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Friedebert Tuglas (1886-1971) wrote short-stories in a style that could be termed "Gothic Symbolist". He was influenced by a wide variety of authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, J.P. Jacobsen, Valery Bryusov, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Rodenbach, Lafcadio Hearn, Maxim Gorky and several others. He wrote most of his key stories between 1905 and 1925. You can read about him at:

http://www.einst.ee/literary/spring96/02tuglas.htm

A book of several of his short-stories appeared recently with the Central European University Press, in a series that was once edited by Timothy Garton Ash:

http://www.ceupress.com/books/html/ThePoet.htm

The stories there mostly represent his period of exile when he, a Russian citizen in Czarist times, was fleeing from the Czarist police, who would have imprisoned him as a suspected revolutionary. But they are not realist, but rather weird, often morbid. The subject matter of Tuglas? stories ranges from a starving prisoner, via a luckless pharmacist?s hallucinations from childhood, a wandering soldier who encounters weird spirits, to a young man sitting in a park, accosted by a devilish lunatic who wants to introduce a new brand of devil worship to the world.

Previously, between 1901 and the beginning of the First World War, Tuglas had written in a more realistic and romantic vein, but maybe on account of the mood of the war and his long wanderings in Western Europe, he began to write his core stories. Tuglas was always working on several stories of rather different mood and subject matter at the same time, so within the general category of Gothic Symbolism, the results are interestingly varied.

As well as stories, there are two texts in this 360-page book that are not quite stories: a mood piece about the First World War, that is a kind of mixture of essay and story, and a story that is the spoof biography of a totally made-up figure, Arthur Valdes, who is nevertheless partly based on Tuglas himself.

My own favourite story in this collection is "The Golden Hoop", which tells of a pharmacist, something of a failure in life, who returns to his childhood home, only to find the hearth cold and the old servant woman dying. It is told in a kind of hallucinatory way, and you are never quite sure what the man sees, and what he imagines.

Another story, the title story "The Poet and the Idiot" describes how the protagonist meets a weird tramp-like figure in the park and is unable to shrug him off. The tramp wants to initiate him in devil worship and argues cogently for this activity.

One story, "Freedom and Death" describes how a hungry and desperate man in a Russian Czarist prison escapes from his cell, but cannot get out of the prison yard, and therefore hides in the woodshed. This is again written in hallucinatory style, with the man seeing freedom over the prison wall, so near and yet so far.

In another story, "The Air is Full of Passion", the protagonist is a cocky knight, riding through the forest at night. He finds a hosue in a glade, but the inhabitants are really creepy, a lustful woman, her brothers and father. Later that night he goes for a walk... He survives the horrors he encounters, but his hair has turned white.

Another really strange story of his is written in commedia dell'arte style, with all the clowns and rogues of this Italian kind of folk theatre, and in it an androgyne starts out the day as a pretty little girl and ends it as a savage and cruel prince. This novella predates Virginia Woolf's novel "Orlando" by three years and is in the other direction - the androgyne in the Woolf book starts as a prince and becomes a woman. But comparison is intriguing.

Later in life, Tuglas settled down, married, established a literary magazine and was head of the local writers' union on several occasions. He travelled extensively: though Scandinavia and Germany, France, Italy and Spain and the Maghreb (i.e. Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia).