Fyodor Sologub was a Russian poet, novelist, translator, and playwright, a pessimist with a morbid sense of humour (characteristic elements of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy), and a significant figure of the Symbolist movement. Sologub became in Russia one of the four best-known writers in his time with Andreyev, Kuprin, and Gorky. His reputation as an “archetypal decadent” stemmed from his early prose works, which are characterized by the blending of reality and fantasies, quietly demonic spirit, world-weariness, and existential despair. “It’s life that’s the dream / I relinquish the old lies / And the torturing of time.” Sologub’s child characters are often haunted by abnormal psychic experiences and a longing for death. He died in Leningrad on December 5, 1927. He was said never to have been seen laughing during the whole of his life.