The complaint of death

Fedor Sologub (Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov, 1863-1927) entered the history of literature primarily thanks to the novel "Little Demon" - one of the most gloomy and most discussed by Russian society between the two revolutions. And of course, thanks to the poems - contemporaries confidently included him in the great poetic cohort of the Silver Age. And the stories remained, as it were, the second plan of Sologub’s work - sometimes a sketch, very often a "embryo" of the future novel or drama. But it was precisely because of this that all the main motives and signs of Sologubov’s creativity were reflected in the stories: decadence and symbolism, aesthetization of "deaths of comforting" and mental torment, appeal to Satan as the inevitable opposite of God. Often the heroes of his stories were children or adolescents, their naive feelings and ideas allowed Sologub to do without a "raid of culture" among the heroes, give free rein fantasy. "After all, in his novels, and in stories and in verses - one feature distinguishing: the close plexus of the real, ordinary with magical. A fairy tale walks in life, a fairy tale dines with us at the table - and does not stop being a fairy tale "(Zinaida Hippius) The tale, however, is scary, this cannot be taken away from Sologub.

True, there was a sorcerer ": contemporaries about the personality and work of Fedor Sologub