(real name - Teternikov Fedor Kuzmich)

(1863-1927) Russian symbolist writer

Fyodor's father was a St. Petersburg artisan, a tailor, who died of consumption, leaving behind a young son and daughter. The mother came from peasants and soon after the death of her husband began working as a servant in the family of her acquaintances, the Agapovs. The children were raised in the old-fashioned way: they were beaten at the slightest provocation. Surprisingly, the mother whipped her adult son, up to the age of 28.

However, the owners raised Fyodor and his sister Olga along with their children. They were intelligent and educated people, who were interested in theater and music, and sometimes the boy even received a subscription to the opera from them. The Agapovs’ house had a good library, which Fyodor was allowed to use, and the greatest impression on him was made by “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, “King Lear” by William Shakespeare and “Don Quixote” by Miguel Cervantes.

Fyodor was often allowed to attend conversations of a historical and literary nature and to children's parties. But the children teased him, the son of a servant, and he was acutely aware of the inequality of his position. Later, Fyodor Sologub would reflect his experiences in many poems and stories (for example, in the image of Grisha Igumnov from the story “Smile”).

Thanks to his mother, Fedor was able to finish first the parish school, then the district school. In 1882, he graduated from the teacher's institute and freed his mother from hard daily work.

My pedagogical activity he begins in a remote province - in the town of Kresttsy, Novgorod province, where he goes full of Napoleonic plans bring life into the school routine, seeds of light and love into children's hearts. However, at that time, any manifestation of fresh thought was perceived as dissent.

Later, in the novel “Heavy Dreams,” begun in 1883 and published in 1896, Fyodor Sologub will show the atmosphere of slander, slander, and lies that reigned in provincial schools. His teaching activity in the province lasted for ten years (in 1885 he moved to Velikiye Luki, and then in 1889 to Vytegra, a district town in the Olonets region, where he taught at a teacher’s seminary.) And all this time he struggled with poverty, stultifying labor and heavy despotic domestic oppression of the mother, which continued until her death in 1892.

In letters to his sister, he shares his frankly fantastic plans about how he is going to get rich and escape poverty: he will write a mathematics textbook in order to receive a cash bonus, win the lottery, and organize a savings and loan bank for teachers.

Throughout the years of his teaching career, Fyodor Teternikov keeps a kind of lyrical diary. He describes the places where he lives, the morals of the inhabitants, their appearance, habits, way of life, drinking bouts, and love affairs.

Fyodor Sologub was distinguished by a rare diligence: during his forty years creative life he wrote about four thousand poems. However, although he published the first poem “The Fox and the Hedgehog” already in 1884 in the St. Petersburg magazine “Hedgehog,” subsequent works were either not accepted or went unnoticed.

The turning point in his life was 1892, when he managed to move to St. Petersburg. He received a position as a mathematics teacher at the Rozhdestvensky City School, and in 1899 he became a teacher and then an inspector at the St. Andrew's School and a member of the St. Petersburg District School Council.

He retired only in 1907, and not of his own free will: he was not forgiven for the views that he expressed in the press about education.

In St. Petersburg, Fyodor Sologub immediately entered the literary environment, met the leaders of the new direction (symbolism) Dmitry Merezhkovsky and N. Minsky, and began collaborating with the Severny Vestnik magazine, where he published his first story, “Shadows.” In the symbolist press they came up with a pseudonym for him, dropping one letter from the surname of the famous writer V. Sollogub.

Thematically, Fyodor Sologub's poems are not very diverse; they can be conditionally described as works about life and death. Contemporaries wrote about the simplicity and primitiveness of his poems, saw in them a simple response to events, but did not look for depth historical analogies and complex allusions, as, for example, in the poetry of Valery Bryusov.

A lyrical hero the poet is overcome by moods of melancholy, hopelessness, powerlessness and confusion. “I am also the son of a sick century,” Sologub declares. The writer's poetic vocabulary is unambiguous; it is dominated by such concepts as death, corpse, ashes, crypt, grave, funeral, darkness, haze.

Bryusov noted that in the first volume of Fyodor Sologub, for 177 poems, there are more than 100 different meters and stanza structures - a ratio that is unlikely to be found in any other modern poets. A researcher of poetry at the beginning of the 20th century, Academician V. Zhirmunsky, used Sologub’s poems as poetic samples in the study “Composition of Lyric Poems.”

Contemporaries noted the magical or incantatory tone of the poet's poems. Sometimes they even talked about the satanic, devilish beginning in Sologub’s works.

However, one cannot say that his work is characterized only by pessimistic intonations. He described the world he saw, and characterized it factually accurately.

In the novel “The Little Demon” (1905), Fyodor Sologub described the world that he knew well: the life of the provincial outback and its hero, the teacher Peredonov. In many respects, following the traditions of Gogol, he exaggerates in a naturalistic, precise and at the same time symbolist and generalized way, bringing all possible absurdities and pathologies to the grotesque. human manifestations. The image of the strange fantastic creature Nedotykomka has become a household name, embodying ignorance, vulgarity, and feeblemindedness.

The people depicted by Fyodor Sologub are deliberately ugly, depraved, petty and vain, they are possessed by base feelings. They only seek to humiliate others or harm them. Thanks to Sologub, the name of Peredonov, proud of his ignorance, became a symbol of inertia and pathological stupidity.

Attitude to modern education the poet expressed in his journalistic articles, appearing in various St. Petersburg publications. He begins to publish poems and political tales in satirical magazines.

Criminal prosecutions and lawsuits are even being initiated against Fyodor Sologub.

A new period of the writer’s work begins in 1907, when he loses his beloved sister, to whose memory he dedicates the poem “Devil’s Swing,” in which he asserts that the world is ruled by a devilish force.

At the same time, Fyodor Sologub began the first novel of the trilogy, “The Legend in the Making.” He will call it "Drops of Blood". It was soon followed by the novels Queen Ortrud and Smoke and Ashes. Sologub’s main utopian dream appears in them, “a proud dream of the transformation of life through the power of creative art, of life created according to a proud will.” It contains echoes of themes that appeared in early poems, for example, the myth of the distant country of Oil, which can only be reached after death. This is how the idea of ​​death appears in the writer’s work as one of the ways to resolve all life’s conflicts.

At the same time, he is developing another myth - the myth of the sun-dragon. It is known that the ancients imagined the sun as a living creature that runs away from a serpent crawling across the sky. If a serpent catches up with the sun and swallows it, there will be a storm on earth. solar eclipse. The world appears to Sologub as an eternal duel between good and evil, with the latter usually winning. The personality is forced to submit to an evil fatal force; its freedom is illusory.

Fyodor Sologub turns to drama, one after another his plays “Victory of Death” (1907), “The Gift of the Wise Bees” (1907), “Love” (1907), “Night Dances” (1908), “Vaska the Klyuchnik” and “ Page Jehan" (1908), which are successfully performed on the stages of St. Petersburg theaters.

The eighth book of poems, The Circle of Fire, published in 1908, is basically a collection of what was written over a period of fifteen years. Sologub demonstrates his understanding of the image-symbol: it must be clear in semantics and at the same time carry the author’s content. The writer combined his stories into the collections “The Sting of Death” (1904), “Decomposing Masks” (1907), “The Book of Separations” (1908), and “The Book of Charms” (1909). The real and the conditional coexist side by side in them, sometimes it is even difficult to distinguish where and when the action takes place, in what environment, in a dream or in reality. The story “Shadows” (1896) can be considered indicative, in which a boy can hardly wait until evening to begin to draw various figures on the wall. Sologub, with pedantic, almost protocol precision, reproduces incomprehensible, painful incidents that are on the border between reality and fantasy. The outwardly cold, emotionless style was called “merciful cruelty” by T. Mann.

In 1908, Fyodor Sologub married the writer A. Chebotarevskaya, who graduated in Paris High school social sciences. She was the author of stories and translations, and wrote articles on art.

In Sologub’s former apartment, according to Chulkov’s recollections, “the Areopagus of St. Petersburg poets” gathered. Now A. Chebotarevskaya is opening a literary salon in their house, where artists, actors, politicians. Sologub becomes a life teacher, a fashionable writer.

The events of the First World War are assessed by him from a chauvinistic position; now he speaks of self-sacrifice for the sake of renewal of life. True, the book of poems “War” was not positively assessed by critics.

Fyodor Sologub did not accept the October Revolution; it seemed to him that demonic forces had come out. He wanted the structure of the soul to change, so that people would become different. Since this did not happen, Sologub was planning to leave Russia. 1921 became a year of losses for him: his wife committed suicide in a fit of melancholy, throwing herself into the Neva from the Tuchkov Bridge. Her body was found only in the spring, when the ice melted.

Despite internal opposition to the new regime, the writer continued to work: in 1923, his novel “The Snake Charmer” was published, and poems and articles were published. Since 1926, Fyodor Sologub was the chairman of the Union of Leningrad Writers.

However, the disease took away from him last strength, for many months he did not get up, he lived behind a dark closet, in the corner of his wife’s relatives. In December 1927, Sologub died, remaining in the history of literature as a novelist, storyteller, and playwright.

Descendants are faced with the task of studying its vast creative heritage. After all, for many decades the name Sologub was known mainly to specialists. And only recently have his works begun to be published in mass editions.

The translation activity of Fyodor Sologub remains practically unstudied: he translated from Ukrainian, Bulgarian, German, Modern Greek, Polish, French, and English.

Fyodor Sologub, whose biography is given in this article, is a famous Russian writer, poet, publicist and playwright. He worked at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was one of the largest representatives of symbolism in his generation.

Biography of the writer

Fyodor Sologub was born in 1863. The writer's biography originates in St. Petersburg. Here he spent almost his entire life. His real name at birth is Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov.

His father is a former peasant who worked as a tailor in St. Petersburg. The family lived very poorly. The situation worsened in 1867 when his father died. The mother was forced to become a servant to the St. Petersburg nobles.

Sologub began writing poetry in early childhood. The biography will not be complete without recalling the texts created by the young 14-year-old poet. By that time he was already studying at the city school in Vladimir, and in 1879 he successfully entered the teacher's institute in St. Petersburg. There he spends four years on full board, which, of course, was a great relief for his family.

Having received higher education, goes to work as a teacher in the northern provinces with his sister and mother. He works in the Novgorod region, then in the Pskov and Vologda regions. In total, he spends about 10 years in the province.

Working as a teacher

Fyodor Sologub began his teaching career in Krestsy, Novgorod region. The biography of the future writer has been associated with the public school in this small town for three years. At the same time, he writes poetry and a novel, which was later called “Heavy Dreams.”

In 1884, the first publication of the young writer Sologub was published. The author's biography began with the fable "The Fox and the Hedgehog", which was published in a children's magazine called "Spring". Sologub signed the work as “Ternikov.”

Over the course of ten years of work in the provinces, he dreams of returning to St. Petersburg. But only in 1892 he received an appointment to the Nativity City School, located in historical district cities on the Neva - on Sands.

Career in St. Petersburg

The magazine "Northern Herald" played a big role in the life of Sologub Fyodor Kuzmich. The writer’s biography began to be actively replenished with publications in this publication starting in the 1890s. Moreover, these were not only poems, but also reviews, translations, stories and even a novel. At the insistence of a friend of the mystical writer Nikolai Minsky, a pseudonym also appeared.

It was invented by literary critic Akim Volynsky. This was an allusion to the noble Sollogubov family, to which the famous fiction writer belonged. To make a difference, one of the letters “l” was removed from the pseudonym.

This is how readers recognized Fyodor Sologub. In a short biography of the author, it is necessary to mention the first novel, published in 1896. It was called "Heavy Dreams". This is a realistic work in which everyday pictures of the province are combined with a semi-mystical atmosphere in which the heroes find themselves. In addition, they are constantly overcome by erotic dreams and attacks of inexplicable panic.

Symbol of death

The symbol of death often appears in Sologub’s works in the first five years of the 20th century. Fyodor Sogolub, whose biography and work during this period are enriched with new symbols and images, in the future uses them for self-expression in his own creative system.

Often in the works of these years you can find the image of death, which brings comfort. For example, it is often used in the collection of short stories "The Sting of Death". The main characters are increasingly becoming teenagers or even children. Moreover, the general madness that was in previous collections is replaced by consolation before probable death.

The author begins to turn to Satan, in whom he sees not a terrible curse that denies God, but only the opposite of good, which is necessary in the world. The best way to get acquainted with the philosophy of the author of that period is in the essay “I. The Book of Perfect Self-Affirmation.”

During the revolution of 1905, Sologub became extremely popular. The short biography and work of the writer were replenished with political fairy tales. Revolutionary magazines willingly undertook to publish them.

This is a special genre created by Sologub. These “fairy tales” are bright, short, with a simple plot, sometimes they are poems in prose. Despite the fact that they cover adult themes, the author actively uses the vocabulary and techniques of children's fairy tales. Sologub combined the best of them in 1905 in the “Book of Fairy Tales”.

Sologub's most famous novel

In 1902, Sologub finished his most famous novel. In the biography and work of a writer, there is always great place is given to the "Little Demon". He worked on it for 10 years. At first they refused to publish it, considering it too strange and risky.

Only in 1905 the novel was published in the magazine "Questions of Life". True, the magazine soon closed, and they did not have time to finish printing the novel. Finally, in 1907, when “The Little Demon” was published as a separate book, readers and critics paid attention to it. Over the next few years, this work became the most popular in Russia.

What is "The Little Demon" about?

In the novel "The Little Demon" Fyodor Sologub talks about a well-known topic. The biography and creativity (which are briefly outlined in the article) of the writer are inextricably linked with the destinies of provincial teachers, one of them was the author himself. So the hero of this work is a gymnasium teacher in the remote province of Ardalyon Peredonov.

It is noticeable that the author treats his hero with disdain. He calls his feelings dull and his consciousness corrupting. Everything that reaches his consciousness turns into dirt and abomination. Faults in objects please him, but he could only depress people’s feelings.

The main traits of the hero are sadism, selfishness and envy. And they are pushed to the limit. The embodiment of his darkness and horror is the image of the missing piece, which Peredonov sees everywhere.

Experiments in dramaturgy

After writing “The Little Demon”, Sologub focused on drama. The short biography of the hero, set out in our article, mentions that it was this type of literature that he preferred from 1907 to 1912.

His plays clearly demonstrate the author's philosophical views. The first experiments for the stage were the mystery “Liturgy for Me” and the play “The Gift of the Wise Bees”. In 1907, he wrote the tragedy “Victory of Death,” in which the legend of the origin of Charlemagne is detailed, and love becomes an instrument of a special “magic” will. It is noteworthy that the play was originally called “Victory of Love.” The replacement of love with death for Sologub is proof of internal identity; for him, love and death are one.

This idea is especially clearly manifested in the grotesque play “Vanka the Key-Keeper and the Page Jehan.” At the same time, Sologub actively transfers scenes from the reality around him to the stage. At the same time, productions based on Sologub’s works were rarely successful.

In 1908 he married Anastasia Chebotarevskaya. She was 14 years younger than her husband and worked as a translator. Anastasia was so imbued with the ideas and works of the spouses that she actually became his literary agent. By 1910, she was organizing a real literary salon in their new apartment on Razyezzhaya Street. New contemporary poets were regularly invited here. Igor Severyanin, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Yesenin were guests here.

In the early 1910s, under the influence of young talents, Sologub became interested in futurism. Gets close to Vasilisk Gnedov, Ivan Ignatiev.

Novel "The Legend in the Making"

Sologub repeatedly formulated his philosophical ideas in numerous articles and essays. In a fictionalized form, they took shape in the novel “The Legend in the Making.” This is the name of the trilogy, which includes the works “Drops of Blood”, “Queen Ortrud” and “Smoke and Ashes”.

The main character of the trilogy is again a teacher. This time by the surname Trirodov. A children's colony has been founded on his estate, in which the so-called "quiet children" live. They allow Trirodov to feel the fullness of life around him.

Unthinkable things are happening outside the estate, just like everywhere else in Russia at that time. The Cossacks are breaking up demonstrations, the intelligentsia are having life-or-death disputes, political parties are waging an uncompromising struggle. Trirodov, an engineer and chemist by training, is trying to confront this reality.

The heroes of Sologub's past works come to him - the former madman Peredonov, who became vice-governor, and even Jesus Christ.

Critics received the novel with bewilderment. Everything was unusual, from the genre to the incredible mixture of magic and topical problems of reality.

Revolution of 1917

Sologub accepted the February Revolution with delight and had high hopes for it. In March 1917 he participated in the newly formed Union of Artists. Soon his articles and publications took on a pronounced anti-Bolshevik character.

Meanwhile, in the Union he heads literary group, is preparing to convene a Council of Artists. But in his journalism, a sense of impending disaster is increasingly visible.

After October revolution Sologub's journalistic statements are devoted to freedom of speech; he treats the Bolsheviks with open hostility. Everyone creative people It wasn't easy at the time. As critic Lev Kleinbort recalls, writers turned into lecturers and lived off rations. Sologub did not give lectures, survived by selling things, without being able to publish, he wrote several books of his poems by hand a day and sold them.

In 1919, he turned to the Soviet government for permission to leave the country. We managed to get the go-ahead only after a year and a half. However this hard times broke the writer's wife. Her psyche was shaken. In September 1921, she drowned herself in the Zhdanovka River, throwing herself from the Tuchkov Bridge.

After the death of his wife, Sologub gave up thoughts of emigration.

New publications

During the NEP period, the publishing life of Russia revived. His new novel, “The Snake Charmer,” was even published in the Soviet Union. This realistic narrative about the relationship between workers and their masters against the backdrop of the Volga expanses was unlike anything he had written before.

Sologub published several collections of poetry, but they soon stopped publishing him. He worked a lot, but everything went to the table. To fill the void in his life, he concentrated on working at the St. Petersburg Writers' Union. He was even elected its chairman.

In 1924, his 40th anniversary was widely celebrated literary activity. None of the participants in the celebration imagined that since then not a single book of his would be published.

Death of a Writer

At the same time, Sologub continued to write a lot. In 1927, he worked on the novel in verse "Gregory Kazarin", at which time he was overcome by a serious illness. Illnesses tormented him for a long time, but before he managed to suppress them. Now there are complications. In the summer he no longer got out of bed.

Famous for its representatives. Their names, along with their unforgettable works, are known to everyone who considers themselves even a little connoisseur of literature. There are poets whose poems are remembered against their will. This includes Fyodor Sologub. A short biography, an overview of creativity and a description of the direction in which the poems were created awaits you below.

About the writer

Fyodor Sologub is a Russian writer, poet, publicist, translator and teacher. He was one of the brightest representatives of the Silver Age and an apologist for Russian symbolism. His work is so extraordinary and ambiguous that many critics still cannot come to the only correct interpretations of the images and heroes created by the poet. Sologub, whose biography and work are still the subject of study and search for new symbols, is a multifaceted creator of poetry and prose. His poems amaze with their motifs of loneliness, mysticism and mystery, and his novels attract attention, shock and do not let go until the last page.

History of the nickname

The poet's real name is Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov.

The Northern Messenger magazine has become launching pad for the poet. In the 90s of the 19th century, Sologub’s poetry was published in this publication, and in large quantities.

The role of a symbolist poet required a sonorous name. The editorial staff of the magazine came up with the first variants of pseudonyms, among which the option “Sollogub” was proposed. This surname was borne by a noble family, a prominent representative which was Vladimir Sollogub - writer, prose writer. To make differences, Fedor decides to remove one letter.

In 1893, the magazine published the poem “Creativity,” signed under the pseudonym Fyodor Sologub. The writer's biography hides many events in which members of the editorial board of this magazine took part. The Northern Messenger gave the poet a worthy incentive for development and growth.

Fyodor Sologub, short biography. Childhood

The writer was born on March 1, 1863 in St. Petersburg. His father was from the Poltava province.

The family lived very poorly, the father was a serf and made his living as a tailor.

The parents of the future poet were educated; there were books in the house, and the father taught the children to read and write, played for them, talked about the theater and passed on those grains of knowledge about world culture and literature that he had.

When, two years after Fyodor’s birth, his little sister was born, the family’s life became more difficult financially. The family was finally driven into poverty by the death of their father in 1867. The mother was left with the children in her arms, without a means of subsistence. She was forced to become a servant in rich family. In this noble Agapov family, a young poet grew up, to whom the aristocrats treated him favorably, helped his self-education, and shared rare books, which Sologub was very keen on. The poet's biography will further be rich in random people and meetings that helped him overcome life's obstacles and find himself.

However, there were also dark sides in the poet's childhood at the Agapovs' house. The world of books, science and music, which I joined young Fedor in the house, an incredibly sharp contrast with the atmosphere of the smoky kitchen and laundry room in heavy steam, where his mother worked until she completely lost her strength to feed the children. Sometimes she took out her fatigue on her children, even going so far as to beat her for the slightest disobedience. Later the writer would write the story “Consolation”, in which he would express the severity of his shattered childhood world. Sologub reluctantly recalled this in his memoirs, short biography the poet often misses these moments, but they are necessary to depict a complete picture of his life and development.

Works that showed the way to the poet

The poet's wife, compiling his biography, talked about three books that Fyodor read in his childhood.

These are "Don Quixote" by Cervantes, Shakespeare and "Robinson Crusoe" by Defoe. The impression from what he read was so strong for a very young boy that it gave rise to a talent that was destined to blossom in mature age and create a great poet working under the pseudonym Sologub. A short biography written by his wife said that these books were "a kind of gospel."

But the work of Pushkin and Lermontov, its main motives were alien to young Sologub. N. was much closer in spirit to him, the images of the poor man and his difficult fate were transformed and found their place and reflection in the future poetry of his successor. In his youth, Fyodor Sologub was amazed at the realism with which Nekrasov described the experiences and suffering of the common man.

The work of S. Nadson also had a significant influence on the formation of the writer’s worldview and talent.

Youth and self-discovery

The poet's youth was influenced by world literature and Russian classics, which he had the opportunity to read. It was thanks to this opportunity that young Sologub was able to develop his talent (the biography written by the poet’s wife gives a very clear idea of ​​this).

At the age of fifteen, Fyodor Sologub became a student at the Teachers' Institute in St. Petersburg. The young poet came here with ambiguous thoughts and thanks to the patronage of the Agapov family and teacher Fyodor, he discerned in the boy a sharp mind and a talent that required cutting. Literally the first classes opened up a completely new world of creativity and freedom for the poet.

The director of the institute was K.K. Saint-Hilaire, a highly educated man with progressive and innovative views. Thanks to his enthusiasm, the most advanced teachers of the time were attracted to teaching. Among the students, most of whom were from wealthy families, Fedor was a complete stranger. He was not attracted to student gatherings and festivities. While his classmates were having fun, he was translating classics and taking his first steps in prose. With the beginning of his studies at the institute, Sologub will begin the novel “Night Dews”. The poet's biography will tell us that he will never finish this novel, but it will be a good attempt that will enrich him with experience.

In 1882, the future symbolist writer graduated with honors from the institute and left for the remote village of Kresttsy. He will take his mother and sister Olga with him. Here he found work as a teacher, as well as ten years of wandering around the provinces: Velikiye Luki and Vytegra were the temporary home of the writer and his family.

Here, in the “bear corner,” the writer suffered madly from his loneliness and the “provincial swamp.” Later he will write about this, saying that the teacher is doomed to loneliness and misunderstanding.

First steps in poetry

The poet's first poems appeared, according to some sources, when he was a twelve-year-old boy. Fyodor Sologub (whose biography tells little about his development as an author) in adulthood often recalled with bitterness the hardships of his youth, when there was no support and understanding, and he had to achieve everything himself.

With all his might, young Fyodor was sure that he was destined to become a poet, and he swore to himself that he would not give up his calling, no matter how difficult it might be for him. And fate did not skimp on trials. If we don’t talk about the material difficulties in which the writer’s orphaned family lived, there was also a lot of moral torment for the gifted young man. He lived with his mother and sister in a provincial town, where there were fewer opportunities than obstacles. His poems were published in weak provincial magazines with a limited number of readers, fame and recognition still did not come to the poet.

"Northern Herald"

The year 1891 became a turning point for the poet, when fate brought him to the capital and gave him a completely random meeting with Nikolai Maksimovich Minsky, a representative of the so-called mystical symbolism. The significance of this meeting was that, despite the short communication, F. Sologub (the biography written by the poet’s wife vividly describes this meeting) would leave Minsky his small collection of poems (literally a couple of hundred early poems). This year was the year of the birth and transformation of the already known magazine “Northern Herald”. Its creators: N. Minsky, Z. Gippius and A. Volynsky were busy searching for works that would be a worthy illustration of N. Minsky’s newly-minted manifesto “In the light of conscience...”. Surprisingly, the young poetry of Sologub turned out to be in place, which helped to design the editorial magazine, and finally allowed the young poet to establish himself in the mainstream of symbolism.

Maturity

In the fall of 1892, Fyodor Sologub moved to St. Petersburg. After the province that almost destroyed him, he breaks into the Symbolist society with his innovation and desire to create.

Here he finds a position as a teacher at the city Nativity School. While coming to life here, the writer softened many scenes of his brilliant but difficult novels “The Little Demon” and “Heavy Dreams.” And the place of action of his works was transferred to the “provincial cities”, but for some reason not to the capital, in which he spent all his maturity and loved with all his soul.

“Northern Messenger” becomes for the writer both a place of learning and a means through which his poems finally become known.

In 1908, Sologub Fedor Kuzmich (the writer’s biography does not fully describe this life stage) leaves his teaching career and marries Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, a writer and translator.

In 1913, with his wife, he went on a trip to the cities of Russia, visiting almost four dozen of them.

In 1918, the poet had the honor of being chairman of the Union of Workers of Fiction.

On December 5, 1927, the writer passed away at the age of sixty-four, leaving behind a huge legacy of the brightest poetry and prose of symbolism.

Brief overview of creativity

The work of the poet and writer is rich and multifaceted. Although critics themselves later attributed his poetry and prose to symbolism, many features of his works go beyond this direction.

Fyodor Kuzmich began his Sologub (a short biography written by Anastasia Chebotareva talks about this) with poetry.

Later, at the teacher's institute, he makes an attempt to create a prose epic, “Night Dew.” Around the same time, the poem “Loneliness” was born, which was never destined to be published.

The poet's poems are published in the St. Petersburg Severny Vestnik.

In 1902, the writer completed work on his novel “The Little Demon.” The work tells about the insane, unhealthy soul of the sadistic teacher Ardalyon Peredonov. Because of its frankness and “riskiness,” the novel was doomed to “life on the table.” However, in 1905, the magazine “Problems of Life” began to publish the work. Due to the closure of the magazine, publications were cut short, which did not give the novel the opportunity to fully reveal itself.

In 1907, “The Little Demon” was finally published in full and from that time to the present day remains one of the most famous and studied books in Russian literature.

The main motives of F. Sologub's poetry

Despite the fact that the writer’s novels occupy a worthy place in the world of literature, his poetry is no less interesting for its originality and unusually light, airy style.

It is this lightness of syllable that strikes Sologub. The writer’s biography is full of his creative quests and experiences, which are reflected in his poems; they are easy and read in one breath.

The main theme of the poems is the themes of sadness, suffering, existence without meaning and purpose of life, characteristic of symbolism and decadence.

Mystical themes of influence on life higher powers can be traced in the poems “Devil's Swing” and “One-Eyed Dashing”. Also, the weakness of man, his powerlessness in the face of life’s obstacles runs through all of Sologub’s poetry.

Finally

We briefly told you about the writer who left literary heritage, which can safely be put on a par with Blok and Tolstoy. Fyodor Sologub (biography and creativity, photo of the writer - all this is in the article) is a writer and poet, prose writer and playwright who reflected the dark sides of life in his work. But he did it so skillfully and interestingly that his works are read in one breath and remain in memory forever.

Russian poet, writer, playwright, publicist. One of the most prominent representatives symbolism and the Fin de siècle that swept the whole of Europe.

Fyodor Sologub was born in St. Petersburg into the family of a tailor. former peasant Poltava province Kuzma Afanasyevich Teternikov. Two years later, the writer’s sister, Olga, was born. The family lived poorly, a situation that worsened when Fyodor's father died in 1867. The mother was forced to return “as a mere servant” to the Agapov family, St. Petersburg nobles, for whom she had once served. The future writer spent his entire childhood and adolescence in the Agapov family. The future writer felt his poetic gift at the age of twelve, and the first completed poems that have reached us date back to 1878. In the same year, Fyodor Teternikov entered the St. Petersburg Teachers' Institute. He studied and lived at the institute (the institution was on a boarding basis) for four years. After graduating from the institute in June 1882, he, taking his mother and sister, went to teach in the northern provinces - first in Krestsy, then in Velikiye Luki (in 1885) and Vytegra (in 1889), - spending a total of ten years in the province .

Service in the province (1882-1892)

Sologub spent three years in Kresttsy (Novgorod province), being a teacher at the Krestetsky Public School. He continued to write poetry and began work on a novel (the future “Heavy Dreams”), which took almost a decade. The young poet’s first publication was the fable “The Fox and the Hedgehog,” published in the children’s magazine “Spring” on January 28, 1884, signed by “Ternikov”; this date marked the beginning of the literary activity of Fyodor Sologub. In subsequent years, several more poems were published in small newspapers and magazines.

Delay in literary path Sologuba was due to complete cultural isolation - he felt that he could no longer write in the wilderness, in social and cultural loneliness. The poet dreamed of returning to St. Petersburg, where he could fully realize his talent. But Teternikov did not manage to transfer to the capital for a long time; Only in the fall of 1892 was he able to move permanently to St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, Sologub was appointed as a teacher at the Rozhdestvensky City School on Peski.

In St. Petersburg (1893-1906)

The Northern Messenger magazine played a special role in Sologub’s biography. It was there that he began to publish widely in the 1890s: in addition to poems, his first stories, a novel, translations from Verlaine, and reviews were published. And actually “Fyodor Sologub” himself - a pseudonym - was invented by the editorial office of the magazine, at the insistence of Minsky. Volynsky suggested: “Sollogub,” a surname that at that time evoked an association with the famous aristocratic family to which the fiction writer Vladimir Sollogub belonged; To distinguish it, one letter “l” was removed from the pseudonym. The pseudonym first appeared in print in 1893 in the April issue of the magazine “Northern Herald” (it signed the poem “Creativity”).

In 1896, Fyodor Sologub’s first three books were published: “Poems, Book One,” the novel “Heavy Dreams” and “Shadows” (a combined collection of stories and the second book of poems). Sologub published all three books himself in a small, although usual at that time, circulation.

The novel “Heavy Dreams” was begun in Krestsy back in 1883. The strong realism of “Heavy Dreams,” which paints everyday pictures of the province, is combined with a ghostly, intoxicating atmosphere of half-dreams, half-realities, filled with erotic dreams and attacks of fear. The novel took a long time to write and was completed only in St. Petersburg in 1894.

In April 1897, a split occurred between the editors of Severny Vestnik and Sologub. The writer began to collaborate with the magazine “North”. At the beginning of 1899, Sologub transferred from Rozhdestvensky to Andreevsky City School on Vasilyevsky Island. There he became not only a teacher, but also an inspector with a government-owned apartment at the school according to his status.

In 1904, the Third and Fourth Books of Poems were published, collecting poems from the turn of the century under one cover. “Collected Poems 1897-1903” was a kind of boundary between decadence and the subsequent symbolism of Sologub, in which the symbols of Sologub the poet were established. At the same time, in Sologub’s decadence and symbolism there was no sharp and disharmonious accumulation of aesthetic paradoxes or deliberate mystery or understatement. On the contrary, Sologub strove for extreme clarity and precision - both in lyricism and in prose.

A difficult period in Sologub’s work was the years 1902-1904. His inspirations and philosophical moods change one after another, enriching his lyrics with new images and symbols, which will then be repeatedly evoked in his own creative system. “In the very style of his writings there is some kind of charm of death,” wrote Korney Chukovsky. “These frozen, quiet, even lines, this, as we saw, the soundlessness of all his words - isn’t this the source of Sologubov’s special beauty, which will be sensed by everyone who is given the ability to sense beauty?” The symbol of “comforting death” was expressed especially clearly in the stories that made up the book “The Sting of Death,” published in September 1904. The main characters of the book were children or teenagers. Unlike “Shadows,” the first book of stories (1896), general madness recedes before an alluring, not so much terrible, but truly “comforting” death. At the same time, the poet turns to Satan, but in it he sees not a curse and denial of God, but an identical opposite, necessary and also helping those who need it. Sologub’s philosophy of that time was most fully expressed by him in the essay “Ya. A book of perfect self-affirmation”, published in February 1906 in the magazine “Golden Fleece”. Consistently proceeding from his philosophy, Sologub then wrote the mysteries “Liturgy for Me” (1906), “Longing for Other Beings” (1907) and came to the idea of ​​a “theater of one will” and his cherished symbol - “a legend in the making.” The poetic myth about the Serpent is associated with the theomachism of that period - “The Heavenly Serpent”, “the evil and vengeful Dragon” - this is how the sun is called, embodying evil and earthly hardships in the “Serpent” cycle and prose of 1902-1906. Eighteen Poems different years(mainly 1902-1904), in which the “serpent” symbol is in charge, were compiled by Sologub into the “Serpent” cycle, which was published as a separate publication as the sixth book of poems in March 1907.

In 1904, Fyodor Sologub entered into a permanent cooperation agreement with Novosti and Birzhevaya Gazeta. It lasted just under a year, during which about seventy articles were published, and dozens more remained unpublished. The range of topics that Sologub touched on in his journalism was formed both by his official activities and by the most pressing issues of the time: school, children, Russo-Japanese War, international situation, revolution, Jewish rights.

During the First Russian Revolution of 1905-06. Sologub's political tales, published in revolutionary magazines, enjoyed great success. “Fairy tales” are a special genre for Fyodor Sologub. Brief, with a simple and witty plot, often beautiful prose poems, and sometimes repulsive with their stuffy reality, they were written for adults, although Sologub liberally used children's vocabulary and techniques of children's fairy tales. In 1905, Sologub collected part of the fairy tales published by that time in the “Book of Fairy Tales” (Grif publishing house), and the “political fairy tales” written at the same time were included in the book of the same name, published in the fall of 1906. In addition to newspaper articles and “fairy tales,” Sologub responded to the revolution with his fifth book of poems, “Motherland.” It was published in April 1906.

Tour of Russia 1913-1917

On the background increased interest society to the new art and to the writings of the author of “The Legend in the Making,” in particular, Fyodor Sologub conceived a series of trips around the country with poetry readings and lectures on the new art, which promoted the principles of symbolism. After thorough preparation and the premiere of the lecture “The Art of Our Days” on March 1, 1913 in St. Petersburg, the Sologubs went on tour together with Igor Severyanin. Their trip to Russian cities lasted more than a month (from Vilna to Simferopol and Tiflis.

The main theses of the lecture “The Art of Our Days” were compiled by Chebotarevskaya, who diligently organized the credo of Sologubov’s aesthetics according to his articles. At the same time, the previous works of D. S. Merezhkovsky, N. Minsky, V. I. Ivanov, A. Bely, K. D. Balmont and V. Ya. Bryusov were taken into account. Sologub develops the idea of ​​the relationship between art and life. According to him, true art influences life, makes a person look at life with already experienced images, but it also encourages action. Without art, life becomes just everyday life, but with art, the transformation of life itself begins, that is, creativity. And it, if sincere, will always be ethically justified - thus morality becomes dependent on aesthetics.

After the first performances, it turned out that Sologub’s lectures were not very well received, despite being sold out in many cities. Reviews of the speeches in the press were also ambiguous: some did not accept Sologub’s views at all, some wrote about them as a beautiful fiction, and everyone reproached the lecturer for his reluctance to somehow establish contact with the public. And the reading of poetry by Igor Severyanin, who completed Sologub’s lectures on the first tour, was generally considered by observers as a deliberate mockery of literature and listeners. “Sologub,” wrote Vladimir Gippius, “decided to express a confession of symbolism with his lecture... and delivered a stern and gloomy speech... The abyss between this sad man and youth, who hesitantly or indifferently applauded him, is deep.” Sologub, who carefully monitored all comments about himself in the press, was aware of such assessments of the lecture, but did not try to change anything in the nature of the speeches. The tours were resumed and continued until the spring of 1914, ending with a series of lectures in Berlin and Paris.

The success of the lectures prompted Fyodor Sologub to expand his cultural activities, which resulted in the founding of his own magazine “Diaries of Writers” and the society “Art for All”. Sologub also took part in the Russian Society for the Study of Jewish life" The Jewish question has always interested the writer: even in articles of 1905, Sologub called for the eradication of all official anti-Semitism, and in 1908, Sologub began the novel “Substituted” (not completed) - on the topic of the relationship between Jews and knights in medieval Germany. In the winter of 1915, Sologub, on behalf of the Society, went to a meeting with Grigory Rasputin in order to find out about his attitude towards Jews (why he turned from an anti-Semite into a supporter of Jewish full rights). One of the fruits of the “Society for the Study of Jewish Life” was the collection “Shield” (1915), in which Sologub’s articles on the Jewish question were published.

First world war Fyodor Sologub perceived it as a fatal sign that could bring many instructive, useful fruits for Russian society, as a means of awakening the consciousness of the nation in the Russian people. However, by 1917, Sologub had lost faith in such a mystical quality of war for Russia, having become convinced that there was no spirit in this war in society. You can trace the writer’s attitude to the war and various social issues from the articles that Sologub published weekly in the Birzhevye Vedomosti.

The pathos of Sologub’s military journalism formed the basis of the lecture “Russia in Dreams and Expectations”, with which Sologub gave in 1915-1917. traveled throughout the Russian Empire, from Vitebsk to Irkutsk. Like the previous one, “The Art of Our Days”, new lecture caused exactly the opposite reactions. Cool assessments of the performances again prevailed in the provincial press. Often lectures were prohibited. But most of the performances were a success, and as always, the youth were especially sensitive.

In addition, the poet also responded to the war with a book of poems “War” (1915) and a collection of short stories “The Ardent Year” (1916), which received extremely lukewarm reviews in the press. The poems and stories were intended to support the spirit and strengthen hope for victory, but their content turned out to be artificial, often tinged with sentimentality, so unusual for Fyodor Sologub.

Years of revolution (1917-1921)

The February Revolution, which brought down the monarchy and created the preconditions for the democratic transformation of the Russian Empire, was greeted with enthusiasm by Fyodor Sologub and high hopes. He, like other cultural figures, was worried about what would happen to art in the new situation, who would curate it and on whose behalf. So on March 12, 1917, the Union of Artists was formed, lively participation in whose work Fyodor Sologub took part. However, soon the Union of Artists focused on the struggle for influence in the cabinet of the newly created Ministry of Arts, the presence of which Sologub especially opposed.

Since the summer of 1917, Sologub's newspaper articles took on an openly anti-Bolshevik character. If earlier Sologub entered into relations with the Bolsheviks, then from the position of a “common enemy” (tsarism), in addition, we must not forget that Anastasia Chebotarevskaya was actively connected with the revolutionary environment (her brother was executed, another was exiled, and her sister was relative of Lunacharsky). This explains the contacts of the Sologubs with the left (especially abroad, where in 1911-1914 Sologub met with Trotsky, Lunacharsky, etc.), concerts in favor of the exiled Bolsheviks.

Returning from his dacha to Petrograd at the end of August, Sologub continued to work in the Union of Artists, where he headed the literary curia, taking part in the preparation for the convening of the Council of Artists. At the same time, Sologub, in his journalism, conveyed his premonition of trouble, trying to arouse the civic feelings of his compatriots, especially those in power (a little later, Sologub admits that he was mistaken in Kerensky and General Kornilov: the first, in his words, turned out to be “a chatterbox who told Russia off” , the latter was a “straightforward, honest man”).

Sologub’s articles and speeches, which became rare after the October Revolution, were devoted to freedom of speech, as well as the integrity and inviolability of Constituent Assembly in view of the threat of its dispersal. Sologub treated with unconditional hostility Bolshevik coup and subsequent robbery. Throughout the winter and spring of 1918, Sologub took every opportunity to publish “educational” articles directed against the abolition of copyright, the liquidation of the Academy of Arts and the destruction of monuments.

“Rations, firewood, standing in the herring corridors... Apparently, all this was more difficult for him than for anyone else. This was the time when we, writers, scientists, all turned into lecturers, and rations replaced the monetary unit. Sologub did not give lectures, he lived by selling things,” L. M. Kleinbort recalled about life in that era. One way or another, the rations that these organizations issued to writers recognized by the “law” were insufficient, and in conditions of the absolute impossibility of publishing, Sologub himself began to make books of his poems and distribute them through Bookstore Writers. Usually 5-7 copies of the book were written by hand and sold for seven thousand rubles.

This impossibility of existence ultimately prompted Fyodor Sologub, who was fundamentally against emigration, to apply to the Soviet government in December 1919 for permission to leave. But nothing followed. Six months later, Sologub wrote a new petition, this time addressed personally to Lenin. Then, in addition to Sologub, the issue of going abroad was resolved with Blok, whose serious illness did not respond to any treatment in Russia. Considerations in the cases of Sologub and Blok were delayed. In mid-July 1921, Sologub finally received a positive letter from Trotsky, but the departure was again disrupted. In the end, permission was received, and departure to Revel was planned for September 25, 1921. However, the agonizing wait, interrupted by unfulfilled promises, broke the psyche of Sologub’s wife, who was prone to madness. It was at this time that she had an attack of illness. On the evening of September 23, 1921, taking advantage of the servants’ oversight and the absence of Sologub, who had gone to get bromine for her, Chebotarevskaya went to her sister on the Petrograd side. But before reaching just a few meters from her house, she threw herself off the Tuchkov Bridge into the Zhdanovka River. The death of his wife for Fyodor Sologub turned into an unbearable grief, which the writer did not overcome until the end of his days. Sologub will constantly turn to her memory in his work in the remaining years. After the death of his wife, Sologub no longer wanted to leave Russia.

Last years (1921-1927)

In mid-1921, the Soviet government issued several decrees that marked the beginning of the era of the New Economic Policy, after which publishing and printing activities immediately revived and foreign ties were restored. At the same time, new books by Fyodor Sologub appeared: first in Germany and Estonia and then in Soviet Russia.

The first of these books by Sologub was the novel “The Snake Charmer,” published in the early summer of 1921 in Berlin. The novel was written intermittently from 1911 to 1918 and became the last in the writer’s work. Inheriting the realistic and even narrative of the previous novel, “Sweeter than Poison,” “The Snake Charmer” turned out to be strangely far from everything that Sologub had previously written. The plot of the novel boiled down to simple feudal relations between bar and workers, which unfolded in the picturesque expanses of the Volga. The first post-revolutionary book of poems, “The Blue Sky,” was published in September 1921 in Estonia (where the Sologubs were trying to go at that time). In “Blue Sky” Sologub selected unpublished poems from 1916-21. The same publishing house published Sologub's last collection of stories, “Numbered Days.”

From the end of 1921, Sologub’s books began to be published in Soviet Russia: the poetry collections “Incense” (1921), “One Love” (1921), “Road Fire” (1922), “Cathedral Blaze” (1922), “The Magical Cup” were published "(1922), the novel "The Snake Charmer" (1921), a separate illustrated edition of the short story "The Queen of Kisses" (1921), translations (Honoré de Balzac, Paul Verlaine, Heinrich von Kleist). New books of poetry defined the same moods outlined in “The Blue Sky.” Along with the prevailing poems recent years, those that were written several decades ago were also included. The collection “The Magical Cup” especially stood out for its integrity.

Fyodor Sologub remained in the USSR and continued to work fruitfully, wrote a lot - but everything was “on the table”: he was not published. In order to continue his active literary work in such conditions, Sologub threw himself headlong into the work of the St. Petersburg Union of Writers (in January 1926, Sologub was elected chairman of the Union). Activities in the Writers' Union allowed Sologub to overcome loneliness, filling all his time, and expand his social circle: after all, by that time almost all former major writers and poets pre-revolutionary Russia, to which Sologub belonged, ended up abroad.

The last major social event in the life of Fyodor Sologub was the celebration of his anniversary - the fortieth anniversary of literary activity - celebrated on February 11, 1924. The celebration, organized by the writer’s friends, took place in the hall of the Alexandrinsky Theater. E. Zamyatin, M. Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, O. Mandelstam gave speeches on stage; among the organizers of the celebration are A. Akhmatova, Akim Volynsky, V. Rozhdestvensky. As one of the guests noted, everything went so great, “as if everyone had forgotten that they were living under Soviet rule.” This celebration paradoxically turned out to be the farewell of Russian literature to Fyodor Sologub: none of the congratulators at the time, as well as the poet himself, imagined that after the holiday not a single new book of his would be published. There was hope for translations, which Sologub was busy with in 1923-1924, but most of them did not see the light of day during Sologub’s lifetime.

In the mid-20s. Sologub returned to public speaking and reading poetry. As a rule, they took place in the form of “writers’ evenings”, where, along with Sologub, A. A. Akhmatova, E. Zamyatin, A. N. Tolstoy, M. Zoshchenko, V. Rozhdestvensky, K. Fedin, K. Vaginov and others performed. . New poems by Sologub could only be heard from the lips of the author of the St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo stage shows (Sologub spent the summer months of 1924-1927 in Tsarskoe Selo), since they did not appear in print. At the same time, at the beginning of 1925 and the spring of 1926, Sologub wrote about a dozen anti-Soviet fables, they were read only in narrow circle. According to R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, “until the end of his days, Sologub fiercely hated Soviet power, and never called the Bolsheviks anything other than “stupid-minded.” As an internal opposition to the regime (especially after the issue of emigration disappeared) there was a rejection of the new spelling and the new style of chronology in creativity and personal correspondence. Having little hope for the publication of his books, Sologub nevertheless himself, shortly before his death, compiled two collections of poems from 1925-27. - “Atoll” and “Grumant”.

In May 1927, in the midst of work on the novel in verse “Grigory Kazarin,” Fyodor Sologub became seriously ill. He had been ill for a long time, and the disease had been more or less suppressed before, but now the complication turned out to be incurable. Since the summer, the writer almost never got out of bed. In the fall, the disease began to worsen. The poet died long and painfully. The poet's last poems were dated October 1, 1927.

Russian literature of the Silver Age

Fedor Sologub

Biography

SOLOGUB, FEDOR (real name and surname - Teternikov, Fyodor Kuzmich) (1863−1927), Russian writer. Born February 17 (March 1), 1863 in St. Petersburg. Father, illegitimate son landowner of the Poltava province, was a courtyard man, after the abolition of serfdom he worked as a tailor in the capital; died in 1867, and his widow was hired into a poor bureaucratic family “as a servant for everything.” People in the house were interested in theater and music, there were books, and Sologub became addicted to reading early on. As reported in the document compiled by his wife and verified by him Biographical information(1915), “of the first books he read, Robinson, King Lear and Don Quixote made an absolutely exceptional impression... these three books were a kind of Gospel for Sologub.” It is no less significant that in his adolescence he read everything by V. G. Belinsky (“very exciting and captivating”), then N. A. Dobrolyubov and D. I. Pisarev. N.A. Nekrasov knew almost everything by heart, unlike A.S. Pushkin and M.Yu. Lermontov, who were not so interested in him. Under the sign of Nekrasov’s acutely personal perception, whose mood fully corresponded to Sologub’s concentration on the sad feeling of the “evil fate” of the poor, his idea of poetic creativity, in the 1880s, adjusted with an eye on S. Ya. Nadson and N. M. Minsky (“There are no sounds in this song, only moans, / There are no thoughts in this song, only cries of suffering”).

Having undergone accelerated pedagogical training at the Teachers' Institute after a parish school and a district school, nineteen-year-old Sologub went with his sister and mother, placed in his care, to teach mathematics in a remote province - in the town of Kresttsy, Novgorod province (1882−1885), in Velikiye Luki (1885−1889). ), finally to Vytegra (1889−1892). He taught diligently and even wrote a textbook on geometry, but did not consider school teaching a worthy occupation. He wrote poetry from the age of 12, and, as the Help says, “in young poet a firm confidence in my calling and in the poetic possibilities inherent in it has matured.” For a long time such confidence had no particular basis - during all the years of his stay in the province, Sologub published about a dozen poems in “magazines”; but from the beginning of the 1890s the situation began to change.

In 1891, while visiting the capital, Sologub made acquaintance with Minsky, whom he highly respected and even twenty years later called “an ideological like-minded person.” A large selection of Sologub’s poems (several hundred) was presented to his court, and they came in very handy. The poets Minsky, D. S. Merezhkovsky and Z. N. Gippius, the critic A. Volynsky and the publisher L. Gurevich were busy transforming the former populist magazine “Severny Vestnik” in the spirit of “deeply modern internal rebirth” (Merezhkovsky), the manifesto of which was the treatise Minsky In the light of conscience. Thoughts and dreams about the purpose of life (1890) - according to its reviewer Vl. Solovyov, a symptom of the “general mental illness of our time.” A living illustration of this treatise could be the poems of Sologub in the 1880s: their Nekrasov-Nadsonian theme is framed as philosophical under the obvious influence of A. Schopenhauer, which was fully felt already in the 1890s. Later, Volynsky even dubbed Sologub “the basement Schopenhauer,” clearly referring to Notes from the Underground of F. M. Dostoevsky: Dostoevsky was Sologub’s favorite author, and it is characteristic that his religious pathos did not affect Sologub at all, but the transformation of “the humiliated and insulted” into “ underground” dirty tricks and embittered dreamers prone to solipsism became his universal plot, lyrical, epic and dramatic. All this is quite typical for a decadent worldview, and for Sologub, decadence could not be more organic: it turns out to be a new hypostasis of his social deprivation, elevated to a universal scale and metaphysical dignity. Reality is exposed, rejected and destroyed; in its place, an image of the universe appears in which “lies and evil” reign supreme, basically corresponding to Schopenhauer’s “will and idea.” In this vein, in the 1890s, the potential content was determined and the mythologemes (mostly quasi-religious) of Sologub’s work were developed.

From 1892, having moved to St. Petersburg and continuing to teach at school, he became a permanent and prolific employee of the Northern Messenger, where he received his “aristocratic” pseudonym: it became the well-known count’s surname, mutilated for legal security. His poems are published abundantly in many St. Petersburg magazines and newspapers; he writes “many reviews, notes and articles” (in particular, he led the review Nasha in 1894-1895 in the Severny Vestnik public life), completes and publishes in 1896 the first novel from the provincial life of a teacher, Heavy Dreams; since 1892 he has been working on a second novel, where the life material and themes of the first are re-arranged under the sign of demonism and in the images of the “dance of death”. His collections of Poems are published. Book One (1896) and Shadows. Stories and Poems (1896). (The highly praised Z. Gippius essay of the Shadow was a fundamental declaration of the separation of artistic creativity from reality, its obvious worthlessness). As a rule, Sologub was considered one of the founders of poetic symbolism, since he appeared alongside them on the pages of periodicals and enjoyed a particularly high reputation among them. But, as Volynsky notes, Sologub only “adjoined them,” and adds: “... I personally did not see anything symbolic in Sologub’s poetry... He was not a symbolist, but a decadent at heart in a high sense words". Despite some commonality of mentality, significant differences between Sologub and the Symbolists emerged during the period of his greatest popularity - in 1905-1914 and after 1917. However, during the social upsurge of the early 1900s, Minsky, the Merezhkovskys, Balmont, Bely, and Sologub occupied close positions on the left flank of revolutionary events. At the same time, Sologub, a principled fighter against God, was much more consistent than his comrades-in-arms: in his understanding, all reality was a playground of evil will, showing the world the ambiguous image of God the Devil (“The Serpent reigning over the universe”), and everything was subject to destruction: “the feat ... of the poet is to say no to dull earthly normality; put above a beautiful life, even if it is empty of earthly content form." Eventually " most glorious feat and the greatest sacrifice is a feat that leads to death, a sacrifice of life.” Destructive, God-fighting pathos inspires countless “incendiary” poems by Sologub, which appeared in the satirical magazines of the revolutionary era “Spectator”, “Signal”, “Hammer”, “Volnitsa”, etc. and partly collected in his fifth book of poems to the Motherland (1906), and also his propaganda Political Tales (1906) - “stinging parodies of the clergy and power” (A. Bely). His most famous sixth and seventh collections of poetry, The Serpent (1907) and The Circle of Flames (1908), represent a unique poetic exposition of the struggle with the reality of the world. His article I. The Book of Perfect Self-Affirmation (1907) is stylized as bible prophecies; the program poem is called Liturgy for Me (1908). Sologub moved to the forefront of writers and gained universal reader recognition after the publication of his second novel, The Petty Demon, completed in 1902, which appeared in 1905 in the magazine “Problems of Life”, and then (1907) was published in several editions and was read, according to Blok, “by all educated people.” Russia." The novel was perceived as a timely explanation of the triumph of reaction; the mystification of the philistine element turned Russian provincial reality into a kind of devilish pandemonium. Only the hidden erotic games of the boy and the girl were beyond her control. This theme is continued by the new novels Navya Chary (1907−1909) and Smoke and Ashes (1912−1913), published in almanacs and collections, in a significantly revised form, united under the title The Legend in the Making and occupying three latest volumes The 20-volume collected works of Sologub, completed in 1914. Here, the omnipotence of philistinism and rebellious revelry is contrasted with the apotheosis of the creative imagination, divorced from reality and complicit in death. The scandalous success of the novel was due to its deliberate eroticism; critics unanimously condemned this work. In the pre-war period, the focus was on Sologub’s dramaturgy, in which mythological and folklore stories sermons of his favorite philosophical ideas serve: the tragedy Victory of Death (1907) is staged at the Komissarzhevskaya Theater by V. E. Meyerhold; “slapstick plays” Night Dances (1908) and Vanka Klyuchnik and Page Jean (1908) - N. N. Evreinov. The war and revolution of 1917 pushed Sologub’s work far into the background. The decline of his fame and prestige was contributed to by his copious jingoistic magazine poems, partly collected in the book War (1915). He enthusiastically welcomed the February Revolution, perceived the Bolshevik reorganization of reality as another triumph of evil and lies, which could only be countered by persistent artistic creativity, which he tried to do in poetry collections that included mainly new poems - One Love (1921), Incense (1921) ), Pipe (1922), The Magical Cup (1922), The Great Good News (1923). They were published in insignificant circulations and did not arouse any reader interest. “Nobody knew him. He was not expected anywhere... Life rejected him,” recalled the future chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers K. Fedin. The Help (1915) reports that “diligent work on style and language inclined Sologub” to literary translation. Before the war, he was especially successful in translating dramas by G. Kleist, carried out together with his wife, translator and critic An.N. Chebotarevskaya (1876−1921), as well as poems by P. Verlaine (1908) - the result of 17 years of work. In 1923, his translations from Verlaine came out in expanded and revised (not always successful) form. For the most part he translated from French and German. Voltaire's Candide and Maupassant's novel Strong as Death are still published in his translations. Assessing Sologub’s work ten years after his death, V. Khodasevich wrote: “Probably, a number of good and even very good poems will remain from Sologub... He will take a decent place in the pantheon of Russian poetry - approximately at the level of Polonsky: higher than Maykov, but lower than Fet " To this we can add that until recently about a third of his poetic heritage remained unpublished, and the most picky critics do not deny the published poems the originality of the poetic structure, special musicality and rhythmic richness. Sologub died in Leningrad on December 5, 1927.

Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov (better known as Fedor Sologub) was born in St. Petersburg on March 1, 1963 in the family of a tailor. The boy's father died early, and his mother had to get a job in the family of a poor official. As a child, Fyodor early became addicted to music and literature thanks to his interactions with the children of officials.

Teternikov received his primary education at a parochial school, and then continued his studies at a pedagogical institute to become a mathematics teacher. After completing the courses, together with his mother and sister, he moved to the wilderness of the Novgorod province where he continued to work in his specialty.

Fyodor Kuzmich's acquaintance with Minsky, Gippius and Girevich (who at that moment were working on the transformation periodical"Northern Bulletin"), leads to the fact that in 1892 Sologub moved to St. Petersburg and became an employee of the magazine, but never left his job as a mathematics teacher. From this moment on, the writer devotes more and more time to creativity and the world gets to know his novels “Heavy Dreams” and “Shadows”. Both works were highly praised by critics, especially Gippius.

In 1908, Sologub married Anastasia Chebotareva. The rapid growth of popularity and the publication of a huge number of works by the writer are interrupted by war and revolution. The imprint of the political events that are taking place in the country is clearly visible in the collection "War".

After the suicide of his wife, Sologub continues to work on writing poetry, but the work is not successful among readers. Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov died on December 5, 1927, having never recovered from the loss of his beloved woman.