world, it is our eyes and our imaginations behind our eyes that can
remodel the world into "a chaste dream." Like Don Quixote, whom
Sologub loves, we must see Dulcinea in our Aldonza, and our persistent
thought of her as Dulcinea may make her Dulcinea in actuality._

_Such are the thoughts behind this strange book, in which fantasy
and reality rub unfriendly shoulders. But it would be robbing the
reader of his prerogative to explain the various symbols the author
employs; for this is in the full sense a Symbolist novel, and, like a
piece of music or a picture in patterns, its charm to him who will
like it will lie in individual interpretation. I cannot, however,
resist the desire to speak of my own personal preference for Chapter
XIII, in which the death of certain musty Russian institutions is
brilliantly symbolized by the author in the passage of the risen dead
on St. John's Eve_.

_In the "quiet children" the author has resurrected, as it were, the
child heroes in which his stories abound, and given them an existence
on a new plane, "beyond good and evil." It is only children, beings
chaste and impressionable, who are capable of transformation--or shall
we say transfiguration?--and if they happen to be in this case more
paradisian than earthly it is because truth expressed in symbols must
of necessity appear fantastic and exaggerated. It is, for the same
reason, that we find the worthlessness of Matov expressed in his being
turned by Trirodov into a paper-weight. Then there is the Sun, the
Flaming Dragon, the infuriator of men's passions, powerless, however,
to affect the "quiet children," who, freed of all passion--"the beast
in man"--may have their white feet covered with the light dust of the
earth, but never scorched by the evil heat._