showing the reverse of the picture: how the imagination, no longer
warped, but sensitized with beauty, is capable of creating a world of
its own, legendary yet none the less real for the legend._

_The Russian title of the book is more descriptive of the author's
intentions than an English translation will permit it to be.
"Tvorimaya Legenda" actually means "The legend in the course of
creation." The legend that Sologub has in mind is the active,
eternally changing process of life, orderly and structural in spite of
the external confusion. The author makes an effort to bring order out
of apparent chaos by stripping life of its complex modern detail and
reducing it to a few significant symbols, as in a rather more subtle
"morality play." The modern novel is perhaps over-psychologized;
eternal truths and eternal passions are perhaps too often lost sight
of under the mass of unnecessary naturalistic detail._

_In this novel life passes by the author as a kind of dream, a dream
within that nightmare Reality, a legend within that amorphousness
called Life. And the nightmare and the dream, like a sensitive
individual's ideas of the world as it is and as it ought to be,
alternate here like moods. The author has expressed this
changeableness of mood curiously by alternating a crudely realistic,
deliberately naive, sometimes journalese style with an extremely
decorative, lyrical manner--this taxing the translator to the utmost
in view of the urgency to translate the mood as well as the ideas._

_As a background we have "the abortive revolution of_ 1905."
_This novel is an emotional statement of those "nightmarish" days.
Against this rather hazy, tempestuous background we have the sharply
outlined portrait of an individual, a poet, containing a world within