To The Stars & Other Stories
By Arya Roshanian
Credit: Columbia University Press
“Why am I living? But why should I die?” Nadezhda Alexeyevna asks herself. Preoccupied with unresolved shame from an abortion in her past, she now mourns the suicide of her sister’s son. Remarkably, “The Kiss of the Unborn Child” is one of the more uplifting tales in To the Stars and Other Stories, a collection of short prose by Fyodor Sologub, newly and skillfully translated by Susanne Fusso. As Nadezhda Alexeyevna sits on the steps outside her sister’s apartment, the unborn child appears and absolves her guilt. They embrace.
As one of the early Russian Symbolists of the late nineteenth century Sologub—like his artist in “The Lady in Shackles,” another story in the collection—is of paltry fame but important talent. Better known for his poetry and novels, he’s credited for bringing the cynical and macabre motifs of Western Europe’s fin de siècle to Russian literature. His fantastical depictions of the human condition are threaded seamlessly into realism, and it’s not always clear whether someone is experiencing or imagining the occult. Such phenomena aren’t graced with an explanation—as is the case with the advent of Nadezhda Alexeyevna’s aborted son, for example. Sologub’s stories are linked by his characters’ abilities to dissociate from themselves, either physically or metaphysically. And usually, that means death. Some readers (myself included) will root for their premature cessations, if only to put an end to their spiritual anguish. It’s an effective, almost rational move on Sologub, one that’s also espoused with irony—death is, after all, the most universal consequence of life.
Russian literature takes suffering very seriously. To Sologub—or at least in the following stories —redemption through suffering is best earned through death. There is some optimism in this attitude, as it’s the only true way to break away from the nefariousness that humanity inflicts upon itself. A sad boy fervently wishes to live within the night sky to escape the apathy of his superiors; a widow annually tortured by the spirit of her husband on his deathday; a triad of siblings who slowly die at the hands of systemic and structural negligence; an underground sorority of women who charade as the bereaved fiancées of deceased, unmarried men; a seamstress who retaliates against trivial inconveniences by howling at the moon, like a dog; a man who solicits his own Specter of Death from a newspaper ad; and a lonely youth who may or may not be held captive by an evil fairy. These stories represent the disparate approaches to surpass reality. All are united by the existential longing to transcendence.
Sologub’s characters are antisocial or malcontent, or both. Contemporary readers of popular fiction could, perhaps, find parallels to Moshfegh, Machado, or Murakami, the latter two of whom also share Sologub’s flair for embedding the supernatural into the natural world. And yet, those otherworldly values are also found in his treatment of the human condition. In “Beauty,” a narrative that whirls around the coupling of self-consciousness and the malevolent glare, he writes: “There is a lot about people that is absurd and ridiculous.” Elena, mesmerized by her naked reflection, finds oppression in the company of others. “People tell untruths, flatter, get excited, express their feelings in an exaggerated, unpleasant way.” Her vanity is only dismantled when she perceives herself from the gaze of another—Elena’s maid—who witnesses her mistress basking in narcissistic pleasure. Unable to cope with the shame of her erstwhile joy, Elena kills herself by thrusting a knife “right into her evenly beating heart.”Sologub typically opposes such ugly situations with sensual prose—before “her pale hand unclenched and fell onto her breast, next to the dagger’s hilt.”
Sologub’s prose often relies on word-play and regional puns, which makes decoding his stories into English an intimidating, unattainable venture. Fusso, a scholar and Russian prose specialist moonlighting as a translator, is adroit in her handling of the text. “The Two Gotiks,” for example, is a masterclass in phonetic amusement. The tale of a young gymnasium student and his mysterious doppelgänger is told alongside a brother’s mirth in the deconstruction and renovation of words. Techniques like this invite a slew of problems for the renderer — puns and witticisms in one language don’t always work in another—and Fusso manages to navigate the untranslatable without straying too far from Sologub’s prosaic style. “Selenitochka” becomes “Sell ‘n’ eat okra.” “Why’d you wake up?” turns into “Wide yew ache us?” Later, it is remarked that “Nastya has a nastya habit of leaving the doors wide open.” Such a homonymic achievement should not be taken for granted. The real feat, however, is not only in Fusso’s interpretation of the prose, but also in bringing these stories to the modern reader. Sologob’s short fiction is often overlooked, and it’s a shame they’re not more widely read. Let’s hope Fusso's efforts change that.
About the author
Arya Roshanian
Arya Roshanian is a fiction and nonfiction writer living in Brooklyn. He is a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia.