Short Fiction
Translated by Various translators
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Read this book for its masterful blend of psychological depth and supernatural symbolism, offering a haunting exploration of human vulnerability and the absurdity of social existence.
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Book Summary
This collection of short fiction by Fyodor Sologub blends supernatural elements with stark social realism, exploring innocence, corruption, and the elusive nature of happiness. Through tales of waiting, shrinking, and mourning, Sologub reveals the fragility of human hope and the oppressive forces of society and fate.
The book opens with nostalgic memories of childhood in 'The Old House,' where family traditions contrast with underlying sorrow. The central story follows Natasha, a young woman who rises at dawn each day to wait by a white statue of Aphrodite, praying for the return of a lost beloved, her hope sustained by the goddess's silent smile. In 'The Tiny Man,' Yakov Saranin, a government clerk, is tricked by his wife into drinking a mysterious Armenian remedy that causes him to shrink progressively. As he diminishes, he loses his job, his dignity, and his wife's respect, eventually becoming a living advertisement in a shop window before shrinking to a speck of dust and disappearing. The authorities declare him dispatched on a scientific mission. Throughout, Sologub juxtaposes the yearning for freedom and transcendence with the crushing weight of social expectation and mortality, as characters grapple with love, betrayal, and the supernatural in a world where reality and illusion blur.
Reading guide
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Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Volodya Lovlev
Volodya drifts through Sologub's stories as son, suitor, and self-appointed dreamer, measuring the world against fantasies it never quite satisfies. His charm lies in his sincerity; his trouble lies in how quickly that sincerity curdles into boredom, resentment, or a craving for something transcendent. He anchors the collection's recurring question of whether a young man can build a soul in a world that offers him only tedium and propriety.
Natasha Ozoreva
Natasha moves through drawing rooms and family circles with an air of quiet superiority, aware of her power over the men who orbit her and stingy with any sign of need. Her tenderness, when it surfaces, is complicated by a streak of cruelty and a refusal to be possessed. She matters because the men around her define themselves by how she receives them, and her choices set the emotional weather of the stories she enters.
Mashenka Pestryakova
Mashenka exists in Sologub's fiction as an object of near-religious devotion for the boys and men who idealize her, and as a person with her own shy longings underneath that worship. The tension is between the fairy-tale role others assign her and the ordinary, vulnerable girl who must actually live inside it. Her fate shapes the moral center of the stories she appears in, testing whether tenderness can survive contact with adult desire and disappointment.
Grisha Igumnov
Grisha navigates the hierarchies of provincial boyhood — brothers, schoolmates, adults who misunderstand him — with a mixture of bravado and secret hurt. His defining tension is between wanting to be loved and refusing to soften enough to earn it, which turns small humiliations into private dramas. He matters because his bruised perspective gives the collection some of its sharpest glimpses of how cruelty is learned young.
Yakov Alexeyevitch Saranin
Saranin occupies the role of father, employer, or respected neighbor — the kind of figure whose authority is assumed rather than argued. His flaw is a cold vanity that mistakes its own comfort for virtue, and his relationships are marked by a quiet need to dominate. He matters because Sologub uses him to expose how much violence can hide inside ordinary domesticity and civic respectability.
Peter Antònovitch Bulanin
Bulanin moves through courtship and family expectation with the anxious intensity of someone who wants to be admired for his soul rather than his prospects. His central tension is between romantic self-dramatization and a genuine, clumsy capacity for love that keeps tripping over his own pride. He matters because his wavering gives the collection one of its most sympathetic studies of how a decent man can talk himself into and out of happiness.
Social Class and Inequality
The book repeatedly contrasts the lives of the wealthy gentry (Elena Kirillovna, the Nesletyevs) with servants and peasants (Glasha, the cook's son Grishka), highlighting rigid hierarchies, exploitation, and the envy or resentment that class divisions create.
Illusion vs. Reality
Many stories blur the line between fantasy and reality, as seen in 'Turandina,' 'The Little Stick,' and 'The White Dog,' where characters escape into dreams, fairy tales, or madness to cope with harsh or mundane existence.
Innocence and Corruption
Children and young people (Natasha, Volodya, Grisha) are portrayed as vulnerable beings whose innocence is threatened by adult cruelty, societal expectations, or traumatic experiences, as in 'The Delicate Child' and 'The Affectionate Boy.'
Love and Betrayal
Romantic love is often shown as fleeting and deceptive, leading to heartbreak and ruin—exemplified by Nadezhda Alexevna's abandonment in 'The Old House' and the failed marriage in 'The Tiny Man,' where trust is weaponized.
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