The Old House
and Other Tales

INTRODUCTION

“Sologub” is a pseudonym—the author’s real name isFeodor Kuzmich Teternikov. He was born in 1863. He completed a scholasticcourse at Petrograd. His first published story appeared in the periodical“Severny Viestnik” in 1894, but it was not until about a dozenyears later that he came into his fame, which he has since then furtherenhanced.

This is all the biographical knowledge we have of a living novelist whoseplace in Russian literature is secure beyond all question; the scantiness ofour knowledge is all the more amazing when we consider that the author is overfifty, and that his complete works are in their twentieth volume.

These include almost every possible form of literary expression—thefairy 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 anovelist.

How little importance Sologub attaches to personal réclame may begathered from his answer to repeated requests for a nutshell“autobiography” a type of document in vogue in Russia; MaximGorky’s impressive model, I believe, is quite familiar to Englishreaders.

“I cannot give you my autobiography,” Sologub wrote to theeditor of a literary almanac, “as I do not think that my personality canbe of sufficient interest to any one. And I haven’t the time to waste onsuch unnecessary business as an autobiography.”

At the beginning of his Complete Works, however, there is a poem in prose, akind 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’spersonality.

In studying his work, one finds that