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“For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” SHAKESPEARE “To the impure all things are impure.” NIETZSCHE

In “The Little Demon” Sologub has shown us how the evil within us peering out through our imagination makes all the world seem evil to us. In “The Created Legend,” feeling perhaps the need of reacting from his morose creation Peredonov, the author has set himself the task of showing the reverse of the picture: how the imagination, no longer warped, but sensitized with beauty, is capable of creating a world of its own, legendary yet none the less real for the legend.

The Russian title of the book is more descriptive of the author’s intentions than an English translation will permit it to be. “Tvorimaya Legenda” actually means “The legend in the course of creation.” The legend that Sologub has in mind is the active, eternally changing process of life, orderly and structural in spite of the external confusion. The author makes an effort to bring order out of apparent chaos by stripping life of its complex modern detail and reducing it to a few significant symbols, as in a rather more subtle “morality play.” The modern novel is perhaps over-psychologized; eternal truths and eternal passions are perhaps too often lost sight of under the mass of unnecessary naturalistic detail.

In this novel life passes by the author as a kind of dream, a dream within that nightmare Reality, a legend within that amorphousness called Life. And the nightmare and the dream, like a sensitive individual’s ideas of the world as it is and as it ought to be, alternate here like moods. The author has expressed this changeableness of mood curiously by alternating a crudely realistic, deliberately naïve, sometimes journalese style with an extremely decorative, lyrical manner—this taxing the translator to the utmost in view of the urgency to translate the mood as well as the ideas.

As a background we have “the abortive revolution of 1905.” This novel is an emotional statement of those “nightmarish” days. Against this rather hazy, tempestuous background we have the sharply outlined portrait of an individual, a poet, containing a world within himself, a more radiant and orderly world than the one which his eyes look upon outwardly. It is this “inner vision” which permits him to see the legend in the outer chaos, and we read in this book of his efforts to disentangle the thread of this legend by the establishment of a kind of Hellenic Utopia.

It is not alone the poet who is capable of creating his legend, but any one who refuses to be subject to the whims of fate and to serve the goddess of chance and chaos, “the prodigal scatterer of episodes” (Aisa). The tragic thing about this philosophy, as one Russian critic points out, is that even the definite settling of the question does not assure one complete consolation, for, like Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov,” one may say: “I do not accept God, I do not accept the world created by Him, God’s world; I simply return Him the ticket most respectfully.” Still it is with some such definite decision that he enters the kingdom of Ananke, the goddess of Necessity. Readers of “The Little Demon” have seen a practical illustration of the two forces in Peredonov and Liudmilla. Peredonov was petty and pitiful, “a little demon”—nevertheless he too “strove towards the truth in common with all conscious life, and this striving tormented him. He himself did not understand that he, like all men, was striving towards the truth, and that was why he had that confused unrest. He could not find his truth, and he became entangled, and was perishing.” Liudmilla, however, had saved herself from the pettiness and provinciality of this “unclean, impotent earth” by creating a new world for herself. She, at any rate, had her beautiful legend, knew her truth.

Elisaveta, of “The Created Legend,” also belongs to the Kingdom of Ananke. She finds her salvation in “the dream of liberation,” the dream dreamt by all good Russians and made an active creative legend by the efforts to realize it in life. Being an antithesis to the analytical novel, this novel treats of sex, not as a psychology but as a philosophy; nuances are avoided, the feminine figure becomes a symbol, drawn, not photographically but broadly, in fluent, even exaggerated Botticellian outlines. I might go even further and say that as a symbol of Russian revolution the figure of Elisaveta is perhaps meant to stand out with the statuesque boldness of the Victory of Samothrace. The feminine figure, nude or thinly draped, has been used as symbol for ideas in the plastic arts ever since art was born; our puritans have never been faced with the problem of what some of the mythological divinities in stone would do if they should suddenly come to life, become human. Yet it is a problem of this sort that Sologub has attempted to solve—the problem of the gods in exile. As for Elisaveta, Sologub goes indeed the length of describing her previous existence in the second of the series of novels that go under the general head of “The Created Legend”; she was then the Queen Ortruda of some beautiful isles in the Mediterranean, and she is fated to carry her queenliness into her later life.

“The Little Demon” is Sologub’s “Inferno,” “The Created Legend” his “Paradiso.” And just as the problem there was the abuse of bodily beauty, so it is here the idealism of bodily beauty. It is natural that the over-draping of our bodies, the supposed symbol of our modesty, but in reality an evidence of our lust, should form part of his thesis. But M. Anatole France has already pointed out brilliantly in “Penguin Island” how immodesty originated in the invention of clothes.

The conclusion is quite clear: it is beauty that can save the world, it is our eyes and our imaginations behind our eyes that can remodel the world into “a chaste dream.” Like Don Quixote, whom Sologub loves, we must see Dulcinea in our Aldonza, and our persistent thought of her as Dulcinea may make her Dulcinea in actuality.

Such are the thoughts behind this strange book, in which fantasy and reality rub unfriendly shoulders. But it would be robbing the reader of his prerogative to explain the various symbols the author employs; for this is in the full sense a Symbolist novel, and, like a piece of music or a picture in patterns, its charm to him who will like it will lie in individual interpretation. I cannot, however, resist the desire to speak of my own personal preference for Chapter XIII, in which the death of certain musty Russian institutions is brilliantly symbolized by the author in the passage of the risen dead on St. John’s Eve.

In the “quiet children” the author has resurrected, as it were, the child heroes in which his stories abound, and given them an existence on a new plane, “beyond good and evil.” It is only children, beings chaste and impressionable, who are capable of transformation—or shall we say transfiguration?—and if they happen to be in this case more paradisian than earthly it is because truth expressed in symbols must of necessity appear fantastic and exaggerated. It is, for the same reason, that we find the worthlessness of Matov expressed in his being turned by Trirodov into a paper-weight. Then there is the Sun, the Flaming Dragon, the infuriator of men’s passions, powerless, however, to affect the “quiet children,” who, freed of all passion—“the beast in man”—may have their white feet covered with the light dust of the earth, but never scorched by the evil heat.

The various references to the art and ideas of the poet Trirodov and to the poet’s tardy recognition are certain to be recognized as autobiographical.

I must add that in the original this first of “Created Legend” novels is called “Drops of Blood,” a phrase which recurs several times in the course of the narrative in connexion with the problem of cruelty in life.