The Created Legend

The Created Legend

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Created Legend, by Feodor
Sologub [Authorized Translated from the Russian by John Cournos]
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Title: The Created Legend
Author: Feodor Sologub
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7480] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 8, 2003]

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Language: English
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THE CREATED LEGEND
BY FEODOR SOLOGUB
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION FROM THE RUSSIAN BY JOHN
COURNOS

INTRODUCTION
_"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