To the Stars and Other Stories

This book brings together 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.

Fusso Susanne :

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

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

Dmitri Svatopolk-Mirsky, author of A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900:
Sologub's prose is beautiful: limpid, clear, balanced, poetical, but with a keen sense of measure. . . .