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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 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
_February_ 1916
CHAPTER I
I take a piece of life, coarse and poor, and create from it a
delightful legend--because I am a poet. Whether it linger in the
darkness; whether it be dim, commonplace, or raging with a furious
fire--life is before you; I, a poet, will erect the legend I have
created about the enchanting and the beautiful.
Chance caught in the entangling net of circumstance brings about every
beginning. Yet it is better to begin with what is splendid in earthly
experience, or at any rate with what is beautiful and pleasing.
Splendid are the body, the youth, and the gaiety in man; splendid are
the water, the light, and the summer in nature.
It was a bright, hot midday in summer, and the heavy glances of the
flaming Dragon fell on the River Skorodyen. The water, the light, and
the summer beamed and were glad; they beamed because of the sunlight
that filled the immense space, they were glad because of the wind that
blew from some far land, because of the many birds, because of the two
nude maidens.
Two sisters, Elisaveta and Elena, were bathing in the River Skorodyen.
And the sun and the water were gay, because the two maidens were
beautiful and were naked. And the two girls felt also gay and cool,
and they wanted to scamper and to laugh, to chatter and to jest. They
were talking about a man who had aroused their curiosity.
They were the daughters of a rich proprietor. The place where they
bathed adjoined the spacious old garden of their estate. Perhaps they
enjoyed their bathing because they felt themselves the mistresses of
these fast-flowing waters and of the sand-shoals under their agile
feet. And they swam about and laughed in this river with the assurance
and freedom of princesses born to rule. Few know the boundaries of
their kingdom--but fortunate are they who know what they possess and
exercise their sway.
They swam up and down and across the river, and tried to outswim and
outdive one another. Their bodies, immersed in the water, would have
presented an entrancing sight to any one who might have looked down
upon them from the bench in the garden on the high bank and watched
the exquisite play of their muscles under their thin elastic skin.
Pink tones lost themselves in the skin-yellow pearl of their bodies.
But pink triumphed in their faces, and in those parts of the body most
often exposed.
The river-bank opposite rose in a slope. There were bushes here;
behind them for a great distance stretched fields of rye, while just
over the edge, where the earth and the sky met, were visible the far
huts of the suburban village. Peasant boys passed by on the bank. They
did not look at the bathing women. But a schoolboy, who had come a
long way from the other end of the town, sat on his heels behind the
bushes. He called himself an ass because he had not brought his
camera. But he consoled himself with the thought:
“To-morrow I’ll surely bring it.”
The schoolboy quickly looked at his watch in order to make a note of
the time the girls went out bathing. He knew them, and often came to
their house to see his friend, their relative. Elena, the younger, now
appealed most to him; she was plump, cheerful, white, rosy, her hands
and feet were small. He did not like the hands and feet of the elder
sister, Elisaveta--they seemed to him to be too large and too red. Her
face also was red, very sunburnt, and she was altogether quite large.
“Oh well,” he reflected, “she is certainly well formed, you can’t deny
her that.”
About a year had now passed since the retired _privat-docent_
Giorgiy Sergeyevitch Trirodov, a doctor of chemistry, had settled in
the town of Skorodozh.[1] From the very first he had caused much talk
in the town, mostly unsympathetic. It was quite natural that the two
rose-yellow, black-haired girls in the water should also talk of him.
They splashed about gaily, and as they raised jewel-like spray with
their feet they kept up a conversation.
“How puzzling it all is!” said Elena, the younger sister. “No one
knows where his income comes from, what he does in his house, and why
he has this colony of children. There are all sorts of strange rumours
about him. It’s certainly a mystery.”
Elena’s words reminded Elisaveta of an article she had read lately in
a philosophic periodical published at Moscow. Elisaveta had a good
memory. She recalled a phrase:
“In our world reason will never dominate, and the mysterious will
always maintain its place.”
She tried to recall more, but suddenly realizing that it would not
interest Elena, she gave a sigh and grew silent. Elena gave her a
tender, appealing look and said:
“When it is so bright you want everything to be as clear as it is
around us now.”
“Is everything really clear now?” exclaimed Elisaveta. “The sun blinds
your eyes, the water flashes and dazzles, and in this ragingly bright
world we do not even know whether there isn’t some one a couple of
paces away peeping at us.”
At this moment the sisters were standing breast-high in the water,
near the overgrown bank. The schoolboy who sat on his heels behind the
bush heard Elisaveta’s words. He grew cold in his confusion, and began
to crawl on all-fours between the bushes, away from the river. He got
in among the rye, then perched himself on the rail-fence and pretended
to rest, as though he were not even aware of the closeness of the
river. But no one had noticed him, as if he were non-existent.
The schoolboy sat there a little while, then went home with a vague
feeling of disenchantment, injury, and irritation. There was something
especially humiliating to him in the thought that to the two girl
bathers he was merely a possibility speculated upon but actually
non-existent.
Everything in this world has an end. There was an end also to the
sisters’ bathing. They made their way silently together out of the
pleasant, cool, deep water towards the dry ground, heaven’s
terrestrial footstool, and out into the air, where they met the hot
kisses of the slowly, cumbrously rising Dragon. They stood a while on
the bank, yielding themselves to the Dragon’s kisses, then entered the
protected bath-house where they had left their clothes.
Elisaveta’s clothes were very simple. They consisted of a greenish
yellow, not over-long tunic-dress without sleeves, and a plain straw
hat. Elisaveta nearly always wore yellow dresses. She loved yellow,
she loved buttercups and gold, and though she sometimes said that she
wore yellow in order to soften her ruddy complexion, she really loved
it simply, sincerely, and for its own sake. Yellow delighted
Elisaveta. There was something remote and unpremeditated in this, as
if it were a thing remembered from another, previous life.
Elisaveta’s heavy black braid of hair was coiled tightly and
attractively around her head, and as it was lifted quite high at the
back, her neck showed--sunburnt and gracefully erect. Elisaveta’s face
had a keen, almost exaggerated, expression of the mastery of will and
intellect over the emotions. The long and peculiarly straight parting
of her lips was very exquisite. Her blue eyes were cheerful--even when
her lips did not smile. Their glance was thoughtful and gentle. The
bright ruddiness and strong tan of the face seemed strangely alien to
it.
While waiting for Elena to finish dressing Elisaveta walked slowly on
the sandy bank and looked into the monotonous distances. The fine warm
grains of sand gently warmed her bare feet, which had grown cold in
the water.
Elena dressed slowly. She enjoyed dressing; everything that she put on
seemed an adornment to her. She delighted in the rosy reflections of
her skin, in her pretty light dress of a pinkish white material, in
her broad sash of pink silk fastened behind with a buckle of
mother-of-pearl, in her straw hat trimmed with bright pink ribbons on
top and yellow-pink velvet on its underbrim.
At last Elena was dressed. The sisters climbed the sloping bank and
went where their curiosity drew them. They loved to take long walks.
They had already passed several times the house and grounds of Giorgiy
Trirodov, whom they had not yet seen once. To-day they wished to go
that way again and to try and see what was to be seen.
The sisters walked two versts through the wood. They spoke quietly of
various things, and felt a little agitated. Curiosity often agitates
people.
The sinuous road with two wagon-ruts revealed picturesque views at
every turn. The path finally chosen by the sisters led to a hollow.
Its sides, overgrown with bushes and weeds, looked wildly beautiful.
From its depth came the sweet, warm odour of clover, and down below
its white bosom grass was visible. A small narrow bridge, propped up
from below with thin slender stakes, hung over the hollow. On the
other side of the bridge a low hedge stretched right and left, and in
this hedge, quite facing the bridge, a small gate was visible.
The sisters crossed the bridge, holding on to its slender hand-rail of
birch. They tried the gate--it was closed. They looked at one another.
Elisaveta, growing red with vexation, said:
“We’ll have to go back again.”
“Every one says that you can’t get into the place,” said Elena, “that
you’ve got to get over the hedge, and that even that is impossible for
some reason or other. It’s very strange. I wonder what they can be up
to?”
Suddenly there was a slight rustle in the bushes by the hedge. The
branches parted. A pale boy ran up to them. He looked quickly at the
sisters with his clear, intensely calm, almost dead eyes. There was
something strange in the shape of his pale lips, thought Elisaveta. A
motionless, sorrowful expression lurked in the corners of his mouth.
He opened the gate; he seemed to say something, but so quietly that
the sisters could not catch his words. Or was it the sound of the
light breeze in the wavering foliage?
The boy hid himself behind the bushes so quickly that it was hard to
believe that he had been there at all; the sisters had no time to be
astonished or to thank him. It was as if the gate had opened by
itself, or had been pushed open by one of the sisters by chance.
They stood there undecided. An incomprehensible unrest took possession
of them for an instant and as quickly went from them. Curiosity again
dominated them. The sisters entered.
“How did he open it?” asked Elena.
Elisaveta, without a word, went quickly forward. She was so elated at
getting in that she had almost forgotten the pale boy. Only somewhere,
within the domain of vague consciousness, there gleamed dimly a
strange white face.
The wood was quite like the one by which they had come to the gate,
quite as pensive and as tall and as isolated from the sky, and as
absorbed in its own mysteries. But here it seemed to have been
conquered by human activity. Not far away voices, cries, laughter
resounded. Here and there were evidences of left-off games. The narrow
footpaths often led to wider paths of sand. The sisters quickly
followed the winding path in the direction from which the children’s
voices sounded loudest. Afterwards all this jumble of sound seemed to
collapse, and it renewed itself in loud, sweet singing.
At last there appeared before them a small glade--oval in shape. Tall
firs edged this open space as evenly as graceful columns in a
magnificent _salle_. The blue of the sky above it seemed
especially bright, pure and dominant. The glade was full of children
of various ages. They were sitting and reclining all around in ones,
twos, and threes. In the middle some thirty boys and girls were
singing and dancing; their dance followed strictly the rhythm of the
tune and interpreted the words of the song with beautiful fidelity.
They were directed by a tall, graceful girl who had a strong, sonorous
voice, braids of magnificent golden hair, and grey, cheerful eyes.
All of them, the children as well as their instructresses--of whom
three or four were to be seen--were dressed quite simply and alike.
Their simple, light attire seemed beautiful. It was pleasant to look
at them, perhaps because their dress revealed the active parts of
their body, the arms and the legs. Dress here was made to protect, and
not to conceal; to clothe, and not to muffle.
The blue and red of the hats and of the dresses gave emphasis to the
vivid tones of the faces and of the arms and legs. There was a spirit
of gaiety here, a sense of holiday splendour in these naturally
adorned bodies, boldly revealed under clear azure skies.
Some of the children from among those who did not sing approached the
sisters and looked at them in a friendly manner, smiling trustfully.
“You may sit down if you like,” said a boy with very blue eyes; “here
is a bench.”
“Thank you, my dear,” said Elisaveta.
The sisters sat down. The children wished to talk to them. One little
girl said:
“I’ve just seen a little squirrel. It was sitting on a pine. Then I
gave a shout--you should have seen it run!”
The others also began to talk and to ask questions. The singers ended
their song and scattered in all directions to play. The golden-haired
instructress went up to the sisters and asked:
“Have you come from town? Are you pleased with what you have seen
here?”
“Yes, it’s splendid here,” said Elisaveta. “Our place adjoins this. We
are the Rameyevs. I am Elisaveta. And this is my sister Elena.”
The golden-haired girl suddenly blushed as if she felt ashamed that
the wealthy young women were looking at her naked shoulders and at her
legs naked to the knee. But seeing that they too were barefoot and
wore short skirts, she quickly recovered and smiled at them.
“My name is Nadezhda Vestchezerova,” she said.
She looked attentively at the sisters. Elisaveta thought that she had
heard the name somewhere in town--perhaps a tale in connexion with it,
she could not remember exactly what. For some reason she did not
mention this to Nadezhda. Perhaps it was a tragic history.
This fear of talking about the past occasionally came upon Elisaveta.
Who knows what sorrow is hid behind a bright smile, and from what
darkness has sprung the blossoming which gives sudden joy to a glance,
elusively beautiful and born of unhappy worldly experience?
“Did you find your way in easily?” asked the golden-haired Nadezhda
with a friendly but subtle smile. “It’s usually not a simple matter,”
she explained.
Elisaveta replied:
“A white boy opened the gate for us. He ran off so quickly that we had
not even the time to thank him.”
Nadezhda suddenly ceased smiling.
“Oh yes--he isn’t one of us,” she said falteringly. “They live over
there with Trirodov. There are several of them. Wouldn’t you like to
have lunch with us?” she asked, cutting short her previous remarks.
Elisaveta suspected that Nadezhda wanted to change the subject.
“We live here all day long, we eat here, we learn here, and we play
here--do everything here,” said Nadezhda. “People have built cities to
escape the wild beast, but they themselves have become like wild
beasts, like savages.”
A bitter note crept into her voice--was it the echo of her past life
or was it a thing foreign to her and grafted upon her sensitive
nature? She continued:
“We have come from the town into the woods. From the wild beast, from
the savages of the town. The beast must be killed. The wolf and the
fox and the hawk--all those who prey upon others--they must be
killed.”
Elisaveta asked:
“How is one to kill a beast who has grown iron and steel nails, and
who has built his lair in the town? It is he who does the killing, and
there’s no end in sight to his ferocity.”
Nadezhda knitted her eyebrows, pressed her hands, and stubbornly
repeated:
“We shall kill him, we shall kill him.”