Fyodor Sologub

The electricity of the relationship between the androgynous, pubescent Sasha and the lovely Lyudmilla, with her exotic perfumes, caresses and lubricious fantasies, seldom fails to hold the reader's attention.

The Petty Demon

роман

Мелкий бес

Peredonov, il demone meschino

Susanne Fusso

A boy who feels persecuted by the banality of everyday life yearns to ascend to the cold and majestic plane of the stars. A seamstress finds liberation of a sort in “becoming” a dog and howling at the moon. A club of young girls masquerade as the grieving fiancées of strange men. This book brings together these and other remarkable short stories by the Russian Symbolist Fyodor Sologub that explore the lengths to which people will go to transcend the mundane.

Renowned as one of late imperial Russia’s finest stylists, Sologub bridges the great nineteenth-century novel and the fin-de-siècle avant-garde. He stands out for his masterful command of both realist and fantastic storytelling; his play with language evinces a belief in its capacity to access other worlds and other levels of meaning. Many of Sologub’s stories are set among children whose alienation from the adult world has lent them imagination and curiosity, enabling them to create an alternative reality. At the same time, he bluntly examines the sordid realities of late imperial Russian society and frankly presents sometimes unconventional sexuality. The book also features a selection of Sologub’s “little fairy tales,” ambiguous parables couched in childlike language whose ingenuity anticipates the miniatures and “incidents” of Daniil Kharms. Susanne Fusso’s elegant translation offers these artful tales to an English-speaking audience.

To the Stars and Other Stories

Ronald Wilks

"'No, my dear contemporaries, it is of you that I have written my novel about the little demon ... about you.'" "Thus Sologub emphatically refuted suggestions that The Little Demon (1907) contained elements of autobiography. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that his schoolmaster hero is one of the great comic monsters of twentieth-century fiction. Peredonov is exercised first by the idea of marrying to gain promotion, later by arson, torture and murder. His descent into paranoia and sexual perversion (he subsequently lent his name to the brand of sado-masochism known in Russia as Peredonovism) mirrors the obsessions of a petty provincial society, tyrannized by triviality and senseless bureaucracy." "The Little Demon is a formidable technical achievement in its portrayal of a spiritual wasteland. It brought Sologub immediate and lasting fame, and is arguably the finest Russian novel to have come out of the Symbolist movement."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Little Demon

Anton Pavlovič Čehov

Aleksandr Sergeevič Puškin

Nikolaj Vasilʹevič Gogolʹ

Maciej Płaza

Ivan Sergejevič Turgenev

Mihail Petrovič Arcybašev

Valerij Âkovlevič Brûsov

Vladimir Pavlovič Titov

Mihail Ûrʹevič Lermontov

Nikolaj Semënovič Leskov

Antonij Pogorel'skij

Aleksej Konstantinovič Tolstoj

Vladimir Fedorovič Odoevskij

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Literatura rosyjska

Opowieści niesamowite

Bad Dreams

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Hidden in the forest, the poet Trirodov attempts to secede from the troubled society of early twentieth century Russia to build his own utopia: a school for the quiet children he cares for. Nothing is ever that easy though, and his personal connections to the outside world tie him into the political whirlwind of agitators, factions and power struggles that threaten his solitude. The Created Legend portrays a stark contrast to the protagonists of Sologub’s earlier work The Little Demon, even though the setting is the same town of Skorodozh. There, they varied from at best well-meaning to actively malignant; here the lead characters are idealistic, and isolate themselves from the trials of Russian society in an attempt to maintain their idealism. Trirodov sees beauty and mystery everywhere he looks, and (following the title) works to create his own legend. This volume, originally titled “Drops of Blood,” is the first of the “Created Legend” trilogy and the only one translated contemporaneously into English. It was received with some bewilderment by critics: the combination of current affairs and magical events proved too strange for many. However, treated as an early example of magic realism and with the benefit of hindsight, the setting and symbolism is less shocking and more readily accessible to the modern reader.

The Created Legend

The Little Demon is an engrossing tale of rage, desperate affection, and subtle opportunism in a small Russian provincial town shortly after the turn of the 20th century. It narrates the story of Peredonov, the antihero, a petty official who lives in constant hate for the world around him and life itself. Throughout the novel, Peredonov struggles to be promoted to governmental inspector of his province and starts going paranoid and hallucinating. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting. He is at once a victim, a monster, a foolish hypocrite, and a vicious nitwit. The plot moves from him to the hopeless romance of the boy Sasha Pylnikov and a much older woman Ludmila Rutilova. Fyodor Sologub's The Little Demon is one of the most humorous and the most scandalous of the great Russian classics, packed with nude boys, curvy girls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. Even in its censored form, it is considered one of the most infuriating and sexually open of the Russian books classics.

Федор Кузьмич Сологуб — русский писатель и поэт, один из крупнейших представителей символизма в отечественной культуре. Он был соратником Александра Блока, Николая Гумилёва, Леонида Андреева и многих других литераторов Серебряного века. Убежденный сторонник Февральской революции, он не признал советскую власть. Как результат, на публикацию его книг в СССР наложили запрет. Лишь в 1990-е годы у читателей появилась возможность познакомиться с такими его замечательными романами, как «Мелкий бес» и «Творимая легенда». А в наши дни выходит полное собрание его стихотворений и поэм, которые литературоведы называют забытыми шедеврами русской поэзии начала XX века.

"Мелкий бес", "Творимая легенда", "Мудрые девы"

Весь Ф. Сологуб

John Cournos

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

And Other Tales

The Old House

Три повести

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Created Legend" by Fyodor Sologub. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Mali zloduh

The legend that Sologub has in mind is the active, eternally changing process of life, orderly and structural in spite of the external confusion. The author makes an effort to bring order out of apparent chaos by stripping life of its complex modern detail and reducing it to a few significant symbols, as in a rather more subtle "morality play." The modern novel is perhaps overpsychologized; eternal truths and eternal passions are perhaps too often lost sight of under the mass of unnecessary naturalistic detail.

Smoke and Ashes

Fjodor Sologub: Der Kuss des Ungeborenen und andere Novellen Erstdruck der deutschen Übersetzung von Alexander Aliasberg: Weimar, Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1918. Inhaltsverzeichnis Der Kuss des Ungeborenen und andere Novellen Der Kuss des Ungeborenen Schatten Der Stachel des Todes Raja In der Menge Die trauernde Braut Neuausgabe. Herausgegeben von Karl-Maria Guth. Berlin 2018. Umschlaggestaltung von Thomas Schultz-Overhage unter Verwendung des Bildes: Wassily Kandinsky, Bild mit drei Punkten, 1914. Gesetzt aus der Minion Pro, 11 pt.

Der Kuss des Ungeborenen und andere Novellen

And Other Fairy Tales, Fables and Stories

The Sweet-scented Name

In "The Little Demon" Sologub has shown us how the evil within us peering out through our imagination makes all the world seem evil to us. In "The Created Legend," feeling perhaps the need of reacting from his morose creation Peredonov, the author has set himself the task of showing the reverse of the picture: how the imagination, no longer warped, but sensitized with beauty, is capable of creating a world of its own, legendary yet none the less real for the legend. The Russian title of the book is more descriptive of the author's intentions than an English translation will permit it to be. "Tvorimaya Legenda" actually means "The legend in the course of creation." The legend that Sologub has in mind is the active, eternally changing process of life, orderly and structural in spite of the external confusion. The author makes an effort to bring order out of apparent chaos by stripping life of its complex modern detail and reducing it to a few significant symbols, as in a rather more subtle "morality play." The modern novel is perhaps over-psychologized; eternal truths and eternal passions are perhaps too often lost sight of under the mass of unnecessary naturalistic detail. In this novel life passes by the author as a kind of dream, a dream within that nightmare Reality, a legend within that amorphousness called Life. And the nightmare and the dream, like a sensitive individual's ideas of the world as it is and as it ought to be, alternate here like moods. The author has expressed this changeableness of mood curiously by alternating a crudely realistic, deliberately na•ve, sometimes journalese style with an extremely decorative, lyrical mannerÑthis taxing the translator to the utmost in view of the urgency to translate the mood as well as the ideas.Ê

Fyodor Sologub

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