M. Maeterlinck’s Art in F. Sologub’s Reception

Abstract

This paper deals with the history of the artistic dialogue between F. Sologub and M. Maeterlinck and singles out stages of Sologub’s perception of the Belgian author’s oeuvre. The article refers to writings by Maeterlinck (the original physiophilosophical essay The Life of the Bee , poems translated by Sologub, and The Blue Bird play) and by Sologub (articles and reviews, plays The Gift of Wise Bees , The Night Dances ). The first step of reception included reading and translating original texts into Russian. In Sologub’s personal library, there were volumes by Maeterlinck in French and in Russian; in his archives, there are unpublished translations of poems; in addition, there is a probability that Sologub participated in the translations of plays made by his wife An. Chebotarevskaya. The next stage implied references to Maeterlinck’s art in journalistic works (including the article The Wisdom of Maeterlinck ). In Sologub’s opinion, one of the fundamental principles of Maeterlinck’s art was the idea of an inseparable connection between love and death. The intertextual links between Sologub’s The Gift of Wise Bees and Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee are allusions to the images of bees, honey, and wax, which become metaphors of life, love, and art, respectively in the Russian play. The concept of “dialogue” was particularly important for Sologub’s art: according to him, a genuine writer can only create within the scope of previous works of art, and his primary task is to be selective and able to “see” and use the material of their own. In this paper, the author suggests the idea that Sologub started writing plays under the influence of Maeterlinck’s writings and his concept of the new theatre. Then there was a new level of artistic communication: almost simultaneously two plays were created and staged in Russia (one by Sologub and the other by Maeterlinck). The two plays are typologically similar: both have a symbolic central image, life-affirming spirit, magic assistants, and a circular plot structure. The author of the article puts forward a hypothesis that translation can become a catalyst of interconnection at such a sophisticated level when two writers have a similar worldview and tend to create within the same aesthetics, as The Blue Bird and The Night Dances resemble tendencies within a common paradigm of creative thinking.