The Petty Demon (42 page)

“Pfui!” Turgenev said scornfully.

“Wait,” Sharik stopped him. “I am maintaining that Nekrasov—and note that I am maintaining it with facts—that Nekrasov was
envious of Minaev.”

“Aha!” Turgenev exclaimed and laughed. “Improbable, but nice. Immortally nice.”

“Yes, yes, he was envious,” Sharik said with conviction. “And in fact it was impossible for him not to be envious: envy is
an essential attribute of the genuinely literary temperament.”

“Yes, perhaps you’re right,” Turgenev said thoughtfully.

“I can understand Salieri.”
^*

Meanwhile a crowd had gathered at the entrance to the buffet. They were looking at the writers and exchanging remarks. Sharik
was angered by this. He stood up, frowned, scratched the back of his head and said in a rude voice:

“Hey, listen you characters there, what d’you want? What do you see here so interesting?”

“Sh-sh-sh,” echoed in the crowd. “He’s speaking, he’s saying something.”

Suddenly it became very quiet and Sharik’s voice echoed with ruthless clarity in the midst of this perfidious silence:

“I came here to study your manners, not to dangle in front of you like a scarecrow. I am a man of letters and not a deep-sea
diver, or even some bare-bellied Venus. You’re wasting your time staring at me. I have the very same kind of mug as every
other scoundrel here and I drink tea with my mouth and not with my nose or any other aperture.”

“Well done!” someone shouted in the crowd.

Someone clucked maliciously, someone started to laugh. Sharik went on, with increasing loudness and anger:

“Sergei Turgenev and I sat down to sip tea, so you scram, hop to it! Rather than goggling at us you’d better read our books
more carefully, otherwise you’ll be gathering moss before you know it. Other men of fiction are merely my precursors … The
precursors for me and Sergei Turgenev. So then, you go ahead and read us, learn some sense for yourselves, we won’t teach
you anything bad.”

He turned away from the crowd, sat down, poured some tea into his saucer, set the saucer on his scalded fingers and slurped
with deliberate loudness. The motley crowd gave the orator a round of applause and dispersed with laughter.

“He got rid of us smartly!”

“Now that’s some writer!”

“He doesn’t have to hunt for words.”

“Smart fellow!”

“We fools really deserved that!”

“After all, what’s the point of stating. Some wonder!”

The official with the besom was shaking it, clowning about energetically and repeating:

“This is a real bathhouse. They really steam our brother here.”

Turgenev had made no attempt to stop Sharik. He smiled sweetly and dreamt that this tactless escapade would find its way into
the newspapers and discredit Sharik. When the spectators had left, Turgenev gave Sharik a sympathetic handshake and said:

“This speech will endure as a famous fact in our biography. Write it down before you forget it, otherwise people will distort
it!”

“Yes, thank you, I’ll slap it down,” Sharik said. “I myself feel that I did a great job of it.”

“You know,” Turgenev said, “when a person hears speeches like that, the soul sprouts wings, white and sharp ones, like those
of demons.”

“That’s a clever one you’ve come up with,” Sharik encouraged him. “You and I are in good form today!”

Turgenev’s eyes grew dreamy and be said:

“Today, while you were writing, I strolled through the woods outside of town. I conversed with the flowers, the birds and
the wind. I was happy.”

“If you take some vodka or rum with you,” Sharik said, “then it’s really something.”

“No, I wasn’t drunk,” Turgenev protested. “My soul is akin to the clouds, those mutable and beautiful clouds. Do you see the
tears in my eyes? Those tears are from a surfeit of sensitivity.”

M
URL
B
ARKER

T
he Petty Demon
, written during the years 1892 to 1902 was serialized in the journal
Voprosy
zhizni (
Question of Life) in 1905
. It was not until 907 that it was finally published in book form, and then it received widespread recognition and Sologub’s
literary fame was assured. But not all of the early reviews and criticism of the novel were favorable; on the contrary, Sologub’s
contemporaries were often sharply divided in their views. While it is a rather flippant exaggeration to write off this initial
reaction to the novel as a “collection of cliches,”
¹
for today’s reader, most of this early criticism seems dated, repetitious and lacking in perspective. Part of the problem
was the pronounced tendency toward rhetoric; there was a great deal of plot recapitulation; generalizations abounded. I do
not feel that extensive translations of this material are necessary to accompany an English edition of the novel intended
for the non-specialist. But a brief overview of the various interpretations by those early critics will serve as an introduction
to the recent criticism included in this appendix.

Many of Sologub’s contemporaries reacted extremely negatively to the work (and its author) in their reviews. Anastasia Chebotarevskaya,
Sologub’s wife, was irked by the attacks and was provoked into an angry diatribe aimed at these critics. In an article which
is really a defense of her husband’s work, she questions these reviewers’ intelligence, their talent and experience in dealing
with literature: in Russia, she claims, virtually anyone can pass himself off as a critic—beginning with the uneducated schoolboy.
²
What prompted her article were the epithets directed at Sologub which she had gathered from the various critical articles
written about him by his contemporaries. Sologub was characterized as “possessed,” “a maniac,” “sadist,” “a morbid, mutilated
talent with a psychopathic inclination,” “abnormal,” “decandent.”
³

Chebotarevskaya’s observations are not confined to
The Petty Demon;
rather; she comments in general about the author’s philosophy as dramatized by all of his works. She points out that one
distinct thread in his works is his rejection of the world in its present, untransformed condition. Denial of the real world
was not difficult for Sologub since death is viewed in such a positive light: it comforts, does not deceive and no one fears
death—not even the children, who alone are called alive in this repugnant world. But Dream, too, may be a liberating force
and with it, the creative process in particular. This idea is expanded in Sologub’s various solipsistic proclamations concerning
the power of the individual’s “I” to create and affirm worlds within itself. And, Chebotarevskaya concludes, there is a striving
in Sologub for the intimate to become universal.
⁴

Certainly the trilogy provoked the more vitriolic outbursts directed toward Sologub.
⁵
But
The Petty Demon
, too, proved to be fertile ground for accusations leveled at the author. While it was generally agreed that Peredonov was
the epitome of banality, stupidity, and cruelty, the crudest interpretation of the protagonist came from those critics who
saw him as a self-portrait of the writer.
⁶
Other critics disagreed and the author addresses this accusation in the preface to the second edition of the work. Most critics
agreed that the existence of Peredonovs was widespread in the Russian provinces, and indeed, shortly after the appearance
of the novel, the word “Peredonovism” was coined and came into general usage. The more general view however Was that there
is some part of Peredonov in each one of us, that the character becomes a symbol of a universal truth, transcending his time
and milieu. One of Sologub’s most perceptive critics, Ivanov-Razumnik,
⁷
insists that one misses the whole point of the work if it is read merely as an account of provincial life. Rather, it is
life in its entirety: life without aim or meaning—the philistines’ rampant banality and cruelty are everywhere. It is not
Peredonov alone who represents this terrifying vision of life: the other characters in the novel are no less horrible in their
spiritual make-up than Peredonov; each one is striving for his or her “inspectorship.”

The repulsive image of Peredonov as victimizer, as a thoroughly contemptible distillation of man’s vile impulses, is balanced
by those who saw him as a victim. While admitting to his baseness, still Peredonov was described as suffering from a persecution
mania resulting from the forces pursuing him: his cohorts, the
nedotykomka
, even nature. Peredonov was seen as a victim of the weakness of human cognition: he did not understand the Dionysian relationship
to nature and he was blind to beauty.
⁸
Peredonov elicited a sympathetic response because of his lonely battle with the
nedotykomka:
he was characterized as a new and tragic Don Quixote.
⁹
His tragedy as also seen as that of a lonely individual who can find no place for himself either on earth or in any higher
realm.
¹⁰
He was seen to be vulnerable because he appeared to have no kind of armor; he was completely naked and unable to save his
“I”.
¹¹
And the reader is asked to feel compassion for Peredonov who emerges as a symbol of human suffering.
¹²

Peredonov’s elusive little beastie, the
nedotykomka
, inspired many different interpretations among Sologub’s contemporaries. The little grey creature was described variously
as the petty demon of the title,
¹³
as a symbol of all that is terrifying in life—”the lie which he (Peredonov) accepted as the truth; it was more indubitable
and more real than the whole of reality surrounding him.”
¹⁴
One critic saw it as a symbol larger than the work in which it appears: “For Sologub, ghosts and devils, the secret, hostile
forces inhabiting all of nature and quietly startling the weak, frightened individual were concentrated into the one sinister
figure of the
Nedotykomka.”
¹⁵
In the criticism Sologub’s contemporaries there are frequent comparisons made between Chekhov’s Belikov (“The Man In A Case”)
and Peredonov. This prompted one critic to see in the
nedotykomka
“a symbol of all that the ‘man in a case’ is guarding himself against.”
¹⁶

Standing in opposition to the gloomy and terrifying world of Peredonov and his
nedotykomka
are Sasha and Lyudmila. No other aspect of the novel seemed to call forth as many contradictory views as this “legend in
the process of being created.” On the negative side we read that the episode has no valid function in the novel but was only
added for its “piquant aroma.”
¹⁷
Another critic agrees that the story is in no way connected with Peredonov’s history and
that while Sasha and Lyudmila may remain innocent, “this boundless perversion is all the
more depraved.”
¹⁸
He asserts that Lyudmila fits very nicely into the banality surrounding her and that Sasha is nothing more than a little
Peredonov.
¹⁹

Alexander Blok, a great admirer of Sologub’s, was most lavish in his praise for the Sasha-Lyudmila episode. He read it as
“… a bright spot, a subtle thread, a fragrant aura,” and he praises Sologub for his originality in discovering “a wellspring
of unfathomable purity and
charm …”
²⁰
Blok wrote about the poetic nature of the story and was joined by another critic who praised Sologub’s “tender and pure tones”
in writing about this “impetuous passion of youth.” He adds that the episode could “exist independently as a beautiful poem
of young earthly love.”
²¹

Ivanov-Razumnik
²²
states the obvious: that the relationship is an escape from Peredonovism. Beauty, and in particular the
beauty of the human body can overcome the Peredonovism in life. The philistines know but two extremes in their relationship
to the human body: either unconcealed debauchery or hypocritical modesty. But Sologub wants to transform the gloomy, grey
meaningless life into a cult of the body, a pure esthetic delight, and he does this with the Sasha-Lyudmila story. He constantly
suggests that the reader compare the relationship of those two with Peredonov and his associates who defile beauty and in
particular, the beauty of the body (as exemplified by Peredonov with Varvara, Grushina at the masquerade and the authorial
interjections regarding their actions). The attempt to avoid Peredonovism through a cult of beauty of the body turned out
to be full of impossibilities and contradictions, notes the critic. So Sologub’s concept of beauty broadened to include nature,
the spirit and fantasy. And through the creative force of his “I,” Sologub takes a piece of life and transforms it into worlds
of fantasy from his imagination.

Scattered throughout this early criticism are comparisons between Sologub and his nineteenth-century predecessors. The most
frequently mentioned names are Gogol, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
The Petty Demon
is often viewed as a continuation of the Gogolian preoccupation with the banality, backwardness and madness of provincial
life and of course,
Dead Souls
was the obvious novel of Gogol’s to compare with
The Petty Demon
. More technical parallels were noted between the two authors’ works: their use of repetitions, the preponderance of negatives
and the predominantly “gloomy” vocabulary which pervades their works?’
²³
V. Botsyanovsky suggests that both Gogol and Sologub
have an apparatus to enlarge each living thing into caricature. He does not mean to accuse them of exaggeration, but rather,
he explains that it is as if each writer had a microscope in his brain. They put under it an imperceptible piece of human
vileness and then it becomes visible to everyone.
²⁴

Again, the stifling atmosphere of the provinces, the banality, a mood of pessimism, the trivialities in which people are involved
were the grounds for comparing Chekhov and Sologub. More specifically, Belikov, “The Man In A Case,” was compared to Peredonov,
with conclusions regarding their similarities and their differences.

With Dostoevsky, the comparisons swing from confusing (suggesting that Sasha and Lyudmila are as necessary in
The Petty Demon
as Kolia Krassotkin and Iliusha are to
The Brothers Karamazov!)
²⁵
to the vague (the gloom to doom atmosphere; the “Karamazov questions” about the meaning of life and innocent suffering).
Character parallels were mentioned: the Underground Man and Smerdyakov with Peredonov for example.
²⁶
Other critics emphasized the presence of the diabolical in both writers’ works: this observation has the potential
for a specific and rewarding comparison.
²⁷
But as is often the case in this early criticism, a provocative idea such as This one is presented, but it is seldom developed
satisfactorily.

After 1923, when Sologub was attacked as “anti-revolutionary” and “outmoded,” he was unable to publish. Two reprints of
The Petty Demon
were issued in the Soviet Union in limited editions
²⁸
Orest Tsekhnovitser, in his Introduction to the 1933 edition, rails that Sologub, who came from such a modest background
and suffered in the provinces, should have been ripe for revolution. Instead, Sologub is accused of having no social perspective,
no belief in tomorrow. And his lack of well-defined political positions cheapens the novel. The work is praised though for
its realistic portrayal of life in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

Soviet criticism continued to emphasize the realism of the novel. In 1969 an article
²⁹
was published with documentation to prove that characters and events were drawn from real life experiences of Sologub when
he taught in the provincial town of Velikie Luki. Included was a letter from an individual who had taught with Sologub as
well as an unpublished interview with Sologub, who admits that he used as his model for Peredonov, a certain Strakhov, a teacher
even more insane than Peredonov.
³⁰

A refreshingly sympathetic, sensitive and more sophisticated assessment of Sologub by a Soviet is found in the introduction
to a collection of Sologub’s poetry published in 1975.
³¹
’ In it, I. Dikman praises
The Petty Demon
as the author’s greatest achievement in prose as well as being one of the most successful Russian novels at the beginning
of the century. While pointing out that Sologub testified to the veracity of character and milieu, the author is applauded
for his portrayal of the philistine psychology and for his creation of the
nedotykomka
, which is interpreted as a symbol of the banality and vileness of that philistinism.

In this introduction, the universal, aspect of the novel is alluded to by the observation that readers and critics Saw the
work as a confirmation of the absurdity, the senselessness and incomprehensibility of life as well as the baseness and vileness
of man in general.) Dikman dismisses the Sasha-Lyudmila story as having no place in the novel, no realistically portrayed
perspective.

There has been one book-length study of
The Petty Demon
, published in this country by Galina Selegen.
³²
In her monograph, which is written in Russian, Selegen introduces the reader to the history of the symbolist novel in France
and Russia, she discusses Sologub’s philosophy and esthetics, then she turns to the novel itself, focusing on structure, methods
of characterization and various aspects of the author’s language. She writes about Peredonov as the embodiment of banality
as well as its ‘victim, the
nedotykomka
as that banality having taken form in his imagination. She points out that unlike other social novels, we do not have a biography
of Peredonov, no explanation of social forces forming his character. She notes that there is no plot in the traditional sense,
but rather that the novel is a series of the hero’s spiritual experiences which reveal his character. She agrees with those
who feel that the Sasha-Lyudmila plot stands outside of the artistic plan of the work.