Fydor Sologub (pronounced Sulagoup, with the stress on the last syllable) is best known as a poet and novelist, famous for his elegant; musical verse and for his grotesque fictional masterpiece, The Petty Demon. Born in 1863 and a member of the first generation of Russian symbolists, Sologub—a man of proletarian origins whose real name was Teternikov—was almost forty-five when he wrote his first play and had already been active in the literary world for over twenty years. Yet at this point the shy and withdrawn poet embarked upon a new career in the theatre and became a major symbolist dramatist and theoretician of a new stagecraft.