dream dreamt by all good Russians and made an active creative legend
by the efforts to realize it in life. Being an antithesis to the
analytical novel, this novel treats of sex, not as a psychology but as
a philosophy; nuances are avoided, the feminine figure becomes a
symbol, drawn, not photographically but broadly, in fluent, even
exaggerated Botticellian outlines. I might go even further and say
that as a symbol of Russian revolution the figure of Elisaveta is
perhaps meant to stand out with the statuesque boldness of the Victory
of Samothrace. The feminine figure, nude or thinly draped, has been
used as symbol for ideas in the plastic arts ever since art was born;
our puritans have never been faced with the problem of what some of
the mythological divinities in stone would do if they should suddenly
come to life, become human. Yet it is a problem of this sort that
Sologub has attempted to solve--the problem of the gods in exile. As
for Elisaveta, Sologub goes indeed the length of describing her
previous existence in the second of the series of novels that go under
the general head of "The Created Legend"; she was then the Queen
Ortruda of some beautiful isles in the Mediterranean, and she is fated
to carry her queenliness into her later life._

_"The Little Demon" is Sologub's "Inferno," "The Created Legend" his
"Paradiso." And just as the problem there was the abuse of bodily
beauty, so it is here the idealism of bodily beauty. It is natural
that the over-draping of our bodies, the supposed symbol of our
modesty, but in reality an evidence of our lust, should form part of
his thesis. But M. Anatole France has already pointed out brilliantly
in "Penguin Island" how immodesty originated in the invention of
clothes._

_The conclusion is quite clear: it is beauty that can save the