Russian Symbolist mythopoesis: The neomythological dramas of Fedor Sologub

By the end of the nineteenth century many scholars and artists felt that myths contain important truths about man's origins and consciousness, a sentiment further developed in twentieth-century research. The works of thinkers such as The German Romantics, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche encouraged the Russian Symbolists to explore the power of myth in creative works. Many of the Symbolists (especially Andrey Bely and Viacheslav Ivanov) came to hope that myth, created anew in their works, would be the vehicle for healing the wounds of man's fragmented consciousness. Due to its communal setting and religious origins the drama was to be the setting for the new Symbolist myths. Fedor Sologub (Teternikov; 1863-1927) occupies a unique place among Russian Symbolist mythopoetic writers. For the first twenty years of his career Sologub was Russia's decadent par excellence and wrote almost exclusively about the imperfections of this earth and his desire to find refuge in a higher world. After 1905 Sologub came to see mythopoesis, metaphorically embodied in Don Quixote's "Dulcination" of Aldonsa, as the means for creating a perfect world on this earth. From Sologub's writings on mythopoesis it becomes clear that his definition of mythopoesis is very similar to the concept, developed by Mints and others of the Moscow-Tartu school, of the Symbolist "neomythological texts," essentially artistic works that consciously engage in dialog with all of previous thought. Sologub drew on an extremely wide range of sources when composing his dramatic works and was highly aware of the "neomythological" nature of many of his dramas. He equipped the dramas The Victory of Death (1907), Van'ka the Steward and Jean the Page (1908), and Nocturnal Dances (1908) with forewords that disclose some of the sources on which he based his myths, but he neglected to mention other sources, meaning that Sologub's forewords obscure as much as they reveal. This dissertation examines these three neomythological dramas in depth, showing what sources (acknowledged and unacknowledged) influenced Sologub's creation of these texts, and how these sources give additional layers of meaning to the completed drama.