Sologub,
wrote that the most original aspect of
Sologub's poetry was its author's
unwillingness to separate himself from
his literature.
The Petty Demon
The Petty Demon attempted to create
a description of poshlost', a Russian
concept that has characteristics of both
evil and banality. The antihero is a
provincial schoolteacher, Peredonov,
notable for his complete lack of
redeeming human qualities. The novel
recounts the story of the morally
corrupt Peredonov going insane and
paranoid in an unnamed Russian
provincial town, parallel with his
struggle to be promoted to governmental
inspector of his province. The
omniscient third-person narrative
allowed Sologub to combine his Symbolist
tendencies and the tradition of Russian
Realism in which he engaged throughout
his earlier novels, a style similar to
Maupassant's fantastic realism.
Realistic elements of The Petty Demon
include a vivid description of
19th-century rural everyday life, while
a fantastic element is the presentation
of Peredonov's hallucinations on equal
terms with external events. While the
book was received as an indictment of
Russian society, it is a very
metaphysical novel and one of the major
prose works of the Russian Symbolist
movement.[citation needed] James H.
Billington said of it:
The book puts on display a Freudian
treasure chest of perversions with
subtlety and credibility. The name of
the novel's hero, Peredonov, became a
symbol of calculating concupiscence for
an entire generation... He torments his
students, derives erotic satisfaction
from watching them kneel to pray, and
systematically befouls his apartment
before leaving it as part of his
generalized spite against the universe.
