The Petty Demon (39 page)

It was perhaps only now that Marta understood how repulsive she found Peredonov after all that had happened with him and because
of him. Marta gave little thought to love. She dreamt about how she would get married and would keep a good household. Of
course, in order to do so she needed someone to fall in love with her and it was pleasant for her to think about that at the
time but it wasn’t the main thing.

When Marta was dreaming about her household, she would imagine that she would have precisely the kind of home, garden and
orchard that Vershina had. At times she had sweet dreams that Vershina would make a present of it all to her and Vershina
herself would stay on there to live with her, smoke her cigarettes and rebuke her for her indolence.

“You didn’t know how to make him interested,” Vershina said angrily and quickly. “You were always sitting there like a bump
on a log. What more could you need! A fine young man, the picture of health. Here I am taking pains with you, trying, you
might have at least appreciated and understood that. It was for you, you know, so you might have at least tried for your part
to attract him somehow.”

“I couldn’t just foist myself on him,” Marta said quietly. “I’m not one of those Rutilov girls.”

“A lot of honor, this threadbare Polish gentry!” Vershina grumbled.

“I’m afraid of him, better I marry Murin,” Marta said.

“Murin! Do tell, please! You have some grand ideas about yourself! Murin! As though he’d take you. The fact that he sometimes
said some affectionate words to you, that doesn’t mean perhaps that they were actually intended for you. You’re still not
worth a husband like that—a solid, serious man. You like to eat, but it makes your head hurt to think.”

Marta turned a brilliant red. She did love to eat and could eat frequently and a lot. Raised in the country air, amid simple
and rough work, Marta considered abundant and nourishing food one of the main conditions for human well-being.

Vershina suddenly rushed up to Marta, struck her on the cheek with her small dry hand and cried:

“On your knees, you good-for-nothing!”

Marta, sobbing quietly, got down on her knees and said:

“Forgive me, N [atalya] A [fanasyevna].”

“I’ll make you stay the whole day on your knees,” Vershina cried. “Don’t fray the dress, if you please, it costs money, stand
on your bare knees, raise your dress up and take your shoes off. You’re no grand lady. Just you wait, I’m still going to thrash
you with the rod.”

Marta, obediently sitting down on the very edge of the bench, quickly took
her shoes off, uncovered her knees and got down on the bare boards. It was as though she liked to subjugate herself and to
know that her part in this oppressive matter was coming to an end. She would be punished, kept on her knees, perhaps even
whipped. It would be painful, but afterwards everything would be forgiven. All this would happen soon, that very day.

Vershina walked back and forth past the kneeling Marta, felt pity for her and yet was hurt over the fact that she wanted to
marry Murin. It would have been nicer for her to marry Marta off to Peredonov or someone else, and to take Murin for herself.
Murin appealed to her in so many ways: he was big, fat, and such a good and attractive person. Vershina thought that she would
be more suitable for Murin than Marta. The fact that Murin had become so engrossed in Marta and so enticed by her—well, that
might have passed. But now, now Vershina understood that Murin would insist on Marta marrying him and Vershina didn’t want
to interfere. It was as though she were overcome with some kind of maternal pity and tenderness towards this girl, and she
thought that she would sacrifice herself and give up Murin to Marta. This pity towards Marta forced her to feel kind and to
be proud of the fact, while at the same time the defunct hope of marrying Murin inflamed her heart with the desire to make
Marta feel the full force of her wrath and her kindness, as well as Marta’s complete guilt.

Vershina particularly liked Marta and Vladya for the reason that she could give them orders, grumble at them and sometimes
punish them. Vershina loved power and she was very flattered when Marta, after committing some fault, would unquestioningly
get down on her knees at Vershina’s order.

“I do everything for you,” she said. “I’m not an old lady yet myself, I too might have still enjoyed my life and married a
kind and solid person. Why should I look for husbands for you? But I’m more concerned with you than with myself. You’ve let
one prospective husband slip away and now, just like for a little child, I’m supposed to lure another one, but then you’ll
snort again and scare this one off.”

“Someone will marry me,” Marta said shamefully. “I’m not a monster and I don’t need other people’s prospective husbands.”

“Silence!” Vershina raised her voice. “Not a monster! So what am I, a monster! She’s being punished and still talks. Obviously,
the punishment isn’t bad enough. Well, of course, you have to be properly punished, my little ones, so that you’ll obey and
do what you’re told and not act smart. You can’t expect any sense from someone who acts smart out of stupidity. You, sister,
must first learn how to live yourself, but for the time being while you’re still going around in other people’s clothing you’ll
have to be a little more modest and obey, otherwise Vladya won’t be the only one getting a licking.”

Marta was trembling, and pitifully raising her tear-stained and flushed face, looked with timid and silent entreaty into Vershina’s
eyes. There was a feeling of submissiveness in her heart and a readiness to do everything she was ordered to do, to tolerate
everything that they wanted to do with her—just as long as she knew, or could guess what was wanted of her. And Vershina felt
her power over this girl and that made her head spin, and a kind of tenderly cruel feeling in her suggested that she had to
treat Marta with parental severity, for her own good.

“She’s become accustomed to beatings,” she thought. “A lesson wouldn’t be a lesson for them without that, they don’t understand
mere words. They only respect, those who oppress them.”

“Let’s go home, my beauty,” she said to Marta, smiling “I’m going to treat you to some excellent whipping rods.”

Marta started to weep anew, but she felt happy that the matter was coming to a conclusion. She bowed down at Vershina’s feet
and said:

“You are like my very own mother to me, I am bound to you for so much.”

“Well, come on,” Vershina said, poking her in the shoulder.

Marta got up obediently and followed barefoot after Vershina. Vershina stopped under a birch and looked at Marta with a grin.

“Should I break them off?” Marta asked.

“Break them off,” Vershina said. “And nice ones.”

Marta started to tear off branches, selecting the ones that were longer and firmer, and she stripped the leaves from them
while Vershina watched her with a grin.

“Enough,” she said at last and set out for the house.

Marta followed her and carried an enormous bundle of rods. Vladya met them and looked fearfully at Vershina.

“I’m going to give your sister a whipping right now,” Vershina said to him. “You’ll hold her for me while I punish her.”

But when she arrived at the house, Vershina changed her mind. She sat down on a chair in the kitchen. She made Marta kneel
down in front of her, bent her over her knees, raised her clothing from behind, held her hands and ordered Vladya to whip
her. Vladya, who was used to whipping rods, having seen more than once at home the way his father whipped Marta, thought that
if someone was being punished then it had to be done conscientiously, even if he did feel pity for his sister at the moment.
And therefore he whipped Marta with all his strength, carefully tallying up the blows. It was extremely painful for her and
she cried out in a voice that was partially muffled by her clothing and Vershina’s dress. She tried to lie quietly, but despite
herself her naked legs kept moving on the floor more and more forcefully, and finally she started to thrash about with them
in desperation. Her body was already covered with wealts and spatterings of blood. It became difficult for Vershina to hold
her.

“Wait,” she said to Vladya. “Tie her legs up more firmly.”

Vladya brought rope from somewhere. Marta was tied up firmly, laid out on a bench and bound to it with a rope. Vershina and
Vladya took a rod each and for a long while thrashed her from two sides. Vladya made an effort to tally up the blows as before,
under his breath, but calling the tens out loud. Marta’s cries were sonorous and shrill, gradually subsiding until her shrill
whining grew hoarse and intermittent. Finally, when Vladya had counted to a hundred, Vershina said:

“Well, that’s enough for her. Now she’ll remember.”

They untied Marta and helped her into her bed. She was whining weakly and moaning.

She couldn’t get out of her bed for two days. On the third day she got up, bowed down with difficulty at Vershina’s feet,
and then getting up, started to moan and weep.

“For your own good,” Vershina said.

“Alas, I understand that,” Marta replied and again she bowed down at her feet. “From now on don’t leave me, take the place
of my mother, and forgive me now, don’t be angry any more.”

“Well, God help you, I forgive you,” Vershina said, holding her hand out to Marta.

Marta kissed it.

T
HE FOLLOWING FRAGMENTS
from
The Petty Demon
were copied from Sologub’s notebooks to the novel (dated 1902), currently housed in the Leningrad Public Library (Gosudarstvennaya
publichnaya bibliotekaimeni Saltykova-Shchedrina; Lichnyi arkhivnyi fond F.K. Soluguba, No. 724, Nos. 2 & 3). Most of this
material was published in the newspaper
Rech’
(April 15, 22, and 29, 1912), under the title “Sergei Turgenev and Sharik.” Some additional unpublished fragments on the
same theme have been interpolated into the basic material by the translator.

Insofar as this fragmentary episode has been generally unavailable to Western readers this material constitutes a new page
in the textual history of one of the greatest twentieth-century Russian novels. Together with the variants offered in the
1933 edition of the novel (reprinted by Bradda Books in 1966), these materials provide us with the most complete text of
The Petty’ Demon
which we are likely to have for the forseeable future.

“Sergei Turgenev and Sharik” recounts the episode of how two writers pass through the town in order, as Sharik informs the
participants at the masquerade ball, “to study your manners.” They initially befriend the gymnasium student Vitkevich, who
then acquaints them with Peredonov, although not before providing the inquisitive visitors with stories about the strange
schoolteacher. Convinced that they themselves are among Russia’s “newest men,” the authors see Peredonov as one of the same
breed and develop an immediate fascination for him. The two perceive something “powerfully evil” in Peredonov, respecting
his “demonic” desire to whip children in order to prevent them from laughing. Indeed, viewing Peredonov as the most curious
example of Russian “manners,” each quickly decides to make the mad schoolteacher the hero of his next novel. What follows
is a series of humorous adventures which the two writers experience while visiting with Peredonov and his fellow townspeople.
It is clear that the Turgenev-Sharik sequence is thematically tied to the main plot of
The Petty Demon
by the
peredonovshchina
which corrupts, to one degree or another, most of the characters and which forms a kind of connective tissue between virtually
all of the novel’s episodes and events. The two writers are linked to the book’s negative figures by virtue of their pettiness,
insincerity, ambition, and blindness to their own banality. Furthermore, insofar as language and theme are profoundly interconnected
in
The Petty Demon
,
the verbal texture of the deleted portion demonstrates considerable linguistic affinities with the larger body of the text.
Yet the overall lightness of the Turgenev-Sharik episode—its entire tonality of banter and almost slapstick humor—runs counter
to the high seriousness with which Sologub approaches the major ideas of the novel: the nature of beauty and the role of creative
fantasy in life. And there is good reason why this is so.

In point of fact, the Turgenev-Sharik episode, and specifically the character of Sharik, was conceived as a vicious parody
of Maxim Gorky, which Sologub allowed himself to release only in 1912—ten years after its original composition. Relations
between the two writers had never been particularly warm, and with the exception of
The Petty Demon
and the verse collection
Circle of Fire (Plamennyi krug
, 1908), Gorky had reacted in print quite unfavorably to Sologub’s “decadent” works. Given their strong literary and political
differences, it is not surprising that Sologub should have composed such a parody. But why he removed this episode from the
novel shortly before its publication will remain a matter of speculation until his voluminous archives are made available
to public scrutiny. There is no question, however, as to why Sologub published this material in April 1912; indeed, that year
marked the culmination of the bitterness that each writer had long felt for one another. Their feud flared up in early March,
when Gorky published an article about suicide (a popular theme in Sologub’s early works and in the writing of many decadent/symbolist
authors), entitled “On the Present Time (“O sovremennosti,”
Russkoe slovo
, March 2 & 3, 1912). Ever-sensitive to the slightest negative allusion (real or imagined) to him and his works, Sologub could
not have failed to notice this piece. Six weeks later “Sergei Turgenev and Sharik” appeared in
Rech’
(April 15, 22, and 29)—Sologub undoubtedly having found the time especially opportune for issuing his long-suppressed parody
of Gorky. Nor did the matter end here. On December 16 of the same year,
Russkoe slovo again
carried a piece by Gorky—his third “Fairy Tale”—which was even more detrimental to Sologub and which included some slighting
remarks about the writer’s wife, the critic Anastasya Chebotarevskaya. In his response of December 23 to an angry letter from
Sologub, Gorky categorically denied any intention of personally attacking him, although when mentioning Sologub in his letters,
Gorky never failed to employ the most abusive terms.

In the deleted episode from
The petty Demon
, Sologub attains at least partial revenge for Gorky’s attacks on him. It is Sharik for whom Gorky serves as the model: the
crude and self-righteous author whose Nietzschean heroes are bathed in cheap sentimentalism and distasteful amoralism, all
of which reflects not “objective reality” but actually the writer-preacher himself. There is little doubt that Shank’s bathetic
exclamation, “To hell with the truth! Truth is a horrible petite bourgeoise, a rumor-monger and fool,” echoes and lampoons
Satan’s famous line in Gorky’s play
The Lower Depths
(written during the same year as Sologub’s notebooks): “Man—now that’s what truth is! … Truth is the god of a free man.”
However one approaches these fragments from
The Petty Demon
, they shed a new and interesting light on Sologub’s timeless masterpiece.

Stanley Rabinowitz

(a) Peredonov met Vitkevich on the street in the company of Stepanov and Skvortsov, two writers who had arrived a few days
before from the big city and whose acquaintance he had made the preceding day.

Stepanov (who now published under the name of Sergei Turgenev) wrote verse in the decandent spirit for fame and Marxist verse
for publication. He also wrote stories that were of a dual content as well. Some were intended for fame—but no one would print
them and they lay in the writer’s desk, preserved for posterity. The others were printed willingly enough in journals and
newspapers, but from time to time it did happen that the writer was criticized because they bore too close a resemblance to
long-forgotten works by deceased writers who were unknown to the world. At that point Stepanov changed his pseudonym. The
literary name of Sergei Turgenev was still not widely known. No one had yet succeeded in discovering the sources for his fresh
inspirations, although sensing fresh booty, many diligent bibliophiles in godforsaken spots had been conducting zealous searches
in their own literary hodgepodge as well as that of others.

The story-writer Skvortsov (who used the signature of Sharik) thought of himself as being the most up-to-date person in Russia
and was very curious to know what would come after Symbolism, Decadence and various other new tendencies at the time. Moreover,
he considered himself to be a Nietzschean. Incidentally, he still hadn’t read Nietzsche in the original—because of his lack
of knowledge of German—and he had heard that the translations were bad and for that reason he didn’t read them either. But
he wrote stories in the mixed style of Reshetnikov
^*
and Romanticism of the 1830’s, and, moreover, the heroes of these stories always possessed an unmistakable resemblance to
Sharik himself. They were all strong people.

There was something akin in their external appearance despite the fact that at first glance they did not appear similar. Sharik
was a lanky young fellow, scrawny, with shaggy red hair. He usually just called himself a “fellow.” Turgenev was short, with
a ruddy complexion, clean-shaven, somewhat balding. He wore a pince-nez in frames made of Warsaw gold and was always squinting.
He was fussy and diffident in his movements. He would say of himself: “I am a poet.” And at the same time he would squint
blissfully. Sharik didn’t wear glasses. His manners were exaggeratedly uncouth. They weren’t badly dressed, just slovenly.
Sharik was in a light-colored loose peasant shirt and Turgenev in a gray summer suit. Turgenev had a walking stick in his
hands whereas Sharik carried a staff that was five feet long. Turgenev spoke in a languid fashion whereas Sharik hacked and
hewed.

Sharik and Turgenev were jealous of each other, because they both considered themselves candidates to become Russian celebrities.
But they pretended to be great friends while being guided by one and the same perfidious calculation: each of them was attempting
to make a drunkard of the other and thereby ruin the other’s talent.

Not long ago Sharik had even embroiled Turgenev in a duel with an apothecary. Before and during the duel everyone got properly
drunk, both the duellers and their seconds. At the signal they fired at each other, but after they had turned their backs
to each other with the calculation that the bullets would fly around the globe and strike where they were intended.

Carousing and seeking ever fresh means for facilitating the realization of their perfidious intrigues, they arrived in our
town. Once they were here each
of them considered himself close to his goal. For that reason they felt complacent, gave themselves a small respite and even
though they got drunk every day, it wasn’t carried to excess. It was Vitkevich who brought the writers together with Peredonov.
As a progressive student at the gymnasium he naturally considered it his responsibility to become acquainted with the writers
and he even wrote an essay for them: “The Influence of Slowacki on Byron.”
^*

Even before the writers made the acquaintance of Peredonov they had been suddenly consumed with a great curiosity about him.
From the stories of Vitkevich and others he seemed to be one of the new people. They sensed something powerfully evil in him
and each of them immediately intended to use him as the hero for their next brilliant novel. Yet, at the same time, by some
strange whim of their willful minds, they saw in him a common type as well, the “bright spirit” (the authorities, i.e., the
headmaster, Peredonov had said, were persecuting him).

“This here lad sure does praise you,” Sharik said to Peredonov.

“He is overcome with pathos because of you,” Turgenev said diffidently.

“He understands,” Peredonov said sullenly, “that they’re all blockheads here. But he’s not a bad fellow himself.”

“We were just out for a walk,” Sharik said.

“This is no time for a walk,” Peredonov replied sullenly. “Come over to my place and drink vodka and we can have lunch at
the same time.” The writers readily agreed. They all went to Peredonov’s.

“These gentlemen of letters and myself were talking about an interesting topic,” Vitkevich said. “About down-and-outers.”

“Yes, people say you shouldn’t hit a man who’s down—what nonsense!” Sharik exclaimed. “Who should you thrash if not a person
who’s down! Someone who’s on his two feet isn’t going to take it, but a man who’s down is a completely different matter. You
can give it to him in the teeth and the mug, the scoundrel!”

He gave Turgenev an affectionate glance, looking directly into a face that was dissipated from protracted drunkenness.

“Give it to him hot, the villain!” Turgenev agreed as well, bestowing a fond look on his friend and stroking him on his thin
and fragile back. It seemed to Turgenev that Sharik was already in bad shape and had contracted syphilis of the spine from
all manner of excesses.

“Do you agree? A submissive person should be pushed around?” Sharik asked Peredonov with an affectionate tone in his uncertain
voice.

“Yes,” Peredonov replied. “And the boys and girls should be whipped and as often as possible, and as painfully as possible
so that they’ll squeal like little piggies.”

“Why?” Turgenev asked with a painful grimace.

“So they won’t laugh, otherwise they’ll be laughing in their sleep,” Peredonov replied sullenly.

“You hear!” Sharik exclaimed ecstatically. “So they won’t laugh! There’s something demonic in that! To banish that vulgar,
animal laughter out of that vulgar childhood!”

“Yes, that is repulsively beautiful,” Turgenev said, out of diffidence to both Peredonov and himself.

“Yes,” Sharik rejoined, “or exquisitely vile. But Turgenev hit it right on the head: repulsively beautiful! My friend Turgenev—there’s
none wittier than he in Russia.”

“And just remark on his marvellous aphorism: exquisitely vile,” Turgenev said. “Marvellously said! O, my friend Sharik knows
how to find amazing words. Russia will be hearing about him.”

Excerpts from the speech which he had prepared long ago to deliver at Sharik’s graveside were activated in his mind.

They went on several paces in silence, smiling joyfully, each delighted with his intelligence and brilliance. Vitkevich walked
alongside them with mincing steps and kept peering exultantly into their blissful faces.

“It’s turned out just famously that we came to this backwash,” Sharik said. His thoughts were on that remarkable person, Peredonov.

“There’s nothing good here,” Peredonov said sullenly.

“But there’s you!” Turgenev exclaimed and gazed fondly into Peredonov’s dull eyes.

“I’m all there is!” Peredonov said mournfully. “And I’ll be leaving soon. I’m going to be an inspector, make the rounds of
the schools and whip the boys and girls.”