The Old House, and Other Tales

Acknowledgments are due to the Editor of “The New Statesman” for permission to republish The White Dog and The Hoop, which first appeared in that periodical .
“Sologub” is a pseudonym—the author’s real name is Feodor Kuzmich Teternikov. He was born in 1863. He completed a scholastic course at Petrograd. His first published story appeared in the periodical “Severny Viestnik” in 1894, but it was not until about a dozen years later that he came into his fame, which he has since then further enhanced .
This is all the biographical knowledge we have of a living novelist whose place in Russian literature is secure beyond all question; the scantiness of our knowledge is all the more amazing when we consider that the author is over fifty, and that his complete works are in their twentieth volume .
These include almost every possible form of literary expression—the fairy tale, the poem, the play, the essay, the novel, and the short story. Sologub’s place as a poet is hardly less assured than his place as a novelist .
How little importance Sologub attaches to personal réclame may be gathered from his answer to repeated requests for a nutshell “autobiography” a type of document in vogue in Russia; Maxim Gorky’s impressive model, I believe, is quite familiar to English readers .
“I cannot give you my autobiography,” Sologub wrote to the editor of a literary almanac, “as I do not think that my personality can be of sufficient interest to any one. And I haven’t the time to waste on such unnecessary business as an autobiography.”
At the beginning of his Complete Works, however, there is a poem in prose, a kind of spiritual autobiography in which he insists that all life is a miracle, and that his own surely is also. “I simply and calmly reveal my soul ... in the hope that the intimate part of me shall become the universal.” After such an avowal the reader will know where to look for the author’s personality .
In studying his work, one finds that he has both realism and fantasy. But while he is sometimes wholly realistic, he is seldom wholly fantastic. His fantasy has always its foundations in reality. His realism is as grey as that of Chekhov, whose logical successor he has been acclaimed by Russian criticism. But it is his prodigious fantasy that makes the point of his departure from the Chekhovian formula. When he combines the two qualities, the strange reconciliation thus effected produces a result as original as it is rich in “the meaning of life.” Sologub himself says somewhere :