Becoming the Serpent

In scholarship on Fedor Sologub's fiction, much attention has been paid to the young person on the brink of adulthood. The most common view is that the child, confronted with adult sexuality, must choose between two extremes: become like the coarse and banal adults who surround him or her, or into death.1 Given Sologub's reputation as decadent writer, many scholars assert that Sologub's children reject earthly banality in favor of decadent, sensual, celebratory death, which has been called a deliverance and self-realization and even a friend and savior.2 This viewpoint has remained unchallenged. But I will argue instead that death is no more positive in Sologub's short stories than is acceptance of the adult world. I propose quite different pattern for Sologub's young people, pattern that is often couched in Garden of Eden allegories. Sologub's young people create separate space, mental construct in which they attempt to escape adult banality. But this space is creation of the child's private language, and the intrusion of adult language, with its philosophical underpinnings, destroys the child's Eden. Adult words, in the form of criticism, gossip, and threats, destroy this fragile world and cause the child to fall from Grace, from the state of innocence and beauty that he or she had attempted to preserve. The child's imaginative spirit is poisoned by adult language; those who are extremely sensitive experience physical death that mirrors their spiritual death. But there is no escape for most people. Perhaps the best illustration of this pattern can be found in the short story Cherviak (1896). Wanda, the young heroine of this story, recreates her distant forest

Art · Serpent (symbolism · Theology · Transformation (genetics · Chemistry · Philosophy · Themes in Literature Analysis