If it were not for the insights contained in his theoretical writings, Fedor Sologub would not appear to be the ideal torchbearer to Chekhov in the struggle to renew art by revalorizing everyday life. Sologub has traditionally been seen as an ally of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii in his mission to forge a path out of the impasse to which Chekhov had led realism. Indeed, the incorrigibly decadent Sologub was considered to have done much to consolidate the notion of byt as a monotonous nightmare of poshlost' from which art offers the only hope of salvation. His fiction tells unfailingly of characters striving through a combination of eroticism, art and/or suicide to escape routine drudgery and enter the realm of beauty beyond it. To cite one example, in “Shadows” (“Teni”), a bored schoolboy follows instructions from a book on hand-shadow theater to create a magical world on the brink of insanity into which he finally entices his mother. The role of madness and death as escape-routes, together with the fact that the alternative world is so often an artificial one – in the novel A Legend in Creation (Tvorimaia legenda) the hero creates his fantasy realm from chemically revitalized corpses – suggest a profound pessimism about the possibility of reconciling the opposing worlds.