Fyodor Sologub is a prominent representative of the poetry of symbolism. The main motives of Sologub's lyrics Creative biography and artistic world F

Fyodor Sologub, whose biography is given in this article, is a famous Russian writer, poet, publicist and playwright. He worked at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was one of the largest representatives of symbolism in his generation.

Biography of the writer

Fyodor Sologub was born in 1863. The writer's biography originates in St. Petersburg. Here he spent almost his entire life. His real name at birth is Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov.

His father is a former peasant who worked as a tailor in St. Petersburg. The family lived very poorly. The situation worsened in 1867 when his father died. The mother was forced to become a servant to the St. Petersburg nobles.

Sologub began writing poetry in early childhood. The biography will not be complete without recalling the texts created by the young 14-year-old poet. By that time he was already studying at the city school in Vladimir, and in 1879 he successfully entered the teacher's institute in St. Petersburg. There he spends four years on full board, which, of course, was a great relief for his family.

Having received a higher education, he goes to work as a teacher in the northern provinces with his sister and mother. He works in the Novgorod region, then in the Pskov and Vologda regions. In total, he spends about 10 years in the province.

Working as a teacher

Fyodor Sologub began his teaching career in Krestsy, Novgorod region. The biography of the future writer has been associated with the public school in this small town for three years. At the same time, he writes poetry and a novel, which was later called “Heavy Dreams.”

In 1884, the first publication of the young writer Sologub was published. The author's biography began with the fable "The Fox and the Hedgehog", which was published in a children's magazine called "Spring". Sologub signed the work as “Ternikov.”

Over the course of ten years of work in the provinces, he dreams of returning to St. Petersburg. But only in 1892 he received an appointment to the Rozhdestvensky City School, located in the historical district of the city on the Neva - on Peski.

Career in St. Petersburg

The magazine "Northern Herald" played a big role in the life of Sologub Fyodor Kuzmich. The writer’s biography began to be actively replenished with publications in this publication starting in the 1890s. Moreover, these were not only poems, but also reviews, translations, stories and even a novel. At the insistence of a friend of the mystical writer Nikolai Minsky, a pseudonym also appeared.

It was invented by literary critic Akim Volynsky. This was an allusion to the noble Sollogubov family, to which the famous fiction writer belonged. To make a difference, one of the letters “l” was removed from the pseudonym.

This is how readers recognized Fyodor Sologub. In a short biography of the author, it is necessary to mention the first novel, published in 1896. It was called "Heavy Dreams". This is a realistic work in which everyday pictures of the province are combined with a semi-mystical atmosphere in which the heroes find themselves. In addition, they are constantly overcome by erotic dreams and attacks of inexplicable panic.

Symbol of death

The symbol of death often appears in Sologub’s works in the first five years of the 20th century. Fyodor Sogolub, whose biography and work during this period were enriched with new symbols and images, in the future uses them for self-expression in his own creative system.

Often in the works of these years you can find the image of death, which brings comfort. For example, it is often used in the collection of short stories "The Sting of Death". The main characters are increasingly becoming teenagers or even children. Moreover, the general madness that was in previous collections is replaced by consolation before probable death.

The author begins to turn to Satan, in whom he sees not a terrible curse that denies God, but only the opposite of good, which is necessary in the world. The best way to get acquainted with the philosophy of the author of that period is in the essay “I. The Book of Perfect Self-Affirmation.”

During the revolution of 1905, Sologub became extremely popular. The short biography and work of the writer were replenished with political fairy tales. Revolutionary magazines willingly undertook to publish them.

This is a special genre created by Sologub. These “fairy tales” are bright, short, with a simple plot, sometimes they are poems in prose. Despite the fact that they cover adult themes, the author actively uses the vocabulary and techniques of children's fairy tales. Sologub combined the best of them in 1905 in the “Book of Fairy Tales”.

Sologub's most famous novel

In 1902, Sologub finished his most famous novel. In the biography and work of the writer, a large place is always given to “The Little Demon”. He worked on it for 10 years. At first they refused to publish it, considering it too strange and risky.

Only in 1905 the novel was published in the magazine "Questions of Life". True, the magazine soon closed, and they did not have time to finish printing the novel. Finally, in 1907, when “The Little Demon” was published as a separate book, readers and critics paid attention to it. Over the next few years, this work became the most popular in Russia.

What is "The Little Demon" about?

In the novel "The Little Demon" Fyodor Sologub talks about a well-known topic. The biography and creativity (briefly outlined in the article) of the writer are inextricably linked with the fate of provincial teachers, one of whom was the author himself. So the hero of this work is a gymnasium teacher in the remote province of Ardalyon Peredonov.

It is noticeable that the author treats his hero with disdain. He calls his feelings dull and his consciousness corrupting. Everything that reaches his consciousness turns into dirt and abomination. Faults in objects please him, but he could only depress people’s feelings.

The main traits of the hero are sadism, selfishness and envy. And they are pushed to the limit. The embodiment of his darkness and horror is the image of the missing piece, which Peredonov sees everywhere.

Experiments in dramaturgy

After writing “The Little Demon”, Sologub focused on dramaturgy. The short biography of the hero, set out in our article, mentions that it was this type of literature that he preferred from 1907 to 1912.

His plays clearly demonstrate the author's philosophical views. The first experiments for the stage were the mystery “Liturgy for Me” and the play “The Gift of the Wise Bees”. In 1907, he wrote the tragedy “Victory of Death,” in which the legend of the origin of Charlemagne is detailed, and love becomes an instrument of a special “magic” will. It is noteworthy that the play was originally called "Victory of Love." The replacement of love with death for Sologub is proof of internal identity; for him, love and death are one.

This idea is especially clearly manifested in the grotesque play “Vanka the Key-Keeper and the Page Jehan.” At the same time, Sologub actively transfers scenes from the reality around him to the stage. At the same time, productions based on Sologub’s works were rarely successful.

In 1908 he married Anastasia Chebotarevskaya. She was 14 years younger than her husband and worked as a translator. Anastasia was so imbued with the ideas and works of the spouses that she actually became his literary agent. By 1910, she was organizing a real literary salon in their new apartment on Razyezzhaya Street. New contemporary poets were regularly invited here. Igor Severyanin, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Yesenin were guests here.

In the early 1910s, under the influence of young talents, Sologub became interested in futurism. Gets close to Vasilisk Gnedov, Ivan Ignatiev.

Novel "The Legend in the Making"

Sologub repeatedly formulated his philosophical ideas in numerous articles and essays. In a fictionalized form, they took shape in the novel “The Legend in the Making.” This is the name of the trilogy, which includes the works “Drops of Blood”, “Queen Ortrud” and “Smoke and Ashes”.

The main character of the trilogy is again a teacher. This time by the surname Trirodov. A children's colony has been founded on his estate, in which the so-called "quiet children" live. They allow Trirodov to feel the fullness of life around him.

Unthinkable things are happening outside the estate, just like everywhere else in Russia at that time. The Cossacks are breaking up demonstrations, the intelligentsia are having life-or-death disputes, political parties are waging an uncompromising struggle. Trirodov, an engineer and chemist by training, is trying to confront this reality.

The heroes of Sologub's past works come to him - the former madman Peredonov, who became vice-governor, and even Jesus Christ.

Critics received the novel with bewilderment. Everything was unusual, from the genre to the incredible mixture of magic and topical problems of reality.

Revolution of 1917

Sologub accepted the February Revolution with delight and had high hopes for it. In March 1917 he participated in the newly formed Union of Artists. Soon his articles and publications took on a pronounced anti-Bolshevik character.

Meanwhile, in the Union he heads a literary group and is preparing to convene a Council of Artists. But in his journalism, a sense of impending disaster is increasingly visible.

After the October Revolution, Sologub's journalistic statements were devoted to freedom of speech; he treated the Bolsheviks with open hostility. It was difficult for all creative people at that time. As critic Lev Kleinbort recalls, writers turned into lecturers and lived off rations. Sologub did not give lectures, survived by selling things, without being able to publish, he wrote several books of his poems by hand a day and sold them.

In 1919, he turned to the Soviet government for permission to leave the country. We managed to get the go-ahead only after a year and a half. However, this difficult time broke the writer’s wife. Her psyche was shaken. In September 1921, she drowned herself in the Zhdanovka River, throwing herself from the Tuchkov Bridge.

After the death of his wife, Sologub gave up thoughts of emigration.

New publications

During the NEP period, the publishing life of Russia revived. His new novel, “The Snake Charmer,” was even published in the Soviet Union. This realistic narrative about the relationship between workers and their masters against the backdrop of the Volga expanses was unlike anything he had written before.

Sologub published several collections of poetry, but they soon stopped publishing him. He worked a lot, but everything went to the table. To fill the void in his life, he concentrated on working at the St. Petersburg Writers' Union. He was even elected its chairman.

In 1924, the 40th anniversary of his literary activity was widely celebrated. None of the participants in the celebration imagined that since then not a single book of his would be published.

Death of a Writer

At the same time, Sologub continued to write a lot. In 1927, he worked on the novel in verse "Gregory Kazarin", at which time he was overcome by a serious illness. Illnesses tormented him for a long time, but before he managed to suppress them. Now there are complications. In the summer he no longer got out of bed.

Famous for its representatives. Their names, along with their unforgettable works, are known to everyone who considers themselves even a little connoisseur of literature. There are poets whose poems are remembered against their will. This includes Fyodor Sologub. A short biography, an overview of creativity and a description of the direction in which the poems were created awaits you below.

About the writer

Fyodor Sologub is a Russian writer, poet, publicist, translator and teacher. He was one of the brightest representatives of the Silver Age and an apologist for Russian symbolism. His work is so extraordinary and ambiguous that many critics still cannot come to the only correct interpretations of the images and heroes created by the poet. Sologub, whose biography and work are still the subject of study and search for new symbols, is a multifaceted creator of poetry and prose. His poems amaze with their motifs of loneliness, mysticism and mystery, and his novels attract attention, shock and do not let go until the last page.

History of the nickname

The poet's real name is Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov.

The Northern Messenger magazine became a launching pad for the poet. In the 90s of the 19th century, Sologub’s poetry was published in this publication, and in large volumes.

The role of a symbolist poet required a sonorous name. The editorial staff of the magazine came up with the first variants of pseudonyms, among which the option “Sollogub” was proposed. This surname was borne by a noble family, the prominent representative of which was Vladimir Sollogub, a writer and prose writer. To make differences, Fedor decides to remove one letter.

In 1893, the magazine published the poem “Creativity,” signed under the pseudonym Fyodor Sologub. The writer's biography hides many events in which members of the editorial board of this magazine took part. The Northern Messenger gave the poet a worthy incentive for development and growth.

Fyodor Sologub, short biography. Childhood

The writer was born on March 1, 1863 in St. Petersburg. His father was from the Poltava province.

The family lived very poorly, the father was a serf and made his living as a tailor.

The parents of the future poet were educated; there were books in the house, and the father taught the children to read and write, played for them, talked about the theater and passed on those grains of knowledge about world culture and literature that he had.

When, two years after Fyodor’s birth, his little sister was born, the family’s life became more difficult financially. The family was finally driven into poverty by the death of their father in 1867. The mother was left with the children in her arms, without a means of subsistence. She was forced to become a servant for a rich family. In this noble Agapov family, a young poet grew up, to whom the aristocrats treated him favorably, helped his self-education, and shared rare books, which Sologub was very keen on. The poet's biography will further be rich in random people and meetings that helped him overcome life's obstacles and find himself.

However, the poet’s childhood in the Agapovs’ house also had its dark sides. The world of books, science and music that young Fyodor became familiar with in the house contrasted incredibly sharply with the atmosphere of the smoky kitchen and laundry room in heavy steam, where his mother worked until she completely lost her strength to feed her children. Sometimes she took out her fatigue on her children, even going so far as to beat her for the slightest disobedience. Later the writer would write the story “Consolation”, in which he would express the severity of his shattered childhood world. Sologub reluctantly recalled this in his memoirs; a short biography of the poet often misses these moments, but they are necessary to depict a complete picture of his life and development.

Works that showed the way to the poet

The poet's wife, compiling his biography, talked about three books that Fyodor read in his childhood.

These are "Don Quixote" by Cervantes, Shakespeare and "Robinson Crusoe" by Defoe. The impression from what he read was so strong for a very young boy that it gave rise to a talent that was destined to blossom in adulthood and create a great poet, working under the pseudonym Sologub. A short biography written by his wife said that these books were "a kind of gospel."

But the work of Pushkin and Lermontov, its main motives were alien to young Sologub. N. was much closer in spirit to him, the images of the poor man and his difficult fate were transformed and found their place and reflection in the future poetry of his successor. In his youth, Fyodor Sologub was amazed at the realism with which Nekrasov described the experiences and suffering of the common man.

The work of S. Nadson also had a significant influence on the formation of the writer’s worldview and talent.

Youth and self-discovery

The poet's youth was influenced by world literature and Russian classics, which he had the opportunity to read. It was thanks to this opportunity that young Sologub was able to develop his talent (the biography written by the poet’s wife gives a very clear idea of ​​this).

At the age of fifteen, Fyodor Sologub became a student at the Teachers' Institute in St. Petersburg. The young poet came here with ambiguous thoughts and thanks to the patronage of the Agapov family and teacher Fyodor, he discerned in the boy a sharp mind and a talent that required cutting. Literally the first classes opened up a completely new world of creativity and freedom for the poet.

The director of the institute was K.K. Saint-Hilaire, a highly educated man with progressive and innovative views. Thanks to his enthusiasm, the most advanced teachers of the time were attracted to teaching. Among the students, most of whom were from wealthy families, Fedor was a complete stranger. He was not attracted to student gatherings and festivities. While his classmates were having fun, he was translating classics and taking his first steps in prose. With the beginning of his studies at the institute, Sologub will begin the novel “Night Dews”. The poet's biography will tell us that he will never finish this novel, but it will be a good attempt that will enrich him with experience.

In 1882, the future symbolist writer graduated with honors from the institute and left for the remote village of Kresttsy. He will take his mother and sister Olga with him. Here he found work as a teacher, as well as ten years of wandering around the provinces: Velikiye Luki and Vytegra were the temporary home of the writer and his family.

Here, in the “bear corner,” the writer suffered madly from his loneliness and the “provincial swamp.” Later he will write about this, saying that the teacher is doomed to loneliness and misunderstanding.

First steps in poetry

The poet's first poems appeared, according to some sources, when he was a twelve-year-old boy. Fyodor Sologub (whose biography tells little about his development as an author) in adulthood often recalled with bitterness the hardships of his youth, when there was no support and understanding, and he had to achieve everything himself.

With all his might, young Fyodor was sure that he was destined to become a poet, and he swore to himself that he would not give up his calling, no matter how difficult it might be for him. And fate did not skimp on trials. If we don’t talk about the material difficulties in which the writer’s orphaned family lived, there was also a lot of moral torment for the gifted young man. He lived with his mother and sister in a provincial town, where there were fewer opportunities than obstacles. His poems were published in weak provincial magazines with a limited number of readers, fame and recognition still did not come to the poet.

"Northern Herald"

The year 1891 became a turning point for the poet, when fate brought him to the capital and gave him a completely random meeting with Nikolai Maksimovich Minsky, a representative of the so-called mystical symbolism. The significance of this meeting was that, despite the short communication, F. Sologub (the biography written by the poet’s wife vividly describes this meeting) would leave Minsky his small collection of poems (literally a couple of hundred early poems). This year was the year of the birth and transformation of the already known magazine “Northern Herald”. Its creators: N. Minsky, Z. Gippius and A. Volynsky were busy searching for works that would be a worthy illustration of N. Minsky’s newly-minted manifesto “In the light of conscience...”. Surprisingly, the young poetry of Sologub turned out to be in place, which helped to design the editorial magazine, and finally allowed the young poet to establish himself in the mainstream of symbolism.

Maturity

In the fall of 1892, Fyodor Sologub moved to St. Petersburg. After the province that almost destroyed him, he breaks into the Symbolist society with his innovation and desire to create.

Here he finds a position as a teacher at the city Nativity School. While coming to life here, the writer softened many scenes of his brilliant but difficult novels “The Little Demon” and “Heavy Dreams.” And the place of action of his works was transferred to the “provincial cities”, but for some reason not to the capital, in which he spent all his maturity and loved with all his soul.

“Northern Messenger” becomes for the writer both a place of learning and a means through which his poems finally become known.

In 1908, Sologub Fedor Kuzmich (the writer’s biography does not fully describe this stage of life) left his career as a teacher and married Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, a writer and translator.

In 1913, with his wife, he went on a trip to the cities of Russia, visiting almost four dozen of them.

In 1918, the poet had the honor of being chairman of the Union of Workers of Fiction.

On December 5, 1927, the writer passed away at the age of sixty-four, leaving behind a huge legacy of the brightest poetry and prose of symbolism.

Brief overview of creativity

The work of the poet and writer is rich and multifaceted. Although critics themselves later attributed his poetry and prose to symbolism, many features of his works go beyond this direction.

Fyodor Kuzmich began his Sologub (a short biography written by Anastasia Chebotareva talks about this) with poetry.

Later, at the teacher's institute, he makes an attempt to create a prose epic, “Night Dew.” Around the same time, the poem “Loneliness” was born, which was never destined to be published.

The poet's poems are published in the St. Petersburg Severny Vestnik.

In 1902, the writer completed work on his novel “The Little Demon.” The work tells about the insane, unhealthy soul of the sadistic teacher Ardalyon Peredonov. Because of its frankness and “riskiness,” the novel was doomed to “life on the table.” However, in 1905, the magazine “Problems of Life” began to publish the work. Due to the closure of the magazine, publications were cut short, which did not give the novel the opportunity to fully reveal itself.

In 1907, “The Little Demon” was finally published in full and from that time to the present day remains one of the most famous and studied books in Russian literature.

The main motives of F. Sologub's poetry

Despite the fact that the writer’s novels occupy a worthy place in the world of literature, his poetry is no less interesting for its originality and unusually light, airy style.

It is this lightness of syllable that strikes Sologub. The writer’s biography is full of his creative quests and experiences, which are reflected in his poems; they are easy and read in one breath.

The main theme of the poems is the themes of sadness, suffering, existence without meaning and purpose of life, characteristic of symbolism and decadence.

Mystical themes of the influence of higher powers on life can be traced in the poems “Devil's Swing” and “One-Eyed Dashing.” Also, the weakness of man, his powerlessness in the face of life’s obstacles runs through all of Sologub’s poetry.

Finally

We briefly told you about the writer who left a literary legacy that can safely be put on a par with Blok and Tolstoy. Fyodor Sologub (biography and creativity, photo of the writer - all this is in the article) is a writer and poet, prose writer and playwright who reflected the dark sides of life in his work. But he did it so skillfully and interestingly that his works are read in one breath and remain in memory forever.

Fedor Sologub(real name Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov; February 17 (March 1) 1863, St. Petersburg - December 5, 1927, Leningrad) - Russian poet, writer, playwright, publicist . One of the most prominent representatives symbolism and covering all of EuropeFin de siècle.

Fedor Sologub was born in St. Petersburg into the family of a tailor, former peasant of the Poltava province K. A. Teternikov. The family lived poorly. When Fyodor's father died in 1867, his mother was hired by the Agapov family, St. Petersburg nobles, for whom she had once served. In the Agapov family, the early years of Fyodor Sologub. People in the house were interested in theater and music, there were books, and Sologub became addicted to reading early on. Knew almost everything by heart N.A. Nekrasov and valued his poetry much higher than Pushkin and Lermontov. Perhaps thanks to this, Sologub felt his poetic gift quite early.

He studied at the parish school, the St. Petersburg district school, and in 1878 Sologub entered the St. Petersburg Teachers' Institute, from which he graduated four years later. During these years, Sologub translated a lot: Shakespeare, Heine, Goethe; translated poems by Hungarian and Polish poets, and the Icelandic saga “Edda”. He also tried to write prose: in 1879 he began the epic novel “Night Dew” about the destinies of three generations, as well as a theoretical study on the form of the novel. And although such a grandiose plan was not completed, it gave a lot to the young writer, being a necessary literary practice. In the last year of study, the poem “Loneliness” was written, dedicated to N. Nekrasov.

After graduating from the institute, having defended his diploma with honors, in July 1882, Fyodor Sologub went to teach in the northern provinces - first in Krestsy, then in Velikiye Luki (in 1885) and Vytegra (in 1889) - spending a total of ten years in the province. While teaching, Sologub continued to write poetry and began work on a novel (the future “Heavy Dreams”), which took almost a decade. The young poet’s first publication was the fable “The Fox and the Hedgehog,” published in the magazine “Spring” on January 28, 1884, signed by “Ternikov”; this date marked the beginning of the literary activity of Fyodor Sologub. In subsequent years, several more poems were published in small newspapers and magazines.

In September 1892, Fyodor Sologub returned to St. Petersburg, where he was appointed as a teacher at the Rozhdestvensky City School. By this time, Sologub was already familiar with some people of the new art, first of all, with N. Minsky, one of the first Russian decadents, who at the beginning of the year handed over his poems to the editor of the Northern Messenger, A. L. Volynsky. It was at the insistence of Minsky that it was decided to give him a pseudonym; the initial version of “Sollogub” was proposed by Volynsky. The pseudonym first appeared in print in 1893 in the April issue of the magazine “Northern Herald” (it signed the poem “Creativity”). For a year and a half, it was sometimes used, sometimes not, until it finally became established. Sologub's first published story, “Ninochka's Mistake” (1894), was published under the signature “Fyodor Mokhovikov.” Without attribution in 1895-1897. Severny Vestnik published many reviews of books, mainly on pedagogy.

From the second half of the 90s, the personal contacts of the writer, who gradually entered the literary circles of St. Petersburg, expanded. Sologub often visited the Merezhkovskys, whose regular guests were K. Balmont, A. Chekhov, and later V. Rozanov. I attended the “Wednesdays” of the “World of Art” circle, the “Fridays” of K. Sluchevsky, and finally, poetry meetings began to take place at Sologub himself on Sundays, which were attended by the first Russian decadents, Vl. Gippius, A. Dobrolyubov and I. Konevskoy.

At the end of December 1895, Fyodor Sologub’s first book was published: “Poems, book one.” Most of the poems contained in it were written in 1892-1895. (at the earliest in 1887) - in the years when the individual poetic language and basic lyrical moods were finally defined and strengthened. It was followed in 1896 by the novel “Heavy Dreams” and “Shadows” - a combined collection of stories and a second book of poems. Sologub published all three books himself in a small, although usual at that time, circulation; he also had to distribute them himself, in which he was helped with advice by L. Ya. Gurevich, publisher of the Northern Messenger.

In April 1897, a split occurred between the editors of Severny Vestnik and Sologub. Relations were not easy before, but in recent years the differences in views between the editors and the poet have worsened. In December 1896, Volynsky wrote a sharp article on the new art, in which he condemned the “decadents” and welcomed the “symbolists”; Sologub was listed among the “decadents”. Sologub began collaborating with the Sever magazine. At the beginning of 1899, Sologub transferred from Rozhdestvensky to Andreevsky City School on Vasilyevsky Island. There he became not only a teacher, but also an inspector with a government-owned apartment at the school according to his status.

In 1904, the Third and Fourth Books of Poems were published, collecting poems from the turn of the century under one cover. “Collected Poems 1897-1903” was a kind of boundary between decadence and the subsequent symbolism of Sologub, in which the symbols of Sologub the poet were established. At the same time, in Sologub’s decadence and symbolism there was no sharp and disharmonious accumulation of aesthetic paradoxes or deliberate mystery or understatement. On the contrary, Sologub strove for extreme clarity and precision - both in lyricism and in prose.

By the mid-1900s. The literary circle, which met in the writer’s house on Sundays since the mid-1890s, became one of the centers of literary life in St. Petersburg. On Sundays, Sologub's conversations were exclusively literary, first at the table, then in the master's office, where poems, dramas, and stories were read. Among the visitors to Sologub’s “Sundays” were Z. Gippius, D. Merezhkovsky, N. Minsky, A. Volynsky, A. Blok, M. Kuzmin, V. Ivanov, S. Gorodetsky, A. Remizov, K. Chukovsky, G. Chulkov ; Andrei Bely and V. Bryusov came from Moscow.

In 1904, Fyodor Sologub entered into a permanent cooperation agreement with Novosti and Birzhevaya Gazeta. It lasted just under a year, during which about seventy articles were published, and dozens more remained unpublished. The range of topics that Sologub touched upon in his journalism was shaped both by his official activities and by the most pressing issues of the time: school, children, the Russo-Japanese War, the international situation, revolution, Jewish rights.

During the First Russian Revolution of 1905-06. Sologub's political tales, published in revolutionary magazines, enjoyed great success. “Fairy tales” are a special genre for Fyodor Sologub. Brief, with a simple and witty plot, often beautiful prose poems, and sometimes repulsive with their stuffy reality, they were written for adults, although Sologub liberally used children's vocabulary and techniques of children's fairy tales. In 1905, Sologub collected part of the fairy tales published by that time in the “Book of Fairy Tales” (Grif publishing house), and the “political fairy tales” written at the same time were included in the book of the same name, published in the fall of 1906. In addition to newspaper articles and “fairy tales,” Sologub responded to the revolution with his fifth book of poems, “Motherland.” It was published in April 1906.

In March 1907, Sologub managed to publish his novel “The Little Demon” (finished in 1902 and previously not fully published in the journal “Problems of Life”), the book received not only fair recognition from readers and became the object of analysis by critics, but was simply one of the most popular books of Russia. By that time, Sologub had abandoned journalism and fairy tales, concentrating on drama and a new novel, “The Legend in the Making” (“Navy Chary”). In the fall of 1907, Sologub began preparing the seventh book of poems (these were translations from Verlaine), upon the release of which he planned to publish the eighth book of poems, “The Flame Circle,” which embodied all of Sologub’s mathematical symbolism.

In the work of Sologub 1907-1912. dramaturgy was given a predominant place. His dramas, more than his fiction, were influenced by his philosophical views, and his first dramatic experience was the mystery play “Liturgy for Me” (1906). Love, united with death, works a miracle in Sologub’s early play “The Gift of the Wise Bees” (1906), written based on the ancient myth of Laodamia and Protesilaus. In the tragedy “Victory of Death” (1907), love is used as an instrument of “magical” will. In the draft version, the tragedy was called “Victory of Love” - Sologub saw in the changing poles of opposites not an aggravation of antagonism, but an internal identity, and the poles in his works often changed (“Love and Death are one,” sound the final words in the play) . This identity of opposites was fully reproduced in the grotesque play “Vanka the Key Holder and the Page Jehan.” In a similar way, another Russian folk tale, “Night Dances,” was reworked for the stage. The premiere of the play directed by Evreinov took place on March 9, 1909 at the Liteiny Theater in St. Petersburg; The roles were played not by professional actors, but by poets, writers and artists: S. Gorodetsky, L. Bakst, I. Bilibin, M. Voloshin, B. Kustodiev, A. Remizov, N. Gumilyov, M. Kuzmin and others.

In 1908, Sologub married translator Anastasia Chebotarevskaya. Their earliest, superficial, acquaintance took place in the fall of 1905 with Vyacheslav Ivanov. Then the 28-year-old translator moved to St. Petersburg from Moscow, having previously studied for four years at French higher educational institutions. Having closely embraced Sologub’s work, Chebotarevskaya did not limit herself to articles about the writer, but also began to delve into all her husband’s literary connections, trying to strengthen them; she became, one might say, his literary agent. In 1910, Sologub and Chebotarevskaya moved to house 31 on Razyezzhaya Street, where, through the efforts of Chebotarevskaya, a real salon was set up, in which, in the words of K. Erberg, “almost the entire theatrical, artistic and literary Petersburg of that time gathered.” Special evenings were held in the salon on Razyezzhaya in honor of new interesting poets - there were evenings of Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Yesenin, Igor Severyanin.

Chebotarevskaya’s creative collaboration with Fyodor Sologub was also expressed in the writing of several joint stories, articles and plays - the stories “The Old House” and “The Path to Damascus”, the plays “Love over the Abyss”, “The Victorious Dream” and “A Stone Thrown into the Water” " Sologub and Chebotarevskaya The story “Cold Christmas Eve” generally belongs to the pen of Chebotarevskaya alone, although it was published under the name of Fyodor Sologub. Sometimes her own articles in newspapers were signed with the name of Fyodor Sologub - this way they were published more willingly and, accordingly, were paid more.

In the early 1910s, Fyodor Sologub became interested in futurism. In 1912, Sologub, mainly through Chebotarevskaya, became close to a group of St. Petersburg ego-futurists (Ivan Ignatiev, Vasilisk Gnedov, etc.). Sologub’s lyrics were consonant with the ideas of egofuturism, and Sologub and Chebotarevskaya took part with interest in the almanacs of the egofuturist publishing houses “The Enchanted Wanderer” and “Petersburg Herald.”

Against the backdrop of increased public interest in new art and in the writings of the author of “The Legend in the Making” in particular, Fyodor Sologub conceived a series of trips around the country with poetry readings and lectures on new art that promoted the principles of symbolism. After thorough preparation and the premiere of the lecture “The Art of Our Days” on March 1, 1913 in St. Petersburg, the Sologubs went on tour together with Igor Severyanin. Their trip to Russian cities lasted more than a month. The main theses of the lecture “The Art of Our Days” were compiled by Chebotarevskaya based on the notes and writings of Sologub. At the same time, the previous works of D. Merezhkovsky, N. Minsky, V. Ivanov, A. Bely, K. Balmont and V. Bryusov were taken into account. To summarize, the trips can generally be called a success - Sologuba met with great success in many cities of Russia, especially thanks to the young students. After the lecture they came, asked questions, took autographs.

Fyodor Sologub perceived the First World War as a fatal sign that could bring many instructive, useful fruits for Russian society, as a means of awakening the consciousness of the nation in the Russian people. However, by 1917, Sologub had lost faith in such a mystical quality of war for Russia. You can trace the writer’s attitude to the war and various social issues from the articles that Sologub published weekly in the Birzhevye Vedomosti. The pathos of Sologub’s military journalism formed the basis of the lecture “Russia in Dreams and Expectations”, with which Sologub gave in 1915-1917. traveled throughout the Russian Empire. In addition, the poet also responded to the war with a book of poems “War” (1915) and a collection of short stories “The Ardent Year” (1916), which received extremely lukewarm reviews in the press. The poems and stories were intended to support the spirit and strengthen hope for victory, but their content turned out to be artificial, often tinged with sentimentality, so unusual for Fyodor Sologub.

Sologub met the February revolution with enthusiasm. However, Fyodor Sologub reacted to the October events that followed with unconditional hostility. In his speeches and journalism, Sologub not only opposed the new government, but tried to form public opinion that could influence the Bolsheviks in the field of cultural policy. During the years of the revolution, the Moscow Book Publishing House published two new books by Fyodor Sologub: “The Scarlet Poppy” (poems, 1917) and “The Blind Butterfly” (stories, 1918).

Rejection of the surrounding situation prompted Fyodor Sologub, who was fundamentally against emigration, to apply for permission to leave several times in the period 1919-1921. Finally, permission was received, and departure to Revel was planned for September 25, 1921. However, the agonizing wait broke the psyche of Sologub’s wife. On the evening of September 23, 1921, Chebotarevskaya committed suicide by throwing herself from the Tuchkov Bridge into the Zhdanovka River. The death of his wife was a tragedy for Fyodor Sologub. Sologub will constantly turn to her memory in his work in the remaining years, writing a number of poems, united in memory of his wife, combining them into the “Anastasia” cycle. After the death of his wife, Sologub changed his mind about leaving Russia.

In mid-1921, the Soviet government issued several decrees that marked the beginning of the era of the New Economic Policy - private trade and private enterprise were allowed. Publishing and printing activities immediately revived, and foreign contacts were restored. At the same time, new books by Fyodor Sologub appeared. The first of these books by Sologub was the novel “The Snake Charmer,” published in the early summer of 1921 in Berlin. The novel was written intermittently from 1911 to 1918 and became the last in the writer’s work.

The first post-revolutionary book of poems, “The Blue Sky,” in which Sologub selected unpublished poems from 1916–21, was published in September 1921 in Estonia; the erotic short story “The Queen of Kisses,” with illustrations by Vladimir Grigoriev, and Sologub’s last collection of stories, “Numbered Days,” were also published there. . From the end of 1921, Sologub’s books began to be published in Soviet Russia: the poetry collections “Incense” (1921), “One Love” (1921), “Road Fire” (1922), “Cathedral Blaze” (1922), “The Magical Cup” were published "(1922), the novel "The Snake Charmer" (1921), a separate illustrated edition of the short story "The Queen of Kisses" (1921), translations (Honoré de Balzac, Paul Verlaine, Heinrich von Kleist).

In the spring of 1922, Sologub turned to the poetry of Paul Verlaine, and then both new translations and corrections of those previously published in the 1908 book were made. Sologub placed some translations of Verlaine’s poems, carried out at the same time, in the anthology “Sagittarius” (1922), and a year later the second edition of the book of translations was published by the Petrograd publishing house. This book of Verlaine's translations can be conditionally called the last new book by Fyodor Sologub: all subsequent ones were reprints of previous books.

The last big event in the life of Fyodor Sologub was the celebration of his anniversary - the fortieth anniversary of literary activity - celebrated on February 11, 1924. The celebration, organized by the writer’s friends, took place in the hall of the Alexandrinsky Theater and attracted a large audience. Wreaths and telegrams of congratulations came from all cultural organizations of the USSR. E. Zamyatin, M. Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, O. Mandelstam gave speeches on stage. Among the organizers of the celebration are A. Akhmatova, A. Volynsky, Vs. Christmas. This celebration paradoxically turned out to be the farewell of Russian literature to Fyodor Sologub; no one then imagined that after the holiday not a single new book of his would be published.

In the mid-20s. Sologub returned to public speaking and reading poetry. As a rule, they took place in the form of “writers’ evenings”, where, along with Sologub, A. A. Akhmatova, E. Zamyatin, A. N. Tolstoy, M. Zoshchenko, Vs. Rozhdestvensky, K. Fedin, K. Vaginov and others. According to one of the organizers, Sologub’s name on the poster already ensured the success of the event in advance. Only at such performances could Sologub’s new poems be heard, since they did not appear in print. The poems were wonderful. Having stopped writing prose and drama, Sologub devoted himself entirely to pure lyricism.

In addition, during this period, Sologub wrote about a dozen anti-Soviet fables (in early 1925 and spring 1926), which were read only in a narrow circle. According to R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, “until the end of his days, Sologub fiercely hated the Soviet regime, and did not call the Bolsheviks anything other than “stupid-minded.” As an internal opposition to the regime (especially after the issue of emigration disappeared) there was a rejection of the new spelling and the new style of chronology in creativity and personal correspondence.

In May 1927, in the midst of work on the novel in verse “Grigory Kazarin,” Fyodor Sologub became seriously ill. Since the summer, Fyodor Kuzmich almost never got out of bed. In the fall, the disease began to worsen.

Most of the major Russian writers of the pre-revolutionary era came from cultured metropolitan families, from the upper middle class. But the best, most refined poet of the first generation of Symbolists was a man from the lower classes, whose strange genius blossomed under the most unfavorable circumstances. Fyodor Sologub (real name Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov) was born in St. Petersburg in 1863. His father was a shoemaker, and after his father’s death his mother became a servant. With the help of her owner, Sologub received a relatively decent education at the Teachers' Institute. Having completed his studies, he received a position as a teacher in a provincial town, eventually became an inspector of primary schools, and in the nineties he was finally transferred to St. Petersburg. Only after the huge success of his famous novel Little devil he was able to leave teaching service and live on literary earnings.

Fedor Sologub (Fedor Kuzmich Teternikov)

In 1905, Sologub was revolutionary, and in 1917 and later he showed extreme rejection of the Bolshevik regime. In the years civil war, he suffered terrible need, but for a long time did not want to leave Russia. However, then the complete impossibility of publishing under the communists still pushed him to ask for permission to travel abroad. Fyodor Sologub obtained permission to emigrate only after much ordeal. The departure was scheduled for September 25, 1921, but literally two days before, on the 23rd, the nervous, prone to madness wife of Fyodor Kuzmich, writer Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, unable to bear the unrest and hardships, committed suicide - she threw herself into the river from the Tuchkov Bridge in Petrograd. After the death of his wife, Sologub did not want to leave his homeland. IN " NEP"In the 1920s, several of his old books were republished in small editions, but no new works were published, despite the fact that in January 1926 he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Writers' Union. Sologub somehow existed thanks to public readings of poetry and constantly cursed the “stupid” Soviet government. He died on December 5, 1927.

"Star Mair". Documentary film by Evgeny Potievsky about Fyodor Sologub

Sologub began writing in the 1880s, but for the first ten years he had no connections with the literary world. His first books were published only in 1896 - three at once: a collection of poems, a collection of short stories and a novel Heavy dreams, which he worked on for over ten years. The next collection of poems and the next collection of stories appeared only in 1904. For his best novel Little devil, on which he worked from 1892 to 1902, Sologub could not find a publisher for many years. It finally began to be published in 1905 in supplements to the magazine, but the magazine closed. And only in 1907 the novel was finally published in book form and was received with a bang. Little devil brought Sologub universal recognition and all-Russian fame. However, in later books, Sologub began to give too much free rein to his moods, which readers did not like; his books no longer had the same success, and after 1910 everyone decided that his talent had declined. A legend in the making(1908–1912) - a very interesting and strangely original book - was met with indifference. Sologub's last novel - Snake charmer- decidedly weak, but Sologub’s poems maintained a high level, although lovers of new products and sensations did not like some of their monotony.

In Sologub’s work it is necessary to distinguish two aspects that are not related to each other - this is his Manichaean idealism and a special “complex”, which is the result of a suppressed, vicious libido. There is no doubt that many of Sologub’s works, especially of the last period, would not have been written if not for the need to satisfy this “complex.” To study this issue requires an experienced psychoanalyst, not a literary historian. Enjoying cruelty and humiliation of beauty is one of its main symptoms. The second symptom is the ever-repeating “bare feet” detail. It's like an obsession. In all Sologub's novels and stories, barefoot heroines wander around.

The stories of Fyodor Sologub are the connecting link between his poetry and novels. Some of them are short sketches in the style heavy dreams And Little devil. Others, especially those written after 1905, are frankly fantastical and symbolic. In them, Sologub gives complete freedom to his pathological sensual demands. Typical examples – Dear page And Lady in bonds. Miracle of the Youth Lin- a revolutionary plot in a conventionally poetic setting - one of the best examples of Russian prose of that time. In general, Sologub’s prose is beautiful: transparent, clear, balanced, poetic, but with a sense of proportion. In later works, however, an irritating mannerism appears. Stand apart Political tales(1905): delightful in the causticity of sarcasm and in the rendering of the folk language, rich (like any folk speech) in verbal effects and reminiscent of the grotesque manner of Leskov.

Sologub's plays are worse than his other works. They have little dramatic merit. Victory of death And Gift of the wise bees- magnificent spectacles symbolizing the author’s philosophical concepts. They have less sincerity than his poetry, their beauty is false. More interesting play Vanka the Keykeeper and Page Jehan: a funny and ironically told familiar plot about a young servant who seduces the mistress of the house, develops in two parallel versions - in medieval France and in Muscovite Rus'. This is a satire on Russian civilization, with its rudeness and poverty of forms, and at the same time a symbol of the deep imagery of the bad confusion of life throughout the world and in all centuries.

Translations carried out within the chronological framework of one literary movement are not only of instructive interest from a philological point of view (not to mention historical), but, as a rule, have certain artistic advantages over all subsequent ones. The appeal of a Russian writer, in particular a symbolist, to the work of a contemporary poet, a like-minded poet close to him in terms of his creative personality, literary views and sympathies, often endowed his translation experiences with undeniable and unique advantages.

As for research interest, these translations could undoubtedly serve as reliable material for identifying the national identity of a particular branch of a literary movement, material at least no less reliable than the theoretical statements of its representatives. In this case, the very choice of works to be translated is not without interest, as well as the complex system of substitutions that, whether programmatically declared or carried out subconsciously, is present in any translation work. Among the major phenomena of Russian literary life at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. The least studied, perhaps, are the translations of Fyodor Sologub from the French Symbolists, which are quite revealing in many respects.

For Sologub, as for other Russian “senior” symbolists, orientation towards Western European culture was of fundamental importance. This orientation determined the place that translations occupied in their work (Donchin 1958: 10). It is no coincidence that Bryusov considered it possible to make his debut in literature with translations from Verlaine, and Sologub prepared the collection “Paul Verlaine. Poems selected and translated by Fyodor Sologub" (1908) was called in the Preface to it the seventh book of his poems.

Sologub began translating early, from the late 1870s, and continued to translate, mainly from French and German, until the end of his life. He is the author of classic translations of many poems by Verlaine, Voltaire’s philosophical story “Candide, or Optimism,” and Maupassant’s novel “Strong as Death.” Over the years, he devoted a lot of time and effort to attempts to recreate on Russian soil the poems of French poets - Hugo, Lecomte de Lisle, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, German expressionist poets - Goll, Tsekh, Ukrainian - Shevchenko and Tychyna, Hungarian - Petofi, Jewish - Bialik , Armenian - Nahapet Kuchak, the poem of the Provençal poet F. Mistral “Mireya”, the drama of G. Kleist (together with A. Chebotarevskaya). Moreover, working on translations, by his own admission, gave him great pleasure. The amplitude of his translation activity (in his youth he translated Euripides and Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Kokhanovsky, Goethe and Heine) is evidence of the breadth of Sologub’s poetic interests. His various translation works were received differently in the press, sometimes with more than restraint. In Sologub’s later translations, Chukovsky discovered “contempt for Shevchenko’s verse sound and meaning” (Chukovsky 1968: 351; see also pp. 350–357). The fact that Sologub, with his distinctive attention to the original, invariably re-voiced it in accordance with the peculiarities of his poetic world, was clearly recognized by his contemporaries. “No, Sologub is not a translator,” wrote I. Annensky in the article “On Modern Lyricism.” - He is too himself in his own transformations, created by himself. And most importantly, he cannot even be poisoned by someone else’s, because he was wisely immunized” (Annensky 1979: 357).

Sologub made the most significant contribution to Russian translation culture with his translations from Verlaine. Sologub was one of those who instilled in the Russian reading public a love for the French poet, and at the same time formed a new reader capable of creating the background against which Russian symbolism developed and gained ground.

By the nineties, French symbolism had already fulfilled in its country the mission for which the Russian poets, grouped around the Northern Messenger in St. Petersburg and around Bryusov in Moscow, were preparing, and decisively updated all means of poetic expression. It is quite natural that, having set themselves the same task somewhat later, Russian writers at first drew a lot of inspiring stimuli and, more specifically, literary techniques from the work of Verlaine. S. A. Vengerov wrote about the exceptional importance of Baudelaire as the immediate predecessor of French symbolism and Verlaine for the first stage of Russian symbolism. At the same time, acquaintance with both national versions of one literary movement leaves no doubt that we were in no way talking about a “translated” literary movement (Izmailov 1911: 296). Suffice it to say that the content that was put into the concept of “symbolism” was too vague to allow the question of direct “translation” to be raised. “What is symbolism? - wrote one of the “younger” French symbolists Remy de Gourmont. - If you stick to the direct, grammatical meaning of the word, almost nothing. If we expand the question more broadly, then this word can outline a whole series of ideas: individualism in literature, freedom of creativity, renunciation of memorized formulations, the desire for everything new, unusual, even strange. It also means idealism, disregard for the facts of the social order, anti-naturalism, the tendency to convey only those features that distinguish one person from another, the desire to flesh out only what is suggested by final conclusions, what existed” (Gurmont 1913: VI) . P. Valery, who attended Mallarmé’s school in his youth, insists even more decisively on the indefinability of clear boundaries of the movement: “What has been called symbolism simply comes down to the desire common to many poetic families (and families at war) to “take away their goods from Music.” This is the only possible solution to this direction. The darkness and strangeness for which so many were reproached him, the seemingly too close connection with English, Slavic or German literature, the confusion of syntax, the confusion of rhythms, the bizarreness of the vocabulary, the obsessive figures<...>all this is easily explained once the basic principle is identified” (Valéry 1976: 366–367). The statement about the “translational” nature of symbolism in Russia is all the more incorrect because for representatives of the younger formation of Russian symbolism, French symbolism turned out to be quite alien on the whole. Like Vyach. Ivanov and Andrei Bely saw him as too rational, rationalistic, and his images too unambiguous and precise (Asmus 1968: 584). Andrei Bely, in an unfinished article he was working on in 1918, reproached the French symbolists for failing to “deepen” symbolism as a worldview and narrowing it to a school that focused all its attention on the problem of style and verbal instrumentation (Bely 1980: 174). In the confessions of younger symbolists there are both inaccuracies and insufficiently substantiated generalizations. According to Vyach. Ivanov, he and his like-minded people had neither historical nor ideological grounds to combine their work with the techniques and method of thinking inherent in the French symbolists. He argued that the main point of difference between both schools was the attitude towards the logical significance of a word. If Mallarmé “only wants our thought, having described wide circles, to descend precisely to the one point he has outlined,” for the Russian school symbolism “is, on the contrary, energy that releases from the facets of the given, giving the soul the movement of an unfolding spiral” (Ivanov 1916, 157). In the understanding of both French symbolism and Russian with Vyach. Not only senior Symbolists, such as Sologub or Bryusov, would disagree with Ivanov here, but also younger ones, for example, Voloshin, who was close to the Symbolists. Moreover, the interpretation of Mallarmé and the assessment of his work by Vyach. Ivanov are extremely subjective.

At that time when Vyach. Ivanov denied the historical and ideological connection of Russian symbolism with French and gave a not very flattering description of Mallarmé’s work; in general, the symbolist trend in Russian poetry, regardless of disputes about its origins, had long been dominant, and the names of Verlaine and his like-minded people and compatriots were surrounded by reverence. Meanwhile, in the early 90s, the first steps of representatives of the new poetry, relying on the authority of the Symbolists of France, met with fierce resistance.

Like any new literary movement, whether it is instilled from the outside or spontaneously generated (in fact, the emergence of any literary movement is a combination of these two principles and trends), Russian symbolism encountered strong opposition, motivated both aesthetically, ethically, and even patriotically , since the first Russian symbolists persistently declared, if not direct dependence on the French model, then at least their sympathies for the symbolists of France who were ahead of them in creating new poetry. N. N. Nikolaev called for resorting to effective measures to eradicate this “sticky disease.” He characterized Bryusov’s translation of Verlaine’s famous poem “The sky above the city is crying” as follows, noting its most innovative features: “In addition to these very ugly repetitions instead of rhymes, we see here other repetitions that make this expression of pale, causeless melancholy even paler, more colorless. At the same time, this does not make the poem at all more valuable, since the reader receives the impression of melancholy not from the same feeling that excites the author and which he would like to convey to the reader, but simply from his boring and bad manner of writing, from the difficulty with which he is given the process of writing and controlling his tongue.” K.P. Medvedsky was surprised at the seriousness of the desire of the new “sectarians” to transplant theories completely alien to Russian literature onto domestic soil. He argued that the salvation of Russian literature lies in love for the homeland, that real Russian writers are “strong in their homeland,” and only this strength will save Russian literature from being carried away by foreign graphomaniacs and charlatans, and Russian writers from becoming cosmopolitans, people without family, tribe and fatherland.

Meanwhile, the number of enthusiastic admirers of the talent of Verlaine and Mallarmé in Russia multiplied; readers could get acquainted with examples of their poetic creativity in Russian translations, from critical works, original and translated, they received a fairly specific and clear idea of ​​the uniqueness of their talents. Thus, from an article by Z. Vengerova, who is one of the most talented popularizers of French symbolism in Russia, Russian readers learned that all these Mallarmé sonnets, incomprehensible at first reading, are explained by “the poet’s philosophical worldview, his belief in the eternal harmony of the universe, due to which only the same abstract concepts must evoke the same symbols. He believes in the correct relationships between the world of thought and external nature that have existed since the beginning of time, so that the poet only needs to remind them for them to appear in human consciousness, without needing any explanations.” Of particular interest were the arguments of the French themselves, for example Remy de Gourmont or A. de Regnier, about the revolution in Russian poetry carried out by Verlaine.

Russian symbolists (Bryusov, Sologub, Annensky, Minsky, Ellis, Voloshin) not only translated the works of their French predecessors, not only paid tribute to them, choosing lines from their poems as epigraphs or dedicating their own poems to them (Bryusov, in particular, there are poems dedicated to Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Verhaerne and Maeterlinck or written in their manner), but actively and truly creatively mastered their experience. Verlaine's creative perception was especially fruitful. Russian poets used stylistic devices characteristic of Verlaine - denominative constructions following one another, various kinds of repetitions and anaphors. They relied on the experience of the French poet in their persistent attempts to dramatically update and enrich the metrical repertoire of Russian poetry. Not without the influence of Verlaine's lyrics, in contrast to the poetry of the previous period, the poems of Nadson or Apukhtin, short, flexible rhythms and meters begin to be actively mastered. Like Verlaine, Russian symbolists began to introduce rhymes of different syllables and different words more often (Gasparov 1984: 243–248), less often use exact rhyme and alternation of male and female rhymes, and began to widely use alliteration and enjambement. Their work reflects Verlaine's typical color scheme - gray and black, to which the poet attached symbolic meaning. Verlaine's influence was also evident in the mood (propensity for faded tones, intimacy of sound, etc.). Sometimes the late Verlaine was reminiscent of the contrast and at the same time the fusion of holiness and sin, creating a specifically decadent atmosphere. A very noticeable and striking element of the poetic language of Russian symbolists are the so-called reverse comparisons, rare in Russian poetry of the 19th century. (Kozhevnikova 1986: 17). Meanwhile, reverse comparisons are of key importance in Mallarmé’s poetry, as Russian popularizers of his work also pointed out, citing specific examples. Thus, the novelist, critic and translator P. N. Krasnov wrote about him: “He allowed a completely original and arbitrary arrangement of words, forcing the reader to mentally return to the very beginning of the poem when he read it to the end. This arrangement of words, the omission of some essential particles, strange epithets like “solitude bleue”, completely unexpected comparisons, and it is not even mentioned that the reader is dealing with a comparison, but directly instead of one object, others are put with which it is compared (so, instead of, for example, saying “sun,” Mallarmé says: “beautiful brand of glory,” “golden storm”) - makes his poems ultimately look like charades, and he achieves essentially the opposite result: instead of concentration attention on the subject, it is spent on solving the riddle." There is no doubt that the experience of not only Verlaine, but to some extent Mallarmé too, turned out to be quite useful for the Russian symbolists.

Bryusov was sincerely convinced that “genuine and wide acquaintance with the books of French poets will increase the demands that we place on the creation of poetry, expand the horizons of our writers, and largely improve the technique of our verse” (Bryusov 1913a: XI). Based on this conviction and despite his other conviction - the untranslatability of a poetic work (Bryusov 1987: 99), - Bryusov most actively popularized the work not only of Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud or A. de Regnier, but also of such poets of the younger generation as R. . Gil, F. Viele-Griffen, S. Merrill, whose name even after Bryusov was almost an empty phrase for Russian readers (Bryusov 1909). In sketches of the 90s on symbolism, Bryusov advocated the publication of “luminaries of French symbolism in Russian translation” (Bryusov 1937: 268). Along with Bryusov and slightly inferior to him, Sologub also translated French symbolists from the first steps of his literary activity.

Sologub's acquaintance with Verlaine's lyrics, which opened up new French poetry for him, took place in the late 1880s, around the same time when Bryusov became interested in the work of Verlaine and Mallarmé. Sologub began translating Verlaine in 1889 in Vytegra, while teaching in the “terrible world” of the Russian province. His passion for Verlaine was facilitated by his studies in French, which, however, he studied not to read poetry, but to work on a textbook on geometry. On March 18, 1890, Sologub wrote to V. A. Latyshev: “Since I do not stop studying French. language, then reading the textbook is easy, you have to resort to the dictionary rarely, no more than once over the course of several pages.” However, by the beginning of the 90s, the poet was unlikely to be able to master the language deeply enough. In one of the most famous “Romances without words” “II pleure dans mon coeur” - by the way, one of the most transparent in lexical terms, from a translation point of view it is really almost “wordless” - he was forced to write down four words (еcoeurer , langueur, Quoi, Haine) and check in the French-Russian dictionary for possible translations (1, 38, 335 vol.).

If we take into account the conditions in which Sologub’s interest in Verlaine arose, then his concept of the “mystical irony” of the French poet (discussed below), whose work helped him survive, and perhaps even reminded him of his own seemingly incompatible existence, becomes clearer. a combination of gray routine and depravity of provincial life with breakthroughs of a dreamy nature to high, bright spirituality.

Sologub's perception of contemporary French literature was facilitated by the certain similarity of some characteristic features of French culture to the features of his creative appearance. This undoubted closeness did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. “The homogeneity of literary phenomena is sometimes born not from monkeyiness and fashion, but from the homogeneous beating of hearts<...>) Some of our modern writers would not create dissonance if they were born in France. As milestones, they bring countries closer together. The rays of those suns that burn brightest for the modern world converged in them. One of such writers in our country is Sologub” (Izmailov 1911: 297). We find a more subtle and insightful observation in Vyach. Ivanova: “The Book of Stories” by F. Sologub, Russian in its charming charm and living power of language, drawn from the depths of the elements of the people, Russian in its prophetic penetration into the soul of native nature, seems like a French book in its, new for us, sophistication, in its mastery exquisite, in its artistic simplicity, form” (Ivanov 1904: 47).

Inferior to Bryusov in terms of the number of French symbolists translated and in the number of names of new French poets with whom he introduced Russian readers, Sologub nevertheless covered almost all possible genres in his translations. In addition to the well-known translations from Verlaine (several unpublished versions are preserved in the archive - 1, 38), he translated poems by Rimbaud, most of which have not yet been published (1, 44), prose poems by Rimbaud (part of “Illuminations” also remained unpublished - 1, 44), prose poems by Mallarmé (1, 42). His archive also contains unfinished translations of R. de Gourmont’s play “Lilith” (1, 209) and A. de Regnier’s novel “Twice Beloved” (1, 561). If the translations from Mallarmé and Remy de Gourmont are presented as typewritten copies, partly corrected by hand, and in the case of the novel by A. de Regnier - only an autograph, then individual translations from Verlaine and Rimbaud have been preserved both in white and draft autographs, some of which are dated, and and in typewritten copies.

The reasons that led to the appeal to certain works were, apparently, different. The poems of Verlaine, who was especially close to Sologub, accompanied him throughout his life. It can be assumed that Sologub was interested in the play of R. de Gourmont, a writer who insisted on the “legitimacy of sensual pleasure” and on the sensuality of any “spiritual” pleasure (Lunacharsky 1925: 283), and the novel by A. de Regnier, who knew how to portray strictly in verified forms, the exquisite sophistication of the heartfelt dramas and experiences of the heroes. Probably, Sologub’s attitude towards Rimbaud’s “Illuminations” and Mallarmé’s “Prose Poems” was ambiguous. He could not help but appreciate the outstanding poetic merits of the works of the great French poets, and at the same time, his own aesthetic quests did not intersect with those that Rimbaud and Mallarmé were obsessed with in their complex and unambiguous texts. It seems that M. I. Dikman was right when she suggested (in connection with “Illuminations”) that Sologuba was drawn to this stylistically and rhythmically alien poetic phenomenon by the need to “overcome difficulties” (Dikman 1975: 70).

At the same time, apparently, an important role was played by the desire to enrich Russian literature with the Russian equivalent of such a bright and fruitful genre in France as the “prose poem,” while preserving, if possible, all its specific French features.

Considering that Sologub turned to Verlaine's lyrics at the turn of the 1880-1890s and actively translated them for a number of years, his translations from Mallarmé date back to 1898, in 1905-1908. in Since 1918 he tried to publish a collection of his and Bryusov’s transcriptions of Verlaine’s lyrics and, finally, in 1923 he published the second edition of Verlaine in his translations, it is impossible not to notice the Russian poet’s persistent commitment to the task of recreating the heritage of the Symbolists of France on a national basis.

The first Sologubov translations from Verlaine appeared in 1893-1894. in the magazine "Northern Herald". In 1896-1898 new translations were published in the newspaper “Our Life” and the magazine “Petersburg Life”, in 1904-1905. - in the “New Journal of Foreign Literature, Art and Science”, in 1907 - in the magazine “Education”. Finally, in 1908, Sologub’s translations were published as a separate book, which included thirty-seven poems from the collections “Poimes saturniens”, “La bonne chanson”, “Fktes galantes”, “Romances sans paroles”, “Sagesse”, “Jadis” et Naguére" and "Chansons pour elle". Sixteen translations were published for the first time, some of the poems were published in several versions.

In 1918, Sologub had the idea to publish Verlaine in his own and Bryusov’s translations, based on the fact of their real coexistence in the reader’s consciousness as the most convincing attempts in Russian literature to give their own poetic version of the work of the French poet as a whole. “I heard,” he wrote to Bryusov on September 17, 1918, “that you are getting involved in a big business in Moscow, publishing translated literature. I hope you will remember that I am a diligent translator. By the way, you and I agreed on Verlaine. A combination of our translations could be useful." In February 1919, he sent a list of these translations to the head of the publishing house “World Literature” A. N. Tikhonov, but the plan was not implemented. Nevertheless, Sologub did not abandon the idea of ​​republishing his old translations, as well as presenting Verlaine in versions that corresponded to his new view of translation activity. The second edition of translations from Verlaine, significantly different both in volume and in principles, dates back to 1923. It already presented fifty-three poems, of which ten were published in a revised form, fifteen were translated anew, and sixteen were translated for the first time. In the "Variations" section twenty-two old translations of sixteen poems were presented, while in the first edition different versions of one poem followed one another in the main text, in every sense coexisting and complementing each other as equals.

Of his other translation works, driven by his unflagging interest in French symbolism, Sologub found it possible to publish only a significant part of Rimbaud’s “Illuminations.” Almost all of them were included in the 1st collection of the Futurist publication “Sagittarius” in 1915 (Rimbaud 1915: 173–190). Fifteen prose poems by the French poet were published here, and a year later - in the 2nd collection of “Sagittarius” - another one - “Adoration” (Rimbaud 1916: 113).

Such a clear preference given to Verlaine both by Sologub himself and, apparently, by publishing houses over all other symbolists of France is quite understandable. It was Verlaine, who in a certain sense was only the forerunner of symbolism, a poet in whose mature and late lyric poetry early symbolist trends were most vividly embodied, for Russia became the focus of a new literary movement, its quintessence, its plenipotentiary representative, eclipsing all his contemporaries and followers. Of all the French poets of the Symbolist circle in Russia, only Verlaine became a living literary phenomenon. Like the younger Symbolists of France, the Russian Symbolists realized that it was difficult to rely on the poetic individuality of Rimbaud, who was far ahead of his time, in their own literary searches, and therefore treated his work with some restraint, although outwardly quite respectfully. Alchemical retorts, magic crystals and algebraic formulas, in which, according to Voloshin, Mallarmé closed his ideas (Voloshin 1988: 55), were so generally different from the tasks that the Russian symbolists set for themselves that the indisputability of the authority of the French poet made one suspect a certain internal alienation. This alienation as a consequence of the lack of deep impulses for the active creative assimilation of his heritage did not at all prevent the appearance in the Russian press of sympathetic and quite profound articles about the works of Mallarmé, vivid translations of his poems written by Annensky, Voloshin and Bryusov, or Bryusov’s recognition of his dependence on aesthetic doctrine of the French poet (Bryusov 1976: 202).

The attitude towards Verlaine, who, like Goethe, Byron or Heine earlier, became an integral part of the Russian literary process, was strikingly different from this interested look of erudites and subtle connoisseurs.

Like their French brethren, the Russian Symbolists felt an understandable need to “pull” Verlaine under the definition of “symbolism” and thereby be able to refer to his authority, which from an artistic point of view was undeniable and, naturally, had nothing to do with terminological disputes. “The word symbolism,” wrote Bryusov, “is often given too broad a meaning, meaning in general the entire movement in art that arose at the end of the 19th century. This is an incorrect use of words, because we will not find any specific “symbols” in the works of a number of poets who undoubtedly belonged to this movement and were prominent figures in it, such as, for example, Verlaine” (Bryusov 1976: 183). More often, however, Verlaine's authority was resorted to without any reservations. In one of his few theoretical articles, Sologub wrote: “This diversity of impressions and experiences, this living life of images of art in our souls contributes to the main task of symbolic art - the insight into the world of essences behind the world of phenomena. We perceive the world of entities not rationally and not demonstrably, but only intuitively, not verbally, but musically. It was not in vain that Paul Verlaine set the requirement of art as a testament: “Music, music first of all”” (Sologub 1915: 41). Such an easy assimilation of Verlaine’s poetic innovation on Russian soil, as always in such cases, is explained by many reasons, one of which is the closeness of his work to the element of Russian poetry, including that which, paradoxically, his Russian adherents had to overcome . This closeness, in many ways apparent, of Verlaine’s poems to the lyrics of Fet, Fofanov and their epigones, such common features as musicality, intimacy, melancholic tonality, were fraught with many dangers, as we will have to see when analyzing translations from Verlaine made by poets , far from symbolic mentalities. And at the same time, this closeness shortened the distance, satisfied the aesthetic need, which Mandelstam would later express: “And only the moment of recognition is sweet to us” (Mandelshtam 1974: 110). No matter how brief, for example, Fet’s “moment of recognition” was in Sologubov’s translation of Verlaine’s poem:

This is the bliss of admiration

These are passionate longings,

These are the tremors of the forests,

Embraced by the fresh breeze,

It's in the grayish branches

it fully responded to such a natural need to learn the unknown through the familiar.

Sologub also had special reasons for preferring Verlaine to all other symbolists of France, due to the uniqueness of his creative individuality. In the Preface to the 1908 edition, the Russian poet admitted: “I translated Verlaine, not prompted by anything external. I translated because I loved him” (Verlaine 1908: 7). On a copy, then donated to Blok, stored in the Pushkin House, he wrote: “To Alexander Alexandrovich Blok. Dear and wonderful poet, I give you this book with the same love with which I translated the poems collected here.” Without a doubt, not only of all the Symbolists of France was Verlaine closest to Sologub, but of all the Russian Symbolists Verlaine was closest to Sologub. Sologub might not have been called the Russian Verlaine, but the “kinship of souls” of both poets should have attracted the attention of their contemporaries. Thus, a reviewer of “Russian Wealth” wrote in connection with the publication of the first edition of Sologub’s translations from Verlaine: “There is some similarity between Verlaine and Sologub; It is no coincidence that our poet took up translations from French lyric poetry. The same tragic grimace distorted both of these faces, the same loneliness surrounds their characteristic figures in literature, the same interweaving of frenzied sensuality with the mysticism of otherworldly quest marks their work.” The Russian poet's muse was in tune with the musicality of Verlaine's poems, which were perceived not only by the mind and sight, but also by ear, and sometimes even more by ear than by mind and sight. Sologub was attracted to Verlaine’s poetry by the combination of apparent simplicity and verse sophistication and precision (“Verlaine, who dares to combine in his poems the most common forms and the most everyday sayings with the very sophisticated poetics of Parnassus<...>”(Valerie 1976: 485)), a feature noted in his own lyrics (“However, the simplicity of F. Sologub is precisely Pushkin’s simplicity, which has nothing to do with negligence<...>Such simplicity is, in essence, the highest sophistication, because it is hidden sophistication, accessible only to a keen, sharp eye") (Bryusov 1975: 284). For Sologub, the frank eroticism of Verlaine’s later collections was not only acceptable, but also quite attractive. The motifs of sadness, melancholy and longing that permeate the entire work of the French poet, incomparable to anything in the entire literature of France, could not help but find a response from Sologub, although, using the statement of S. Velikovsky, one can identify a certain difference in this regard between both poets. If the natural environment of Verlaine’s poetry is brooding sadness, twilight and yearning, then Sologub’s element is often viscous horror, darkness and torment (Velikovsky 1987: 84). Of course, not everything about Verlaine Sologub’s lyrics attracted him. Sologub’s creative aspirations were largely alien to the “Parnassian” period of the French poet, although he translated individual poems from early collections. He was also left indifferent by Verlaine’s religious conversion (“There are no Catholic poems here - they seem to me of little interest, little characteristic of Verlaine” (Verlaine 1908: 7)), to which readers owe many of the masterpieces of the collection “Wisdom”, although, again, interpreting them somewhat detached, Sologub beautifully translated some of the famous poems of this collection.

In the Preface to the 1908 collection, Sologub gave readers the key to his interpretation of both the work of the French poet and the principles that guided him when choosing certain poems for translation. “In the harmony and melody of poetry,” M.I. Dikman rightly noted, “Sologub finds spiritual liberation, “purification,” “catharsis.” And this is the aesthetic catharsis that is inherent in his hopelessly cruel lyrics. The harmony of the verse confronts the evil, disharmonious reality and artistically overcomes it” (Dickman 1975: 56). Apparently, Sologub himself assessed Verlaine’s work in a similar way, considering it the purest manifestation of what can be called “mystical irony.” In the understanding of the Russian poet, the mystical irony of Verlaine, close to his heart, is an aesthetic as well as a life position, the essence of which is the acceptance of the world, however, not in a mundane and ordinary form, but in a transformed one, in which “in every earthly and rough rapture, beauty is mysteriously revealed and delight." “The rarest deviation,” he writes, “and this is the deviation of Paul Verlaine, is when Aldonsa is accepted as the genuine Aldonza and the genuine Dulcinea: each of her experiences is felt in its fatal contradictions, all the impossibility is affirmed as a necessity, found behind a motley veil of accidents.” the eternal world of freedom" (Verlaine 1908: 7, 9). For a sophisticated reader who closely followed Sologub’s creative searches, the motifs of the myth of Dulcinea and Aldonsa introduced in the Preface to the collection of translations from Verlaine helped to reveal the meaning that the poet put into the concept of mystical irony. The myth of Dulcinea, generated by the creative consciousness of Don Quixote from the rude, “goat-smelling” peasant woman Aldonsa, began to take shape in Sologub as an alternative to transforming the world. The Quixotic position in relation to reality is interpreted as the only one worthy of an artist. Sologub outlined his concept in most detail in the article “The Dream of Don Quixote (Isadora Duncan)”, then creating countless versions of it in other articles, novels and plays. “The lyrical feat of Don Quixote,” he claims, “is that Aldonsa is rejected as Aldonsa and accepted only as Dulcinea. Not the dreamy Dulcinea, but the one called Aldonsa. For you - a pretty, rude girl, for me - the most beautiful of ladies" (Sologub 1913: 160). By the way, the need for a sharp turn of the artist to rough prose, to an invasion of reality and a renunciation of striving for transcendental goals is indirectly postulated: “Truly the most beautiful - because in it the beauty is not that which has already been created and is already finished and is already tending towards decline - in it beauty is created and therefore eternally alive. Like a true sage, Don Quixote, to create beauty, took the least processed material and therefore left the most freedom for the creator” (Sologub 1913: 160). Thus, Verlaine, as a representative of mystical irony, for whom Aldonsa is accepted as the genuine Aldonsa and the genuine Dulcinea, is opposed to both the “lyric” poets, for whom Aldonsa does not exist, but only Dulcinea exists, i.e. the new poetic world created by the poet, and and the crudely “ironic,” who accept Aldonza with all her contradictions and reject Dulcinea as “an absurd and ridiculous dream.” It is obvious that the principles of mystical irony, understood in this way, corresponded to the mentality of Sologub himself, who actually managed, albeit through the figurative veil of a somewhat obsessive myth, more perspicaciously than many of his Russian and French contemporaries to determine the originality of Verlaine’s poetic world. In the Preface to the republication of his translations from Verlaine in 1923, Sologub mentioned that the thoughts he expressed in the Preface to the 1908 edition were subsequently reflected in his programmatic work “The Art of Our Days” (Sologub 1915: 52–53). This is quite eloquent evidence of the importance that he attached to his concept of mystical irony, and in the broadest sense, and not only in relation to the work of the French poet.

Verlaine, proposed by Sologub to the reading public, prepared for the appearance of the collection by numerous magazine publications, became a genuine event in literary life. Bryusov, Annensky and Voloshin, subtle experts, connoisseurs, and most importantly, authoritative translators of French poetry, unanimously welcomed the appearance of Sologub's translations. The most enthusiastic, deep and vivid was Voloshin’s response, published in the newspaper “Rus” on December 22, 1907. In his opinion, “Sologub’s translations from Verlaine are a miracle accomplished,” since the Russian poet “managed to accomplish what seemed impossible and unthinkable: convey in Russian verse the voice of Verlaine,” a poet who has the most soulful voice and who is loved for that inexplicable shade of voice that makes the hearts of readers tremble. According to Voloshin, “with the appearance of this small book<...>Verlaine becomes a Russian poet" (Voloshin 1988: 441, 144). This conclusion inevitably cast doubt on all other attempts, parallel to Sologubov’s, to introduce Verlaine into the circle of “Russian poets,” including Bryusov’s. When preparing the reissue of his translations from the French poet, Bryusov could not help but take into account both the fact of the existence of Sologub’s translations and the attitude towards them in literary circles. Therefore, he introduced his own assessment of Sologub’s versions, which was extremely positive, although he interpreted Sologub’s successful experience as one of the possible approaches, into the text of his Preface. Bryusov considered Sologub’s translations “a most remarkable attempt” and noted that Sologub “managed to literally recreate some of Verlaine’s poems in another language, so that they seem to be the original works of the Russian poet, while remaining very close to the French original” (Verlaine 1911: 7). From Annensky’s point of view, set out in his article “On Modern Lyricism” (1909), Sologub is an attentive and skillful translator of Verlaine (Annensky 1979: 355). The translation principles of Bryusov and Annensky were in many ways opposite, and Sologubov’s translations, which captured the subjectively understood, but at the same time characteristic elements of Verlaine’s poems and competently built on these elements, “pleased” both. Therefore, their simultaneous recognition of Sologub’s experience as successful is especially significant.

Due to a typographical oversight, the most interesting and profound thought “fell out” of Yu. Verkhovsky’s detailed review: “<...>if sometimes the appearance of the play, it would seem, could be conveyed more accurately, it is still not Is Verlaine's music sounding much more important in these translations? The poet, in the aspect of himself that he revealed to the translator, appears before us in all the effortless clarity and subtle simplicity of the original. In the clear language of translation and independently In contrast to the whole poetic composition, one sometimes feels something akin to Pushkin’s freedom” (the missing fragment of the review is marked in italics).

The appearance of Sologub’s translations is also welcomed by a reviewer of the newspaper “Comrade”: “Elegant in its very clumsiness, sad, varied, “like that treasured garden where exquisite masks converge,” Verlaine’s poetry was deeply accepted by the translator and transferred by him to the Russian language almost without loss of features and merits original." Dissonant with the general benevolent tone is the assessment of the reviewer of “Russian Wealth” of Sologub’s translations as literalist, since the poet “seeks the accuracy of the letter, but loses the accuracy of the spirit.” Instead of “the impetuous soul of poor Lellian,” instead of his airiness and softness in the translations, “everything is dry, categorical, without inspiration.” As a result, the reviewer sternly summarizes, if Sologub could not even convey the congenial Verlaine to the Russian reader, he cannot be a translator at all; he is too absorbed in his own self to adapt to someone else's.

Sologub's translations were certainly taken into account in one way or another by reviewers of other Russian attempts to instill Verlaine's lyrics into new Russian poetry. Thus, a reviewer of the Severny Vestnik, back in 1896 (that is, on the basis of several magazine publications published, however, in the same magazine) argued that Sologub translated Verlaine “very artistically.”

Reviewers reacted differently, but with extreme interest, to Sologub's innovative initiative - his decision to print different versions of the same poem in the main text. Sologub's attempt has generally been contested as undermining the reader's trust in the translation work. Sologub’s “tricks” were most convincingly rejected by the reviewer of “Russian Wealth”. “We just can’t recognize this peculiar invention as successful. Translation is not a test of the translator’s strength, but an independent artistic creation: otherwise it is not needed. The translation must not only give a certain idea of ​​the original; it should replace the original in the reader's mind<...>But even where there are no contradictions, these combinations of synonymous poems are completely inappropriate; instead of thickening the impression, they dilute it." Giving three translations, he is clearly not satisfied with any of them, otherwise he would have stopped at one. This discourages the reader, says a reviewer for the Tovarishch newspaper. “This is a new technique. And hardly worthy of sympathy,” echoes the reviewer of Birzhevye Vedomosti. And only Yu. Verkhovsky not only supported Sologub’s initiative, but also gave it a deep interpretation: “Particularly instructive are translations that give two or three versions of the same play. Sometimes several options are artistically equivalent and equally necessary: ​​a feature accidentally weakened in one is shaded by another.” Verkhovsky is undoubtedly right, with the only caveat that it is not by chance, but inevitably, that not all the features of the original are simultaneously reflected in any, even the most brilliant poetic translation. With utmost clarity, Bryusov put forward the thesis about the inevitability of losses during translation and about the translation method, which takes into account the very fact of this inevitability: “To reproduce all these elements completely and accurately when translating a poem is unthinkable. The translator usually strives to convey only one or at best two (mostly images and meter), changing others (style, movement of verse, rhymes, sounds of words).<...>The choice of the element that you consider the most important in the work being translated constitutes the translation method” (Bryusov 1975: 106).

Sologub’s innovation did not catch on, and in this sense, the reviewers, who proceeded from the real reader’s perception, for which each translation is as unique as the original, were right. The peculiar montage of translation successes, which modern compilers, editors and publishers sometimes resort to, in no way reflects the process of creative perception of a work of art by a reader who, as a rule, does not know the original. However, let’s return to Sologub’s experience and try to determine the motives that forced the poet to undertake such a daring experiment. Let's start with the fact that the assumption about Sologub's “oscillations” is fundamentally wrong. His archive preserves a considerable number of versions of both those poems by Verlaine that were presented in the collection in several versions, and those that the poet considered it possible to publish in one translation. However, not all editions satisfied Sologub, and some of them remained unpublished.

Proving the unacceptability of variability in translations, the reviewers relied on the original work, which seems to not tolerate variability. It is known, for example, that Sologub did not like to remake his original poems. “Every author, when writing, strains himself to the last degree,” he said, “and gives maximum artistry and clarity.”<...>How can he say something better and more when his tension has passed, when he has moved away from his creation in time?<...>This, in particular, explains my personal trait that I cannot add or change anything significant in a finished piece, because this is preceded by a long period of processing, amendments, rereadings, rewritings.” However, Sologub’s contemporary, P. Valery, held a completely different point of view: “A poem with variations is a real scandal for the consciousness of the ordinary and the walking. For me it is a merit. The strength of the mind is determined by the number of options” (Valerie 1976: 586). In Russia, the same “power of mind” was demonstrated by L. Andreev, who published two versions of the final, fifth, painting “The Life of a Man” (Andreev: 121–147). The poems of this or that poet, imbued with similar thoughts, feelings, and a single mood, can, with a certain stretch, be interpreted as variants of one poem. Leaving aside, however, the problem as such, one cannot help but pay attention to the fact that, both according to Sologub himself and according to the observations of his contemporaries, he constantly repeated himself, endlessly varying the same themes. On April 25, 1906, Blok, for example, wrote to Bryusov: “<...>I like some of Sologub’s poems, although they are not new to him. But he belongs to those who do not grow old in repeating themselves” (Blok 1963: 152). Among Sologub's materials there is a note: “The method is an endless variation of themes and motives” (Quoted in: Dikman 1975: 27).

Therefore, it is not surprising that the poet, who was not inclined to remake his original poems, nevertheless used the same method of variability in translations. Sologubov's versions of Verlaine's poems often literally complement each other, although not always successfully. This feature was noticed by the reviewer of “Russian Wealth”, who interpreted it completely falsely. He was outraged by the coexistence of such lines as “I listen to the sound of the downpour” and “The quiet sounds of the rain,” which are different versions of the same line by Verlaine (O bruit doux de la pluie), because the reader, seeing them side by side, “does not know with how should he connect the poet’s quiet sadness: with the roar of streams of pouring rain or with a quiet, melancholy drop of autumn rain.” Meanwhile, it is obvious that the point is not in the “heavy rain”, but in the fact that, having failed to convey at the same time the monotonous drip sound of this key Verlaine's line and its meaning, Sologub tried to convey the music in one translation (almost adequately from a phonetic point of view), and in the other - the meaning.

Sologub's metric experiments are especially interesting and instructive. Very often, within the boundaries of an intuitively felt semantic halo of a particular size, he tried to determine how organically this or that lyrical mood would “feel” itself (since the starting point is still the mood) in a different metrical embodiment. For one of the variants of the poem “L'ombre des arbres dans la rivière embrumée” Sologub chose alternating lines of iambic hexameter and iambic trimeter, for another he settled on alternating trochaic hetameter with tetrameter, the third decided the whole thing in the size of iambic tetrameter, and at the latest built on alternating hexameter iambic and trochaic tetrameter. The poem “Le ciel est, par-dessus le tosht” is revoiced as follows: in one of the variants, iambic tetrameter alternates with two-foot, in the second Sologub settled on trimeter trochee, and in the third he found, perhaps, the most convincing solution - alternating iambic tetrameter with trimeter . Let's compare different translations of the first stanza:

There is only one sky above the roof, -

The azure is becoming clearer. There is one tree above the roof

There is a breeze from the top.

The sky is above the roof

Clear things turn blue.

Tree over the roof

The canopy blows proudly.

Blue skies above the roof

So clear!

The poplar towers above the roof,

Tilting branches.

The alternation of heterometers iambic and trochee represents one of Sologub’s translation discoveries, who switched the reader’s rhythmic expectation from one meter to another in each line, thus preventing him from plunging into a state of monotonous peace, in which the freshness of perception is to a certain extent lost.

We find an extremely wide metrical amplitude in three different translations of Verlaine’s poem “Il pleure dans mon coeur”. For one of them, Sologub chose a two-foot anapest (Tears fell in my heart), for the second - a trimeter dactyl (Tears fell on my heart) and for the third - an iambic trimeter (My soul is in tears). With such a clearly stated metrical search, the reproaches against Sologub that he allegedly could not choose the best one from his translations and thereby misled readers are completely unfounded. Translations coexist, not to mention the fact that ultimately the reader has the right to choose the one that is most in tune with his own metrical tuning fork.

One more circumstance attracts attention. It is no coincidence that Sologub publishes different versions of mainly “Romances without Words,” i.e., poems in which the verbal fabric has less importance, and the element of song is more important. Essentially, what he offers the reader are various musical variations on given themes, a genre that does not damage the “theme” and at the same time significantly enriches the listener.

The presence of various versions of Sologubov's translations from Verlaine, including unpublished ones, stored in his archive, as well as the fact that many of these poems also exist in translations of other Russian poets, provide a rare opportunity to look into the creative laboratory of the poet-translator and to identify the main features his translation method.

I. Annensky, whose translation principles were in many ways close to Sologub, defined the tasks facing the translator of a poetic work as follows: “The translator, in addition to maneuvering between the requirements of two languages, also has to balance between verbality and music, understanding by this word the entire set of aesthetic elements of poetry , which cannot be looked up in the dictionary. Lexical precision often gives the translation only a deceptive closeness to the original - the translation remains dry, labored, and the transfer of the concept of the play is lost behind the details. On the other hand, a passion for music threatens the translation with fantasticality. To maintain the measure in subjectivism is the task for the translator of a lyric poem” (Annensky 1979a: 153). “To maintain moderation in subjectivism,” and most importantly, to balance between “verbality and music” - this is the task that faced Annensky himself, Sologub, Bryusov and other Russian translators of Verlaine.

Verlaine in Sologub's translations perfectly illustrates Pasternak's idea that the music of a word consists not in its sonority, but “in the relationship between sound and meaning” (Pasternak 1944: 166). The music of Sologub's verse was in the eyes of his contemporaries his undeniable merit. “I don’t know among modern Russian poets,” wrote, for example, L. Shestov, “whose poems would be closer to music than Sologub’s poems. Even when he tells the most terrible things - about an executioner, about a howling dog - his poems are full of mysterious and exciting melody."

Rare even for Verlaine is the musical richness of his “Chanson d’automne”. The mood is set by the first stanza, which is actually built on one vowel “o” and a close vowel “eu”:

Les sanglots longs

De l'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langueur

The feeling of languid melancholy is already conveyed by the first two lines, which essentially represent, from a phonetic point of view, one word drawn out on one note. The first two lines of the last stanza are even more whimsically organized:

Et je m'en vais Au vent mauvais.

Not only do not only the words that close each line rhyme, but in the first of them a deep rhyme covers most of it (m’en vais); the rhyme is picked up by the beginning of the second line (Au vent), and, already repeated and sounded, it moves on to the word that directly performs the function of rhyme (mauvais). The false way in the translation of Verlaine to convey his musicality is to pump up homogeneous members of the sentence, as I. I. Tkhorzhevsky does (Tender, viscous / Melodious violins / Monotonous crying; Pale, weak-willed / The ringing of a bell; Dry in the wind / Colored leaves) (Verlaine 1911a: 29). There is not a single pair of epithets in the original. The doubling of epithets creates melancholy, not so much melodic as semantic, and at the same time simplifies the poem emotionally. N. Minsky's translation has its merits, but apart from other shortcomings, it is completely neutral phonetically. The musicality of Sologubov's translation is ensured by several different techniques. First of all, by means of versification, since here too the alternation of two iambic lines and one trochaic line is used. Let's listen and take a closer look at the first stanza:

Oh, string ringing,

Autumn moan,

Languid, boring.

Sick at heart

Chant of the night

Monotonous.

The last four lines are connected not only by end rhymes, but also by internal consonances. In addition, the entire first stanza turns out to be phonetically closed due to the fact that the last line in terms of vowels is a mirror image of the first. In the last stanza, the first and fourth lines each represent two rhyming words placed side by side (which corresponds to the phonetic organization of the original, noted by Sologub already in the first line of Verlaine’s poem): With my soul; My dreams. It is significant that, like Verlaine’s, Sologubov’s translation is based on the sound “o”. It is he who is dominant, which to a certain extent is inherent in the phonetic dominant of the word “autumn” in both languages, the vowel on which the emphasis falls and which thereby serves as a euphonic tuning fork for the lyrical autumnal mood.

Realizing that his translations in terms of euphony are inferior to Verlaine’s poems, Sologub, at the slightest opportunity, compensates for the loss in the musicality of the verse. For example, the first lines of the poem “Simples fresques. I" in Verlaine are quite neutral: La fuite est verdatre et rose // Des collines et des rampes. Already in the early versions, Sologub tried to play with the consonance hidden in the “valleys” and “distances”. Late Sologub enriched the sound game with assonances and alliterations, introducing a new pair in the second line:

And the hills and before fishing was given

IN ro sir, in p ro greenery od ety. (p. 55)

It is quite natural that Sologub conveys in most cases the saturation of Verlaine’s verse with internal assonances and alliterations, in which one of the secrets of aesthetic impact lies, according to the principle of a shifted equivalent, i.e., recreating a feature lost when transmitting a particular line in another place of the poem. Such, for example, is the line “And twisting their song with your ray” from the poem “Moonlight”, “twisted” by the assonance “their-them” falling under stress and intertwined into a single “lunar” whole by the alliterative play of three “in”, three “ s" and two "m" within three iambic feet.

We find the most sophisticated sound structure in many lines of Sologubov’s translations: “They are showered with flour, like the dust of mortal torment”; “The transparency of the waves, and the air is sweet”; “How the nightingale rumbles, / How streams flow” (in the last two lines, elements of the anagram are easily detected: kkrkchtslv / kkrchstrts). By observing the principles of phonetic adequacy, Sologub achieves stylistic adequacy (it is possible, however, that the path was the other way around). The key line of the song “A poor young Shepherd”, repeated four times throughout the poem, opening it and closing it - “J'ai peur d'un baiser” - was first conveyed by Sologub as “I'm afraid of a kiss” (1, 38, 5), however, it was later replaced by the stylistically and phonetically more successful “I’m afraid of a kiss,” organized by the connective “ts-s,” which successfully breaks the mirror image of the vowels: “o-u/o-u.”

Undoubtedly, contemporaries were sensitive to the euphonic merits of Sologub’s translations. It is no coincidence that they reacted so sharply to any ear-piercing phonetic mistakes of other translators. V. Lvov-Rogachevsky, a reviewer of the publication “French Lyricists of the 19th Century” prepared by Bryusov, reproached the poet for the fact that in Verlaine, “whose poetry is woven from the best and subtle whispers,” such heavy and clumsy phrases are found in Bryusov’s translations as “ There is not a flicker of light in the copper firmament" or "What have you done, you who are crying, / With your youth."

As K.I. Chukovsky emphasized, Sologubov’s principles of equirhythmia were of considerable value for their time (Chukovsky 1968: 349–350). Most of Sologubov's translations from Verlaine are equirhythmic. However, sometimes this equirhythmicity is achieved at the cost of certain losses. Along with and almost simultaneously with Sologub, Verlaine’s poem “II pleure dans mon coeur” was translated by Bryusov, Annensky, D. Ratgauz, N. Novich (N. N. Bakhtin), S. Rafalovich, A. Kublitskaya-Piottukh, S. Frenkel, I . Ehrenburg . The versions of Annensky, Bryusov and Sologub stand out sharply against the background of others, which, as a rule, translate Verlaine's romance in the stylistic register of the epigones Fet and Fofanov, which is alien to it. Equirhythmia disturbance is of no small importance. Thus, due to an unsuccessfully chosen, non-song-like, longer than in the original meter (It’s bitter not to know why and why / I am powerless and speechless in the face of melancholy. / How to suffer without love and without malice? / How to suffer without reason in melancholy languish?) the subtle and poetic, but verbose and as if prosaic and clarifying everything in Verlaine’s impressionistic poem, the translation of Blok’s mother A. Kublitskaya-Piottukh does not achieve its goal. Sologub achieved equirhythmia at the cost of abruptness, rhythmic-syntactic fragmentation, in which the division into lines practically coincides with the division into sentences. Meanwhile, in the original there is a flexible and natural combination of long and short sentences, most of which, smoothly rounding off, cover two or four lines. Bryusov, who was more attentive and “cold-blooded” in translation, tried to get closer to the original in this sense. The desire for rhythmic and syntactic naturalness of poetic speech allowed Annensky to feel the need to cover several lines in one sentence.

In other cases, for example, when translating the poem "Dans l'interminable", Sologub managed to achieve equirhythm, maintaining free breathing, without artificially breaking off the phrase at the end of each line or two lines, to cover the entire stanza (in three cases out of four) in one sentence, while the fact that out of the eight words that, as a rule, each stanza consists of, four turn out to rhyme. Verlaine chose a pentasyllable for his romance. Let us remember that he generally considered verse consisting of an odd number of syllables to have increased musicality. (And therefore prefer the odd verse (1, 38, 19) - “The Art of Poetry”).

The originality of this Verlaine impressionistic landscape, all the images of which are ephemeral and volatile, is achieved not only by the five-syllable system, rare in French poetry, but also by the continuous female rhyme, with a different rhyme system in the stanzas themselves; and the dominant sounds in each of the stanzas - the open “e” in the 1st, 3rd and 5th, creating the impression of monotony, dreary monotony and despondency, and the vowel “i” in the 2nd; and the saturation of the poem with words that evoke a feeling of hopelessness and melancholy, to the detriment of those few (5-6) materially significant words that can only be counted in it (Etkind 1961: 114–116). Let us quote the first two stanzas of this poem.

Dans l'interminable

Ennui de la plaine

La neige incertaine

Luit comme du sable.

Le ciel est de cuivre

Sans lueur aucune.

On croirait voir vivre

Et mourir la lune.

Sologub's translation, while not being completely adequate to the original, nevertheless quite faithfully conveys the mood and rhythmic pattern, and at the same time, with the exception of several blatant and unsuccessful “sub-rhymes” (What awaits your regiment), the Russian poet as a whole honestly follows the author’s concept and conveys it close to the text, without any special losses or substitutions.

In the fields all around

In boundless melancholy

Snow is unreliable

Glistens with sand.

Like metal dust

The azure is dim.

The moon wandered

And she died.<...> (53)

Bryusov's translation is less successful primarily because the very first stanza creates in the reader a false expectation of an answer to the riddle being asked.

For boundless melancholy,

On the snowy plain,

What glitters is wrong

How is the coastal sand? (Verlaine 1894: 14)

Meanwhile, Verlaine is talking only about snow, which shines like sand. If in Bryusov’s translation the initial miscalculation conceals many particular successes, then in the version carried out by N. Novich, the first stanza sets a tone that is sufficiently consistent with the original.

Boredom in the valley

It blows boundlessly.

The snow turns white in the darkness

Like desert sand. (Verlaine 1912: 50)

However, the eclectic style of the subsequent lines (here, “After a short life / The pale month has died,” and “The mighty forest slumbers, / Shaking its head”) negates the successful finds.

The work on translations by Sologub is very indicative, as he mercilessly rejected many solutions - metrical, lexical, syntactic, phonetic - and persistently searched for ways to adequately convey the features of the original. In one case, the replacements were motivated by the desire to eliminate elements of a high style alien to Verlaine (in the poem “Nothing about you, Nature amuses me,” the line “Wealth, nor the beauty of a sad sunset” (1, 38, 204) was replaced by “Dawn, nor the beauty of a sad sunset"), in another - syntactic amorphism was eliminated (in the poem “These roses are too red,” the lines “In your movements there are threats, / Oh, dear, I am betrayed” (1, 38, 387) are replaced with “Oh, dear, there are threats to me / Visible in your movements”). Initially, when translating the poem “Grotesques”, in pursuit of formal compliance, Sologub, at the cost of semantic losses, tried to convey the sound play of the 2nd line of the 1st stanza: “But their gloomy face is dashing for people” (1, 38, 39) (in the original - Pour tous biens l'or de leurs regards). Subsequently, he abandoned this almost pun-like find and translated the entire stanza more neutrally and closer to the original. In the early edition, the first line of Verlaine’s poem “II faut, voyez-vous, nous pardonner les choses” sounded absolutely literally: “It is necessary, you see, to forgive something” (1, 38, 351). All three final versions, with some deviations from the “letter” of the original (“We will not place fetters on each other”; “Learn, my friend, to forget and forgive”; “Know, we must grant forgiveness to the world”), are either more poetic or closer within the meaning of. An excellent example of how Sologub, making adjustments, consistently improved the translation, is his work on Verlaine’s “Kaleidoscope,” the final edition of which represents Sologub’s undoubted translation success. The original version of the 5th and 6th stanzas:

The bouquet is withered - the speech of days gone by!

The public ball will become noisy again.

The widow will cover her forehead with a kokoshk,

And gets mixed up among the bastards,

What are they wandering around with the massacred crowd?

Boys and lousy old men.

Public celebration of the crackling of beetroot

Have fun in the stinking square. (1, 38, 415)

Final edition:

The bouquet is withered, an ancient rehash!

The people's ball will become intrusive again.

The widow will tie a bandage around her forehead,

Yes, and he will go among corrupt virgins,

That they hang around with the depraved crowd

Boys and filthy old men,

And the mouth-watering sounds of the beetroot crackling

They will have fun in the foul-smelling square. (p. 80)

An example of how, despite persistently improving the translation, the poet still did not achieve success, is Sologubov’s version of the poem “Bon chevalier masqué qui chevauche en silence,” which opens the collection “Wisdom.” Sologub's merit in comparison with Annensky and Bryusov, who recreated this poem with great success, is, perhaps, only the conscientious transmission of repetitions and especially “mon vieux coeur”, repeated three times over the first six lines. The saturation of the poetry of French symbolism with repetitions of various types (repetition of stanzas, individual phrases, words, repetition-pickup, anaphoric repetition, etc.) created special difficulties in recreating it on a foreign soil. Poet-translators of the non-symbolist circle not only did not always attach importance to these repetitions, but sometimes, apparently, deliberately eliminated them as an element harmful to the artistic impression. Annensky sometimes compensated for them with other stylistic means. Bryusov often sacrificed them, especially repetitions of a complex type, for the sake of other features of the original. On the other hand, careful attention to such a significant element of the poetics of French symbolism as repetition could not guarantee success. The translation of the first poem in the collection “Wisdom” suffers from excessive rhetoric and some lexical quirks:

Trouble, an evil masked knight, met me in silence,

And he noticed his old spear in his heart.

The blood of the old crimson heart sweeps,

And it gets cold, smoky, under the sun on the flowers. (p. 67)

The reason for the failure is quite clear. This parable poem was quite alien to Sologub’s poetics and at the same time quite organic to Bryusov’s poetry. As for Annensky, the reason for his success is, most likely, the peculiarity of his translation gift, which, according to A.V. Fedorov, forced the poet to strive to recreate on Russian soil in equal measure what was close to him and what was alien to his creative individuality (Fedorov 1983a: 200–201). The same Verlaine of Annensky was attracted by such long and plot-driven poems, which, as a rule, did not attract the attention of other translators, such as “Crime of Love” and “I am a Maniac of Love.”

It is quite natural that the program poem of the collection “Wisdom,” which marks a new stage in Verlaine’s creative biography, did not interest Sologub in the 1890s. However, reprinting the collection in an expanded form, the poet did not consider it possible to leave it aside. Nevertheless, the somewhat abstract basis of this poem, which tells about the religious conversion of the French poet, turned out to be alien to the lyrical element of Sologub’s talent. In Sologubov's refraction, the poem acquired a pathetic and at the same time melodramatic shade, absent in the original. It is difficult to guess Verlaine in such lines as: My eyes are quenched by darkness, I fell with a loud cry, / And the old heart is dead in wild trembling.

Thus, even when translating Verlaine, who was close to him, Sologub, who had a keen sense of the musical basis of his lyrics and was careful about the other levels and elements of the verse, was not always successful. He, as well as other Russian poet-translators, his contemporaries, failed to create an adequate Russian version of one of the most tragic poems in the collection “Wisdom” “Un grand soleil noir”:

Me on dark days

I'm not looking forward to waking up.

Hope, go to sleep,

Sleep, aspirations!

The darkness is falling

To the eye and to the conscience.

Neither good nor evil -

Oh, sad story!

Under someone's hand

I am the unsteady rocking

The cave is empty...

Silence, silence! (p. 74)

The mood of hopelessness, which intensifies in the original from line to line, from stanza to stanza, is somewhat blurred in Sologub. The striking image of an immense black sleep descending on life has been lost (Un grand soleil noir / Tombe sur ma vie); “Tout espoir” and “toute envie” are rendered weakly, as simply “hope”, “aspiration”. More clearly than Sologub, Verlaine shows a loss of ideas and memory of good and evil. Bryusov also failed to sufficiently preserve either the equivalence of the impression or the musicality of this poem. The last line in his translation significantly impoverishes Verlaine’s concept: “Oh, hush, hush, hush!” In the original - not a call, but a sad statement of the silence that accompanies impenetrable darkness - “Silence, silence!” However, as in other examples, the merits of the translations of Sologub and Bryusov become clearer when comparing them with other contemporary versions. Thus, P. N. Petrovsky lost essentially all the key features for this poem. The “huge, black dream” turned out to be just a “dream” for him. The next stanza clearly and clearly states the confession of immoralism: “And conscience forgets / Where is the line between good and evil” (Verlaine 1912: 61), enjambement (The invisible hand / Shakes. Hush, hush!) destroys the impression of the last line that Verlaine with two heavy identical chords puts a musical end to this unique lyrical requiem. Even more helpless is the translation by S. Rafalovich, in which everything is unsuccessful, starting with the meter (tetrameter trochee) and ending with blatant deviations from the original and at the same time stylistic truisms.

Sologub, Annensky and Bryusov entered into a kind of creative competition when translating another Verlaine masterpiece - “Je devine, a travers un murmure”. Annensky denied his and Sologubov’s version the right to exist: “Sologub translated it poorly, and I myself disgracefully” (Annensky 1979: 356). It still seems that if all three lost this competition, then the experience of brilliant translators who approached the original from different positions is extremely instructive, not to mention the numerous undoubted private advantages of each version. Apparently, it was in vain that Sologub did not succumb to the trimeter anapest, inspired by the very first line of Verlaine’s poem, as did Annensky (“Inscriptions of the Old Triodion”) and Bryusov (“I feel the forgotten in the murmur”). The combination of alternating iambic hexameter and iambic pentameter (“I gently dream under the whisper of the branches / Of past conversations a living outline”) left too much “free” poetic space, inevitably covered with redundant epithets (“sonorous flicker,” “hot delirium,” “bright appeal” ).

The specificity of Annensky's translation method allows us to raise the question of the existence of impressionistic translation and its principles. Essentially, the principles of impressionistic translation, which the poet successfully applied in practice, were defined by Bryusov, although he does not specify that we are talking about Annensky’s creative activity as a whole: “I. Annensky’s writing style is sharply impressionistic; he depicts everything not as he knows it, but as it seems to him, and it seems right now, at this moment. As a consistent impressionist, I. Annensky goes far not only from Fet, but also from Balmont; only in Verlaine can one find several poems equivalent in this respect to the poems of I. Annensky” (Bryusov 1973b: 336). From Annensky’s enchantingly refined translation, among other things, the lyrical hero disappears, who directly calls for death, framing the last stanza of the poem with his call. In his version:

Oh, to dissolve in the whisper of fir trees...

Or wait for dreams and sorrows

This heart is completely pumped

And, having fallen asleep... slide off the swing? (Annensky 1988: 215) -

the mention of Death is tabooed, which enhances the feeling of mystery, i.e., apparently, the very impression that attracted Annensky’s attention and in recreating which he sacrificed many other elements of the text. Sologub is much closer to the original in his early translation:

Oh, if only you would come now, my death,

While love hesitates with longing

Between old dreams and young life!

Oh, how I would die silently in that shaky place!

Bryusov's translation, at first glance seemingly inaccurate, is very accurate in essence, since it quite adequately conveys the mood and thus confirms the assessment that the poet later gave to his early translation principles. It is curious that in the later version, Sologub followed the example of Annensky and Bryusov when choosing the size, however, choosing not a trimeter anapest, but a pentameter trochee, deceiving the reader’s metrical expectation, since the first line of his translation is ambivalent: “I guess through whispers.” In accordance with the semantic aura of the six-foot trochee, compared to the more melodic and “languid” three-foot anapest, Sologub’s translation is more energetic.

It would be strange to expect from Sologub (as well as from other Russian translators) the preservation of many very specific features of Verlaine’s lyrics, such as, for example, the obvious tendency towards assonant rhyme or the preference noted by A. Adam, given by the French poet to the most insignificant, the most colorless, the most to the “inactive” verb “кtre” (Adam 1953: 95). The need to undermine the traditional rhyme system was felt by Sologub, like other older symbolists, to a much lesser extent than by the poets of subsequent generations. However, later, in the 1900s, while translating Rimbaud, Sologub tried to introduce assonances into his translations. As for Verlaine’s adherence to the verb “etre,” Sologub, with all the deliberate limitations of his own vocabulary, did not feel this feature of the poetics of the French poet, who, like a child, directly touched all manifestations of the world and, as if for the first time, described them. This apparent and giving the impression of a somewhat primitive simplicity of Verlaine was either not noticed by Russian translators, or repelled and forced them to diversify their language.

The later versions are generally significantly different from the earlier ones. When preparing the 1923 collection for publication, Sologub no longer allows any polyphony or orientation of the reader towards the complementarity of different versions and in all cases, if there is a new translation, he publishes it in the main text, and the old or old versions in the Appendix. The difference in the most general features of the new translations from the old ones is correctly characterized by M. I. Dikman: “The new translation, verbally accurate, literally conveying the picture of the original, is inferior to the first editions in poetic fidelity” (Dikman 1975: 70). Let us compare, for example, one of the early versions of the poem “L’ombre des arbres dans la rivière embrumée” with the later one.

Original:

L’ ombre des arbres dans la rivière embrumée

Meurt comme de la fumée,

Tandis qu'en l'air, parmi les ramures réelles,

Se plaignent les tourterelles.

Combien, f voyageur, ce paysage blкme

Those mira blкme toi-mкme,

Et que tristes pleuraient dans les hautes feuillées

Tes espérances noyées!

Early edition:

Fog rises from the river, and the shadow of the trees drowns,

Like smoky streams,

And above in the branches a swarm of doves moans sadly

About your disasters.

O wanderer, you are pale, the valley around you is pale,

How right you are here!

How your sadness cries over you in the branches

About dead dreams! (p. 99)

Late version:

The shadow of the trees in the river fell into the foggy darkness,

Like a shroud woven with smoke,

And cries in the air there, from real branches,

Song of the sleepless turtle doves.

So aptly reflected in the picture of this pale

You, pale yourself, poor wanderer,

And high in the foliage they cried, so pitiful,

All your hopes mermaids! (p. 54)

The later translation of this poem, more rational, more accurate, is also indicative in another way: the attentive attitude to the original was often formal. Trying to reproduce the internal rhyme in the 2nd line of the 2nd stanza, especially since it is an echo of the rhyme of the previous line (Combien, f voyageur, ce paysage blкme / Te mira blкme toi-mкme), Sologub resorts to a clearly unsuccessful and even slightly comical grammatical rhyme. As in the 1st stanza, where Sologub now retained the “real” branches, not very successfully, however, having named them, he tried, at the cost of obvious losses, to convey the features of the original, which were not reflected in any of the three earlier editions. The translation of this Verlaine poem is also an example of the fact that the late Sologub not only, to a greater extent than before, strived for verbal and formal accuracy, but whenever possible deciphered the poem and interpreted it. Verlaine’s “Tes espérances noyées”, i.e., drowned hopes, and perhaps even drowned in tears, choked on them as they cried high in the foliage, Sologub interprets as “mermaids of hopes.”

However, it would be wrong to say that by working on Verlaine’s translations anew, Sologub only worsened them. He managed to eliminate many inaccuracies or mannered-sounding lines. For example, the 1st line of the poem “Je ne t´aime pas en toilette” in the 1908 edition: “I am an enemy to the deceptions of the toilet,” and in the 1923 edition - “I don’t like you dressed.” Finally, among the later editions there are such undoubted successes as the translation of the poem “Spleen”:

These roses are turning too red,

And these hops are so black.

Oh darling, I'm threatened

Visible in your movements.

The transparency of the waves and the sweet air,

And too soft azure.

I'm scared to wait for a brief caress

Separation and cruel storms.

And holly, like a veneer of enamel,

And the axle box is too bright a bush,

And the fields of boundless distance, -

Everything is boring except your lips. (p. 58)

The early translation was very approximate and somewhat “tabloid”.

The roses were too red

The ivies were so dark!

Darling, how dangerous

These delights of spring!

The sky is blue, the sky is tender,

The joy of the day shines in the sea.

I suffer hopelessly, -

What if you leave me!

These fields have no limits,

These bright flowers -

I'm terribly tired of everything,

You're the only one who's not bored. (p. 102)

The beginning of the 90s, a time of particularly intensive translations by Sologub from Verlaine, coincides with the poet’s persistent desire to determine his own place in literature, with an amazing growth in poetic skill. In a certain sense, translations from Verlaine served as a school for him to practice literary techniques, metrical and stylistic searches. And this circumstance is, apparently, another reason for the abundance of different translation solutions. It is no coincidence that in the folder with translations from the French poet, original poems created at the same time are kept mixed in with them. It is quite natural that some of the Russian poet’s poems turned out to be inspired by the motifs of Verlaine’s lyrics. Back in 1909, in the article “On Modern Lyricism,” Annensky suggested that Sologubov’s “Devil’s Swing” goes back to the last line of Verlaine’s poem “Je devine, a travers un murmure” - O mourir de cette escarpolette. The motives of this poem by Verlaine were indeed reflected in Sologub, however, as it seems to us, not in “The Devil’s Swing”, but rather in another poem, written, by the way, in contrast to the last one, dating from 1907, on July 9, 1894 ., i.e. just a year after Sologub’s work on the translation (August 6–7, 1893). Let us compare the poem “Swing” with the above Verlaine stanza in Sologub’s early translation:

In the languor of a quiet sunset

The hot sun was sad.

The hut was bent under the dilapidated roof

And she shaded the garden with shade.

The birches calmed down in it

And they burned motionless.

Now into the shadows, now into the light

An unsteady swing with a creaking sound.

Sorrows like an old evil shadow

My soul is half dressed

And then he strives greedily for decay,

He is looking for joy and light.

And submitting with inspiration

My fate is destined,

I'm transported alternately

From hopelessness to desires. (Sologub 1975: 122)

The image of a swing on which “love swings with melancholy” was picked up by the Russian poet, who was in tune with the mood of the transition “alternately from hopelessness to desires,” from a joyful acceptance of life to the rapture of death.

It can be assumed that the poem “Restless Rain”, also written in 1894, i.e. during the period of Sologub’s most intense work on translations from the French poet, is directly inspired by Verlaine’s poem “II pleure dans mon coeur”:

The rain is restless

Random as always

It hits the glass noisily,

This is the day

Like a sleepless enemy,

Somehow missed

Howling tears are shed.

And thrown into the shadows.

The wind is like a tramp

But there's no need for anger

Moans under the window.

Invest in the game

And the paper rustles

How the bones fall

Under my pen.

So I take them. (Sologub 1975: 125)

To convey a mood similar to Verlaine's, Sologub used a different meter than in all three published translations - trochaic trimeter. However, it could well have been chosen for translation (as, for example, in the translation by S. Rafalovich). Sologub's poem, like Verlaine's, consists of four stanzas. In the same way, already in the first lines the analogy “rain” - “tears” appears in it. Finally, the same notes of melancholy and longing sound in it. During Sologub's lifetime this poem was not published. Probably, the poet was aware of the obvious correlation of his work with Verlaine’s text and decided not to present to the reader the poem, which is an echo of it, although quite organic and artistically full-fledged.

Meanwhile, in general, Sologub’s poetry in no way developed “under the sign” of Verlaine. According to the fair statement of Y. Smagi, the type of impressionism that Verlaine embodied did not find an echo in Sologub, who fundamentally avoided the lyrical “fullness of coloristic effects and passive dissolution in the beauty of the world.” Such a principle of spontaneity was alien to the author of The Circle of Flames, since his creative imagination was mainly of an “organized” nature, exhausted by “mania of tragic loneliness and sadness, illustrated by the same images and motives” (Smaga 1980: 443–444).

Sologub did not possess the ability, noted by Blok in Annensky, to “infuse the soul with various experiences” (Blok 1962b: 621). Therefore, his attempt to recreate a significant part of the poetic heritage of Arthur Rimbaud was not as successful as the translation of Verlaine's lyrics. Sologub’s personal archive contains his translations of almost all of the French poet’s “Last Poems” (“Larme”, “La Rivière de Cassis”, “Comédie de la soif”, “Chanson de la plus haute tour”, “L’Éternité”, "Age d'or", "Bruxelles", "Est-elle aimée?.. aux premiéres heures bleues", "Qu' est-ce pour nous, mon coeur, que les nappes de sang", "Michel et Christine", “Honte”, “F Saisons, f chateaux”), as well as interlinear translations of a large number of poems from the previous period (“Sensation”, “Venus Anadyomеne”, “Le Coeur volй”, “Rкvй pour l’hiver”, “L’ Orgie parisienne ou Paris se repeuple", "Le Buffet"). Thus, unlike other early (and a few Russian translators of Rimbaud (see: Postupalsky 1982: 478–484) Sologub not only intended to cover and master the work of the French poet as widely as possible, but also realized his intention by translating the most “obscure” poems Rimbaud, those in which, according to Bryusov, we find “a mosaic of words and expressions that should merge in the reader’s soul into one whole impression” (Bryusov 1937: 272).

Probably, Sologub was close to the “romance”, musical basis of “The Last Poems”. In any case, of paramount importance is the fact that Sologub was essentially the only Russian writer who turned to the most “symbolist” works of French poets: in the 1900s and 1910s. - to “Last Poems” and “Illuminations” by Rimbaud, and in 1898 - to “Poems in Prose” by Mallarmé, while mainly Russian symbolists mastered either the lyricism of early Mallarmé and Verlaine, close to the poetics of Parnassus, or the impressionistic “landscapes of the soul” "of the same Verlaine, or the early poems of Rimbaud, which have only an indirect relation to symbolism.

Sologub, apparently, was dissatisfied with his poetic translations from Rimbaud and did not consider it possible to publish them. The fact that Sologub hid his translations gave B. Livshits grounds to assert: “...at that time, few people read Rimbaud in the original. Of the Russian poets, only Annensky, Bryusov and I translated him” (Livshits 1989: 317).

The manuscripts of translations from Rimbaud stored in the Sologub archive make it possible to lift the veil over one of the secrets of the poet’s translation method, his ability in many cases to surprisingly accurately recreate the figurative and semantic aspects of the original, which delighted contemporaries with his ability to convey the original “with literal accuracy” (Voloshin 1988: 442 ). The reason for the closeness, but at the same time semantic and syntactic complexity of individual lines and stanzas in comparison with the transparency of the original, even if not amenable to unambiguous interpretation, is clarified by the poet’s creative laboratory. Formal closeness is achieved by the method of artistic poetic translation, carried out directly on the material of the interlinear, i.e., a rhymed verse inscribed above the line of the rough typescript of the interlinear. This translation technique, fraught with considerable danger, which Sologub was not always able to avoid, nevertheless allowed him in a number of cases to accurately and from an artistic point of view adequately recreate significant elements of the original in a direct, almost mirror image. To illustrate, we can cite the first stanzas of the poem “Qu’ est-ce pour nous, mon coeur, que les nappes de sang” and “Chanson de la plus haute tour” interlinearly and in the final version:

What for us, my heart, tablecloths of blood,

And the heat, and thousands of murders, and prolonged screams

The rages, the sobs of all hell, turning

Order; Aquilon is still in ruins;

What do we need, my soul, a bloody current,

And thousands of murders, and an evil groan,

And the heat and hell that rushed to the threshold

The whole system; and on the ruins of Aquilon.

(Rimbaud 1982: 401)

Idle youth

Enslaved to everything

Sensitivity.

I lost my life

A! Let the time come

When hearts are captivated!

Carefree youth

The will that broke,

Heart tenderness,

Life destroyed, -

The deadline is approaching

The heart is captivated!

(Rimbaud 1982: 412)

The national originality of Russian symbolism was determined by the fact that not only Rimbaud’s “Last Poems” with their fragmentary, largely irrational metaphorical nature, but also the geometrically verified associative layers of Mallarmé’s “Prose Poems”, and one of the pinnacle works for French symbolism - “Illuminations” Rimbaud left translators and publishers essentially indifferent. Sologub’s bold attempt to recreate them on Russian soil was only partially crowned with success, since only a minority of the “Illuminations” he translated were published, and then in a new literary era, only in 1915, in a futuristic edition, when the aesthetic quests of Rimbaud, who was far ahead of his time, they finally began to find their readers in the avant-garde circles of Europe. At the same time, in theoretical statements, especially by Bryusov, the most knowledgeable in matters of French symbolism, the merits inherent in both Rimbaud’s “Illuminations” and “Last Poems” and Mallarmé’s “Prose Poems” were strongly welcomed. “But we are not hopelessly locked in this “blue prison” - using the image of Fet,” argued Bryusov. - There are exits from it, there are gaps. These gaps are those moments of ecstasy, supersensitive intuition, which give other comprehension of world phenomena, penetrating deeper beyond their outer cortex, into their core. The true task of art is to capture these moments of insight and inspiration. Art begins at the moment when the artist tries to understand to himself his dark, secret feelings” (Bryusov 1973b: 86). Ecstasy, hypersensitive intuition, insights, on the one hand, and the mystery of the unsaid, on the other, as the principles of new poetry, as the basis of creativity - all this is found in the statements of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, however, unlike Bryusov, these statements grew out of artistic creativity , fed on it, and sometimes were one of the manifestations of artistic creativity. “I painted silence and night, expressed the inexpressible, captured dizzying moments,” Rimbaud admitted in “One Summer in Hell” (Rimbaud 1982: 168). One of Mallarmé’s most famous testaments reads: “To name an object means to destroy three-quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which is created from gradual guessing: to suggest its image is the dream<...>In poetry there must always be a mystery, and the purpose of literature - and it has no others - is to evoke images of objects" (Mallarme 1945: 869). An echo of this thesis of the French poet is the following theoretical considerations of Sologub: “Therefore, in high art, images strive to become symbols, that is, they strive to contain meaningful content, they strive to ensure that this content is capable of revealing them in the process of perception increasingly deeper meanings. In this ability of the image to endlessly reveal itself lies the secret of the immortality of the highest creations of art. A work of art, interpreted to the bottom, explained to the end, immediately dies; it has nothing to live on and no reason to live.” However, the similarity of aesthetic manifestos should not mislead us regarding the features of poetics and style: in the artistic work of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, they are rather “dark” poets, and Sologub is “clear”. However, for Russian culture of the late XIX - early XX centuries. It is important that Sologub was the only one among all Russian symbolists, not counting individual versions of Bryusov, who translated much of the new poetry of France to “complete the picture”, who turned to the works of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, built on the principles of suggestive art, the basis of which are “insights” and metaphorical connection of associations.

Apparently, Mallarmé Sologub translated “Poems in Prose” from one of the two editions (1896, 1897) of “Divagations” - a collection that included selected prose works of the poet, as well as “Poems in Prose”. The basis for this assumption is both the time of work on the translations (1898) and the composition of the translated text. Sologub translated all twelve “Prose Poems” included in the first section, entitled “Anecdotes and Poems”. He also translated: the Preface that opened the collection, the prose “Clash”, also included in the section “Anecdotes and Poems”; the entire second section of “Books on the Couch,” which included two miniatures: “Once in the Fields of Baudelaire” and “An excerpt to briefly repeat Vathek”; from the third section - medallions or portraits - the second of them, dedicated to Verlaine and representing a funeral oration. Individual “Poems in Prose” of the French poet were translated before Sologub (including Bryusov, who published his translations of “Autumn Complaint” and “Pipe” under the pseudonym “M.”), choosing those that most closely corresponded to the idea of lyrical prose.

Of undoubted interest is Bryusov’s appeal to Mallarmé’s “Prose Poems” back in 1894. This translation is rather a sign of familiarization with the name and the associative circle of meanings that this name carries, rather than evidence of an interested, truly creative attitude. Voloshin noticed the secret alienation of the “Roman” Bryusov from the decadent sophistication of Mallarmé: “This attachment of Bryusov to Rome is significant. In it we find the keys to the strengths and biases of his work. The refined aestheticism and refined tastes of pampered and weakening cultures are alien to him. In this regard, no one is further than he from the idea of ​​“decadence” in the sense that Mallarmé and his group understood it and recognized themselves as “decadents” (Voloshin 1988: 415). As for the genre of prose poems, later Bryusov, who had already become a master and had long been convinced of the intrinsic value of his aesthetic program, spoke about them with undisguised hostility (although he would single out the examples presented in Mallarmé’s work as “genuine”): “Not I remember who compared “prose poems” to a hermaphrodite. In any case, this is one of the most intolerable forms of literature. For the most part, this is prose, which has been given some rhythm, that is, which is colored by a purely external device. When I say this, I do not mean principles, but existing patterns. Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé - I don’t know who else has genuine “poems in prose” (the way they should be)” (Bryusov 1973b: 352).

Mallarmé, along with Rimbaud and following Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire, was one of those who created the phenomenon of French prose poetry. The narrative-logical level of the text is extremely shaken in Mallarmé by associative inclusions, and the harmonious and rigid system of syntactic norms in the French language is subjected to haphazard and whimsical breakdown. As a result, even elements of traditional imagery appear in a new light. Under the pen of Mallarmé and Rimbaud, the prose poem turned into a genre in many ways opposed to “poetic,” “rhythmic,” “lyrical” prose. “One of the most suitable search and testing platforms for itself,” writes S. Velikovsky, “such endlessly renewable invention was discovered in that oxymoronic genre formation that established itself in the last third of the 19th century in French prose poetry. When translating into Russian, the phrase roime en prose should be put in quotation marks: the French have no trace of verse here. There is no repeating one-dimensional smoothness, no even slight verse rhythmicity that makes itself felt from time to time, no occasional rhyme. On the contrary, a prose poem is often the opposite of what is called “poetic prose” for its more or less obvious metrical euphony” (Velikovsky 1987: 171–172).

Sologub created an analogue of the prose poem by Mallarmé, relying on the Russian tradition of rhythmic prose, while trying to follow those recommendations that, in connection with the specifics of the language reform carried out by Mallarmé, he could glean from works about the French poet in Russian magazines, and noted by himself while reading. An analogue of Mallarmé's (as well as Rimbaud's) individual syntax, which is not automatically transferred from one language to another, turned out to be the specific features of word order in Sologub's original prose, which he not only did not abandon in his translations, but which he clearly emphasized. “What is specifically Sologubov,” noted the famous literary critic N.F. Chuzhak, “is in the phrase: “sad lines will suddenly flow in.” In order of traditional syntax, one should say this: “suddenly sad lines will pour in”<...>It’s completely different in Sologub’s arrangement. The adjective “sad,” without giving an exact concept of anything specific, nevertheless sets us up in advance for the appropriate tone, creating a mood and forcing us to creatively anticipate the entire image of “sad memories.” Let us compare with the phrase quoted by Stranger from the story “The Old House” a phrase from Mallarmé’s “Future Phenomenon” translated by Sologub, constructed according to the laws of his own syntax: “... I felt that my hand, reflected by the shop window, was making a caressing gesture... "(1, 42, 44) .

Sologub’s translation approach when recreating Mallarmé’s “Prose Poems” (as well as the later translations of Rimbaud’s “Illuminations”) is based on respect for the author’s will, coupled with some confusion. The intricate ligature of associative images and words, held together by sound rather than meaning, confronts the translator with the problem of choice: either try to decipher for himself the logic of this ligature and, thus, gain the creative ability to write in his native language, as the authors of those published in the 90s did. translations, reducing Mallarmé’s “Poems in Prose” to a rather banal and somewhat pretentious lyrical prose (texts were selected for translation based on the principle of compliance with ideas about “poetic” prose), or, trusting the author and sacrificing “freedom”, following him almost blindly, if not “trace after trace,” then in any case quite close in lexical and rhythmic-syntactic terms. Sologub could not help but realize that, following the second principle, he risked losing both the associative and phonetic organic nature of the original, but he rightly believed that arbitrary deciphering would cause no less harm. Allowing for the possibility of irrational passages in the original, Sologub did not subject the translation to a rational “filter,” especially in those cases when he was satisfied with it from a phonetic point of view. And yet, in general, apparently, he was dissatisfied with the result and did not dare to publish his work or did not find a publisher who was able to trust his translation intuition.

Without a doubt, Rimbaud Sologub translated “Illuminations” from the 1896 edition, which included precisely those of the “Last Poems”, versions of which he also translated. It is also important that he translated all the “Illuminations” included in the 1896 edition, while three of the five “Illuminations” first published only in 1895 (“Fairy”, “War” and “Genius”) , he just started the work without completing it. Only part of the translated version was published - fourteen out of twenty-one poems.

In Rimbaud’s “Illuminations,” the French prose poem finally breaks with narrative or descriptive “supports” and finally acquires “the purity of its own lyrical meaning radiation” (Velikovsky 1987: 172). “In “Illuminations,” notes N. I. Balashov, “Rimbaud moved away from conveying content with a syntactically organized word and consciously intended (or did it involuntarily as a result of a “disorder of all senses”) to indirectly suggest ideas by visual associations, sound combinations, rhythm and the very fragmentation of the logical and syntactic incoherence of the passages” (Rimbaud 1982: 271–272).

When translating “Illuminations,” Sologub remained generally faithful to the principles that he followed when working on Mallarmé’s “Prose Poems.” By minimally organizing the text stylistically, syntactically and logically, he minimally interprets it, minimally interferes with it and transforms it. As in the translations from Mallarmé, in Sologubov’s versions of “Illuminations” there is a certain element of literalism, the reverse side of his attempts to avoid smooth writing and decoding and achieve the greatest expressiveness. Tracing and literalism in some cases even enhanced the detachment and poetic unpredictability of Rimbaud’s whimsical imagination. The order of words (“The wavy flowers hummed. The slopes of the shaft lulled them. The fabulously graceful animal was spinning”), deliberate pseudo-tongue-tiedness (“Why should the clear window turn pale in the corner of the vault”; “... when the scarlet colors rose again on the houses”), the desire to achieve the emergence of poetic images by juxtaposition, and not by the connection of words placed next to each other (“Deaf, pond, - foam, roll over the bridge...”; “On the other side of the fields, crossed by bands of rare music, phantoms of future night luxury”; “.. .bells rotate in your bright hands"), a rich and skillful phonetic organization of the text, which, by the way, refutes possible accusations of “total” literalism (“How jackals howl in the desert of cumin, - and how pastorals in clogs coo in an orchard”); “He shudders at the passage of hunts and hordes”), lexical whimsicality of style (“Branches and rain rush through the window of the library”; “Then in the violet thicket, pouring buds ...”), pumping up pronouns thanks to the literal translation of possessive pronouns: my, my , me, mine - all this together created a poetic effect quite close to the original.

With his unpublished translations of Mallarmé’s “Poems in Prose” and the partially published “Illuminations” of Rimbaud, which were very far from the aesthetic quests of the Russian symbolists, Sologub paved the way for Russian avant-gardeism and futurist experiments (it is no coincidence that the “Illuminations” were published in Strelets, published by Burliuk, who translated Rimbaud), and to some extent the Oberiuts. Such features of the avant-garde movements of the 1920s as “automatic writing”, surreal “sub-reality”, “stream of consciousness” largely went back to the aesthetic discoveries of Mallarmé and especially Rimbaud. Thus, Sologub, by translating the French symbolists, to a certain extent overtook the literary movement to which he belonged.

The significance of Sologubov's translations from Verlaine, and to some extent also from Rimbaud and Mallarmé, is great in the history of recreating the work of French poets on Russian soil. The assessment of Sologub's translations as epigonic (when comparing them with Bryusov's and along with the versions made by O. Chumina, A. Kublitskaya-Piottukh and others) is deeply erroneous. Yu. Orohovatsky is also wrong when he asserts that “never has the superiority of this art (poetic translation, - V.B.) over poetry itself, as at the turn of the last and present centuries." The level of translations was determined by the level of poetry, and did not rise above the latter, being separated from it and opposed to it. The superiority of the Symbolist translations from Verlaine over the translations of the epigones of the previous literary generation was ensured not only by the fact that the Symbolists translated Symbolist lyrics, but also by the scale of their poetic talents.

The principle of the “golden mean”, the desire to “maintain moderation in subjectivism” - these are the foundations on which, each in his own way, Sologub, Bryusov and Annensky built their translation activities. However, if we consider not the translation principles, but the results of their efforts to introduce the Russian reader to Verlaine’s lyrics, then we will have to admit that Sologub was closer to this “middle” than others (while the versions made by Bryusov are more likely to meet the principles of formal equivalence, and Annensky's version is dynamic), and as such, many of his translations are bequeathed to future generations of Russian readers. On December 2, 1907, Blok wrote to Sologub regarding Verlaine’s poem “The Blue of Heaven Above the Roof” in Sologub’s translation: “You know that this last poem came to me a very long time ago and was for me one of the first poignant revelations of new poetry. For me it is connected with the music of composer S.V. Panchenko<...>Since then I have carried this poem in my memory, for it has been inseparable from me since the days when I comprehended my first love. And in these days, when I painfully doubt myself and see a lot of people, but in essence I can’t see almost anyone, the motive of the poem and its words are with me” (Blok 1963: 219). It seems that, together with Blok, many Russian readers could say that they “carried in memory” Sologub’s translations from Verlaine. Verlaine's lyrics in the versions of Sologub, Bryusov and Annensky played an undoubted role in the “noise” of the poetic time of the beginning of the 20th century. When in 1926 I. Severyanin wrote in a sonnet dedicated to Verlaine:

Untranslatable in sophistication,

Deep in nothing, born in foreignness.

The unique Paul Verlaine, (Severyanin 1988: 241) -

His generation knew about the “refinements” of “dear” Verlaine mainly from translations, and not least from Sologubov’s.

NOTES

For a general formulation of the question of the international character of literary movements, see the work of V. M. Zhirmunsky “Literary movements as an international phenomenon” (Zhirmunsky 1979: 137–157).

Many deep and valuable, however, mostly private observations about Sologub’s translations from Verlaine are contained in the preface by M. I. Dikman to the publication of Sologub’s original and translated works in the Great Series “Library of the Poet” (Sologub 1975), in the monograph by J. Donchin 1958), dedicated to the perception by Russian symbolists of the ideas and creative achievements of Verlaine and his French followers. The topic “Verlaine and Russian Symbolism” is devoted to the articles by K. N. Grigoryan “Verlaine and Russian Symbolism” (Russian Literature. 1971. No. 1. pp. 111–120) and Yu. Orokhovatsky “Russian translators of Paul Verlaine” (Theses of interuniversity scientific .-theoretical conference “Problems of Russian criticism and poetry of the 20th century,” Yerevan, 1973. pp. 47–49). The question of Verlaine’s influence on Sologub is raised in the work of J. Smaga (Smaga 1980: 441–445).

IRLI. Archive of Sologub F.K.F. 289. Op. 2. Unit hr. 30. L. 20. Below, links to Sologub’s archive are given directly in the text, indicating in brackets the numbers of the inventory, storage unit and sheet. M. M. Pavlova pointed out to me Sologuba’s letter to Latyshev, to whom I offer my sincere gratitude.

The Sologub archive contains a few dated draft autographs of translations of Mallarmé’s “Prose Poems.” So, the translation of “The Pale Baby” - 1898, September 27, “The Pipe” - September 28.

Verlaine P. The blue of heaven above the roof / Trans. F. Sologuba // Northern Bulletin. 1893. No. 9. (Department I). P. 202; Verlaine P. The evening was so tender and the distance was so clear / Trans. F. Sologuba // Northern Bulletin. 1894. No. 6. Dep. I. S. 218.

Verlaine P. 1) The shadow of the trees in the river fell into the foggy darkness // Petersburg Life. 1896. No. 291. P. 1739; 2) Serenade; You haven't left yet; Longing // Petersburg life. 1897. No. 236. P. 1982; 3) The hearth and the flickering close above the lamp; So the sun, the companion of my joy; In the forests // Petersburg life. No. 244. P. 2247; 4) Dumps; Me on dark days; Oh, what sings in my soul; Never forever; I guess through the flickering // Ibid. No. 264. P. 2207; 5) Murava // Petersburg life. 1898. No. 205. P. 2280; 6) Night moon; In the fields all around // Petersburg life. No. 291. P. 2426.

Verlaine P. 1) To a woman // New Journal of Foreign Literature. 1904. No. 10. P. 18; 2) My soul is in tears // New Journal of Foreign Literature. No. 11. P. 109; 3) Song, fly away quickly // New Journal of Foreign Literature. 1905. No. 4. P. 27.

Bryusov's translations from Verlaine were published in separate collections twice: Verlaine P. Romances without words / Trans. V. Bryusova. M., 1894; Verlaine P. Collection poems translated by V. Bryusov. M., 1911. Significantly less successful than Bryusov’s and Sologubov’s were other “monological” attempts to recreate Verlaine’s lyrics on Russian soil (See: P. Verlaine. Poems / translated by D. Ratgauz. Kiev, 1896. Issue 1; From Musset and Verlaine. Poems / Translated by Zinaida Ts. St. Petersburg, 1907; Verlaine P. Selected poems translated by Sergei Frenkel. There were also attempts to present Verlaine’s poetry as an anthology of creative successes of Russian poets-translators on a “competitive” basis: Verlaine P. Selected poems translated by Russian poets. St. Petersburg, 1911; Verlaine P. Selected poems in translations by I. Annensky, Valery Bryusov, V. A. Mazurkevich, N. Minsky, N. Novich, P. N. Petrovsky, D. Ratgauz, S. Rafalovich, Fyodor Sologub, I. I. Tkhorzhevsky , Zinaida Ts., O. N. Chyumina (Mikhailova) and Ellis / Comp. P. N. Petrovsky. M., .

A handwritten insert is attached to the review by Yu. Verkhovsky, placed in the “Album with reviews of books of poetry by F. Sologub” (6, 17, 9). Quote from: (Voloshin 1988: 732).

On the various possibilities of rhythmization in traditional literary forms (picks and other kinds of verbal repetitions, homogeneous members of the intonational-syntactic whole, paired groups of words, alliteration of initial consonants, anaphoric repetitions, slightly outlined syntactic parallelism) see: Zhirmunsky V. M. On rhythmic prose // Zhirmunsky V. M. Theory of verse. L., 1975. S. 575-576.

“Mallarmé invents his own words that have no meaning, omits such necessary words in the French language as members, interrupts the structure of the phrase with exclamations and even entire introductory phrases, arbitrarily inserts punctuation marks, and sometimes even denies them,” wrote, for example, P. Krasnov (Krasnov P. Chapter of the Decadents: Stephane Mallarme. Vers et prose // Books of the Week. 1898, Oct. pp. 132-133).

Chuzhak N. Creativity of the word // About Fyodor Sologub. Criticism. Articles and notes / Comp. A. Chebotarevskaya. [SPb., 1911.] P. 247-248.

Mallarmé’s syntax in this fragment is completely neutral: “...je sentis que j’avais, ma main rеflеchie par un vitrage de boutique y faisant le geste d’une caresse...”

However, in Sologub’s translations the burden of “writing technique” is also quite large, the absence of which, as one of the main advantages of Mallarmé’s work, was written by R. Barthes: “Having escaped from the shell of habitual cliches, freed from the yoke of reflexes of writing technique, each word acquires independence from any possible contexts; the very appearance of such a word is like an instantaneous, unique event that does not give off the slightest echo and thereby asserts its loneliness, and therefore sinlessness” (Barthes R. Zero degree of writing // Semiotics. M., 1983. P. 342).