Fyodor Sologub (Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov) was born in Petersburg into the family of a tailor and a peasant. Until 1907 he worked as a teacher of mathematics and then as a school inspector. He was a member of a circle of symbolist poets. As Alexander Blok pointed out, the subject of Sologub’s poetry was “the soul refracting the world inside it, rather than the world refracted in the soul”.

Grandiloquent surges peculiar to the symbolist poetry of that time for Sologub were impregnated with bitterness of the sufferings of poverty that he had endured.

The summit of Sologub’s prose writing is his famous novel The Petty Demon written in 1902 and published in 1907. The creation of this novel determined Sologub's further destiny: he got an opportunity to retire and devote his life to literary work. He started to write the novel Navyi Charms.

The years 1910-1912 saw the publication of Sologub's Collected Works in twelve volumes. The writer also made lots of translations. Fyodor Sologub died in Leningrad on December 5, 1927. He was laid down to rest at Smolensk orthodox cemetery.