To the Stars and Other Stories

by Susanne Fusso (Translator)

Overview

A boy who feels persecuted by the banality of everyday life yearns to ascend to the cold and majestic plane of the stars. A seamstress finds liberation of a sort in “becoming” a dog and howling at the moon. A club of young girls masquerade as the grieving fiancées of strange men. This book brings together these and other remarkable short stories by the Russian Symbolist Fyodor Sologub that explore the lengths to which people will go to transcend the mundane.

Renowned as one of late imperial Russia’s finest stylists, Sologub bridges the great nineteenth-century novel and the fin-de-siècle avant-garde. He stands out for his masterful command of both realist and fantastic storytelling; his play with language evinces a belief in its capacity to access other worlds and other levels of meaning. Many of Sologub’s stories are set among children whose alienation from the adult world has lent them imagination and curiosity, enabling them to create an alternative reality. At the same time, he bluntly examines the sordid realities of late imperial Russian society and frankly presents sometimes unconventional sexuality. The book also features a selection of Sologub’s “little fairy tales,” ambiguous parables couched in childlike language whose ingenuity anticipates the miniatures and “incidents” of Daniil Kharms. Susanne Fusso’s elegant translation offers these artful tales to an English-speaking audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231553407
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2023
Series:	Russian Library
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Fyodor Sologub (the pseudonym of Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, 1863–1927) was a major Russian Symbolist poet and prose writer. The son of a tailor and a maid, he began his career as a provincial high school teacher and attained literary fame in St. Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century. He is best known for the novel The Petty Demon.

Susanne Fusso is Marcus L. Taft Professor of Modern Languages and professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Wesleyan University. Her translations include Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose and Other Stories (Columbia, 2020).

Susanne Fusso is professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the translator of Trepanation of the Skull by Sergey Gandlevsky, and the author of Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel (NIU Press, 2017).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction by Susanne Fusso
Selected Works About Sologub in English
Note on Transliteration and Translation Issues
1. To the Stars (1896)
2. Beauty (1899)
3. In Captivity (1905)
4. The Two Gotiks (1906)
5. The Youth Linus (1906)
6. In the Crowd (1907)
7. Death by Advertisement (1907)
8. The White Dog (1908)
9. The Saddened Fiancée (1908)
10. The Sixty-Seventh Day. A Novella (1908)
11. The Road to Damascus (1910) (written with Anastasia Chebotarevskaya)
12. The Kiss of the Unborn Child (1911)
13. The Lady in Shackles. A Legend of the White Nights (1912)
14. Little Fairy Tales (selection, 1898–1906)
Notes
Publication History of the Stories

Editorial Reviews

[A] richly painted world . . . The stories collected in To the Stars contain echoes of Baudelaire, Huysmans and Wilde. . . [Fusso's] English versions capture not just the morbid corporeality of Sologub’s prose, but also its radiant poetry and extravagant wordplay.

Times Literary Supplement - Philip Ross Bullock

[Sologub’s] vivid, honed, stinging style . . . combines simplicity and elegance, coldness and fire, tenderness and austerity. . . . His anguishing conceptions more and more convincingly lift the cover of enchantment that all of reality turns out to be. He is the singer of death: but he sings of death with all the tenderness of a prayer, all the ardor of passion; he speaks of death the way a passionate lover speaks of his beloved.

Andrei Bely

Alternately funny and frightening, charming and chilling, Sologub's short fiction remains curiously undervalued. Fusso's excellently selected and masterfully translated collection, accompanied by an exemplary introduction and copious notes, finally allows readers of English to appreciate the full power of Sologub's relentlessly double vision and the depth of his literary craft.

Stanley J. Rabinowitz

Sologub's prose is beautiful: limpid, clear, balanced, poetical, but with a keen sense of measure. . . .

Dmitri Svatopolk-Mirsky

[Sologub’s] vivid, honed, stinging style . . . combines simplicity and elegance, coldness and fire, tenderness and austerity. . . . His anguishing conceptions more and more convincingly lift the cover of enchantment that all of reality turns out to be. He is the singer of death: but he sings of death with all the tenderness of a prayer, all the ardor of passion; he speaks of death the way a passionate lover speaks of his beloved.

Andrey Bely