ABSTRACT
Fyodor Sologub writes a beautiful limpid prose, but he ranked among the ‘decadent’ poets, and his sensibility belongs to the wider European decadence. Andreev brings out the barbarity and senselessness of the ordeal through which they must pass, and he does it in the spirit of Tolstoy and almost with Tolstoy’s precision and seriousness. Dostoevsky shows an erotic awareness by no means common among Russian writers of the nineteenth century. In 1910 Blok recognized him as ‘one of the most serious and profound writers in our time’ who had learned to ‘guide his rudder through the ocean of Russian speech’. Like Bunin, Fyodor Sologub was also a poet. His novel of 1907, known in translation as The Little Demon, though it should more accurately be called The Petty Devil, is a prime document of the Russian decadence.
