The Created Legend | Page 2

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._
JOHN COURNOS