Две жены в творчестве Ф. Соголуба: между Евой и Лилит
Two Wives in F. Sologub’s Work: between Eva and Lilith

Summary/Abstract: Lilith went into the early 20th-century literature as a bearer of a principle opposite to Eva’s. Lilith opposes Eva in the same way as dream opposes reality. Lilith’s attraction in the literature of “fin du siècle” is the other side of repudiating Eva associated with the ordinary and conventional life, with “what is always with us”. With F. Sologub these contractions acquire a particular significance while interrelations between Lilith, Eva, and Adam form original configuration. The main characters of Sologub works turn out to be not even Lilith or Eva but what can be called personified as energy values. Like a designing demiurg-engineer Sologub sorts out all possible configurations of their roles over and over again trying to combine these polarly contraposed energy would concentrate in the Man – New Adam – unwasted and undispersed. However, these titanic efforts were not destined to be crowned with success. Instead of the expected fullness Sologub’s man who has wasted his life energy on both sides finally sinks down into tiredness and exhaustion which make him – in Sologub’s way – the expression of an epoch paradoxical combination of a ten-dency towards the communist synthesis of contradictory principles on the one hand and the decadent doom on the other.

• Details
• Contents