Again, to one who has read most of Sologub’s productions, the story of the Beast is interesting, because it contains, as it were, a synthesis of the author’s tendencies. Its separate motifs are repeated in variation in many of his other stories. There is the boy Timarides, whom the author loves. Why?
Because Timarides is a child, because he is beautiful, trustful, and ready to do daring deeds. Timarides perhaps stands for the young generation reproaching the old for its neglect, its forgetfulness of its promises, its settling in a groove, its stripping itself of its happiest illusions.
And throughout his work, Sologub reiterates his affection for children and the childlike. When he loves or pities an older person, he endows him with childlike attributes. He does this in the little story, “The Hoop.” Does the old man seem absurd to us? If so, it is to be inferred that the fault is with ourselves. We have grown too sophisticated.
Here, again, Chekhov and Sologub meet. Chekhov loves the unpractical people, because they are usually more lovable personalities than the successful, practical ones; Sologub loves the absurd, the childlike, the quixotic, for the same reason.
Rather than have them grow up and therefore become unlovable, Sologub makes some of his children die young. There is, for example, in one of his stories, sweet Rayechka, who died in a fall, and upon whom the boy, Mitya, recalling her, muses in this fashion: “Had Rayechka lived to grow up, she might have become a housemaid like Darya, pomaded her hair, and squinted her cunning eyes.”
In “The Old House” it is the children once more who are the revolutionaries—trustful, adorable, and daring. In “The White Mother” the bachelor, Saksaoolov, is redeemed through the boy, Lesha, who resembles his dead sweetheart.
Schoolmasters and schoolchildren are among the characters who frequent the pages of Sologub’s books. Sologub, it should be remembered, began life as a schoolmaster. The story “Light and Shadows” is, perhaps, a reflection upon our educational system which crams the young mind with a multitude of useless facts and starves the imagination; we see the reaction of the system on the delicate organism of a sensitive and imaginative child.
Mothers share the author’s affection for their children; but, like schoolmasters, mothers, unfortunately, are of two kinds. The world has its “black mammas” as well as its “white mammas.”
There are few writers who are so subtle, so insinuating, and so seductive, in their power to make the reader think; few writers who give so great a stimulus to the imagination.
With Chekhov, Russian fiction turns definitely to town life for its material; nevertheless, the changes which the modern industrial system has brought about have in no wise weakened the mystic force of Russian literature. Sologub is a mystic, a mystic of Russian tradition; and Sologub is a product of Petrograd.