| For the first time in English a critical biography of Fyodor Sologub (1863-1927) is now presented, researching the life and works of one of the foremost Russian authors of the early Twentieth Century. He attained distinction as poet, dramatist, and author of novels and short stories. This dissertation maintains three parallel objectives: (1) establishing fuller understanding of the life and personality of the man Fyodor Teternikov (2) examining the quantity and quality of his works in four principal genres (3) investigating personal and cultural elements conducive to and reflected in Sologub's literary works. These objectives are pursued by investigating Sologub's personal, literary, and cultural milieu and by examining and comparing works of Sologub himself, the personal observations about Sologub by himself and his contemporaries, and, finally, subsequent scholarly materials.The biographical research investigates every period of Sologub's life and reveals or clarifies much that has heretofore been obscure or misunderstood: the loneliness, misery, and social confusion of his childhood dreary years as a provincial schoolteacher the literary milieu in St. Petersburg, and his particular compatibility within the Decadent and later Russian Symbolist movement the character and influence of his wife, A. Chebotarevskaya his friendships with Hippius, Blok, and Bely and his "feud" with Gorky finally, the surprisingly benign quality of his last years.In literary scholarship original conclusions resulting from this study include: a fuller identification of the actual people who became the prototypes for characters in Sologub's major novels an analogical correlation between Sologub's story "The Wall and the Shadows" and Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and an approach to a thematic and formal analysis of Sologub's lyric poetry, including such rare, perhaps unique concepts as the "adult lullaby" and transformations in lyric device or stanza form to represent shifts in voice or dimension within a poem. A chapter is devoted to Sologub's peculiarly experimental dramatic works and their staging under Meyerhold and Yevreinov. Sologub's work is shown to be powerfully original yet also not without echoes of worthy literary predecessors, particularly Cervantes, Pushkin, Lermontov, Fet, and Nekrasov. |
