To the Stars and Other Stories

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

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

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

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