The Kiss of the Unborn, and Other Stories by Sologub, Fedor - 1977

E-156: University of Tennessee Press. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 1977. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN, 1977. 214 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth with titles present to the spine. Boards have light wear present to the extremities of the boards. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. According to Murl G. Barker, the translator of these stories, "critics, in attempting to assess Sologub as an important figure in the modernist movement, have named him Russia's only true decadent, Russia's Baudelaire, Russia's Marquis de Sade." Fedor Sologub (1863-1927) does strike me as the most pessimistic, world-wearied, and sexually perverse Russian writer of the Silver Age. His contemporaries including Leonid Andreyev, Zinaida Hippius, and Valery Bryusov, not lightweights themselves, nevertheless do not traverse the obsession with death, a key theme in decadence, with as much morbid passion as Sologub does. Sologub's outlook is one of unrelenting pessimism, hatred of reality, and misanthropy. As evidenced in almost every denouement in these short stories, death is the best answer to everything, but until then, we would do well to create our own fantasies or "legends" to escape from reality; he also despises the mundane, the daily routine of existence, and the deplorable and cruel nature of mankind. E-156; 8.4 X 5.8 X 1.1 inches; 214 pages .