Description
Book SynopsisThis book brings together 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.
Trade ReviewSologub's prose is beautiful: limpid, clear, balanced, poetical, but with a keen sense of measure. . . . -- Dmitri Svatopolk-Mirsky, author of
A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900[Sologub’s] vivid, honed, stinging style . . . combines simplicity and elegance, coldness and fire, tenderness and austerity. . . . His anguishing conceptions more and more convincingly lift the cover of enchantment that all of reality turns out to be. He is the singer of death: but he sings of death with all the tenderness of a prayer, all the ardor of passion; he speaks of death the way a passionate lover speaks of his beloved. -- Andrei Bely, author of
PetersburgAlternately funny and frightening, charming and chilling, Sologub's short fiction remains curiously undervalued. Fusso's excellently selected and masterfully translated collection, accompanied by an exemplary introduction and copious notes, finally allows readers of English to appreciate the full power of Sologub's relentlessly double vision and the depth of his literary craft. -- Stanley J. Rabinowitz, Amherst College
[A] richly painted world . . . The stories collected in
To the Stars contain echoes of Baudelaire, Huysmans and Wilde. . . [Fusso's] English versions capture not just the morbid corporeality of Sologub’s prose, but also its radiant poetry and extravagant wordplay. -- Philip Ross Bullock * Times Literary Supplement *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction by Susanne Fusso
Selected Works About Sologub in English
Note on Transliteration and Translation Issues
1. To the Stars (1896)
2. Beauty (1899)
3. In Captivity (1905)
4. The Two Gotiks (1906)
5. The Youth Linus (1906)
6. In the Crowd (1907)
7. Death by Advertisement (1907)
8. The White Dog (1908)
9. The Saddened Fiancée (1908)
10. The Sixty-Seventh Day. A Novella (1908)
11. The Road to Damascus (1910) (written with Anastasia Chebotarevskaya)
12. The Kiss of the Unborn Child (1911)
13. The Lady in Shackles. A Legend of the White Nights (1912)
14. Little Fairy Tales (selection, 1898–1906)
Notes
Publication History of the Stories
