_It is not alone the poet who is capable of creating his legend, but any one who refuses to be subject to the whims of fate and to serve the goddess of chance and chaos, “the prodigal scatterer of episodes” (Aisa). The tragic thing about this philosophy, as one Russian critic points out, is that even the definite settling of the question does not assure one complete consolation, for, like Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov,” one may say: “I do not accept God, I do not accept the world created by Him, God’s world; I simply return Him the ticket most respectfully.” Still it is with some such definite decision that he enters the kingdom of Ananke, the goddess of Necessity. Readers of “The Little Demon” have seen a practical illustration of the two forces in Peredonov and Liudmilla. Peredonov was petty and pitiful, “a little demon”--nevertheless he too “strove towards the truth in common with all conscious life, and this striving tormented him. He himself did not understand that he, like all men, was striving towards the truth, and that was why he had that confused unrest. He could not find his truth, and he became entangled, and was perishing.” Liudmilla, however, had saved herself from the pettiness and provinciality of this “unclean, impotent earth” by creating a new world for herself. She, at any rate, had her beautiful legend, knew her truth. Elisaveta, of “The Created Legend,” also belongs to the Kingdom of Ananke. She finds her salvation in “the dream of liberation,” the 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._