March and April in Russian History

1863

march 1

On this day, Russian poet and prose writer Fyodor Sologub (real name: Fyodor Teternikov) was born into a tailor’s family in St. Petersburg. Sologub started his literary career in the 1890’s. Initially regarded as a symbolist, along with Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov and Konstantin Balmont, his work actually differed from theirs in many ways, and has been classified as Decadent literature. The poetic language in his collections such as Blue Sky (1920) and One Love (1921) is rather laconic and does not contain the refined metaphors so characteristic of symbolic poetry. It was Sologub’s prose works — Little Demon (1892-1902), Heavy Dreams (1895) and Legend Created (1910’s) — that brought him fame.