The Sweet-Scented Name/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
FEDOR SOLOGUB is one of the cleverest of contemporary Russian tale-writers and poets. He ranks with Tchekhof and Kuprin and Remizof, though he has very little in common with these writers. He is not a realist; he does not love to comment on life as Tchekhof did, nor to flood his pages with delicious details as does Kuprin; he has nothing of either the melancholy or the energy of Gorky. He is more modern than these; he scents new thoughts, and endeavours to find a new medium of style and language to present them to his age. His genius lies in the power he has to suggest atmosphere. He can cast the reader into a spell and then say magical sentences in his ears—it may be a sweet spell as in "Turandina" or a terrible one as in "The Herald of the Beast," but the reader is infallibly beguiled out of the everyday atmosphere into the mirage or phantasy or trance which the author, who is a sort of Prospero, wishes.
Apart from this magic, Sologub possesses and exhibits a pleasant sense of humour. His witty fables, of which only a few are interspersed in these pages, are famous in Russia. In politics he is a Liberal, and is capable of biting satire. Like Biely and Andreef and Kuprin, and many another Russian writer, he was infected by despair after the Russo-Japanese war and the bloody revolutionary era. The literature of 1906, 1907, 1908 was marked by hysteria, and several of Sologub's tales of that time are incoherent through grief. But as the years go on he is quickly convalescent. As Russia righted herself he recovered, and in the time before the great war of 1914 he is found in halcyon mood. One would hardly dream that public events and the political well-being of his nation could affect the author of such stories as these, and yet there is always the reflection of the Russia of the hour in the story of the hour. Such responsiveness to national moods is characteristic of national life.
Sologub's works comprise two novels, The Little Demon and Drops of Blood, a volume of poems, some essays, and about a dozen volumes of short tales. This volume, which my wife and I have selected and translated, is offered as a foretaste of some very remarkable work.
Russia is the land of such short tales. Long novels are exceptional and not very popular. Nearly all Russian writers of note to-day are either poets or essayists or short-story writers. Tchekhof, who wrote some twenty volumes of little tales, really made the short story popular. "I have made a way for this sort of writing," he is reported to have said to Kuprin. "After me it will be easy for others to go on writing such tales." The prophecy has been fulfilled. More than eighty per cent of the fiction published since his death has been collections of little stories.
Fedor Sologub is one of the cleverest of these writers of tales. He has reduced the short story to a minimum, and some of his cleverest efforts do not exceed half a page in length. Many are little more than epigrams, and give one the idea that they were probably written at the oddest moments, between courses at dinner, whilst waiting for an answer to a riddle, in bed, in cabs. The author is notoriously eccentric in life.
Most of these stories were originally published in Russian newspapers, and only after some time collected into volumes. The Russian newspapers give the hospitality of their columns to many short stories and sketches. Long-winded serials are almost unknown in the press, and indeed the public demands a type of literature much higher than that which commonly adorns the columns of our British daily papers. The feuilleton of the Russian newspaper is generally either a quarter-page article written by one of the brilliant publicists of the day, such as Rozanof or Merezhkovsky, or a short tale by Sologub or Kuprin or Gorky, or one or other of the great Russian tale-writers. A great number of Sologub's stories have, for instance, appeared in the Retch. Of those given in the present volume, "Lohengrin," "Who art Thou?" and "The Hungry Gleam" appeared in the Retch; "She who wore a Crown" in the Russian Word; "Turandina" in the Voice of the Earth; "The Kiss of the Unborn" in the Morning of Russia; "The River Mairure" in Our Life; "The Crimson Ribbon" in the New Word—all daily newspapers of Russia. All the stories were written within the last ten years. Of these translations "Wings" and "The Sweet-scented Name" appeared in Country Life, and that journal retains the right to reproduce them in a volume of Russian fairy-tales and fables if it so desires.