The Petty Demon (48 page)

The Dionysiac is beautiful and dangerous, festive and violent. This ambiguous yet liberating dissolution of cultural oppositions
marks Lyudmila’s and Sasha’s relation from its inception. Her puns to Sasha often mix beauty and cruelty: “Do you want me
to scent/suffocate you?” (230) Her pun on
rozochki
(diminuitive of “rose” and of “switch,” 245) makes a Dionysiac reconciliation between beauty and violence. In the
Bacchae
Dionysus is “beyond good and evil”; for us, as Tiresias says, “he is what we make of him.”
²⁹
The boy-god Sasha has an equally disturbing effect. His blushing cheeks, which he shares with Dionysus, hint at innocence
and guilt, or something beyond either. Stories of student orgies and drunkenness are mysteriously associated with his presence,
and lead to Peredonov’s random and unjust punishments and whippings.
Lyudmila’s laughter with Sasha is liberating; for Peredonov the laughter of the Rutilov sisters feeds his paranoia and fear
of mockery. In the
Bacchae
the smiling god brings joy to his followers and humiliating mockery to Pentheus, who, like Peredonov, fears such laughter
above all things.

Lyudmila’s sequence of “torrid African dreams” about Sasha become increasingly destructive, and foreshadow the violence of
the masquerade scene. In the first dream, her desire for Sasha is expressed in imagery simultaneously borrowed from Dionysiac
cult and biblical Eden—the tree of knowledge (Dionysus was also a tree god) and the snake.
³⁰
In the second, Lyudmila lies at the shore of a lake, regal in a golden crown. Sasha as a swan suggests the Greek myth of
Leda, impregnated by Zeus in the shape of a swan.
³¹
In Russian folk belief the swan, a former woman, was the most sacred of birds,
³²
and a metaphor for a bride in folk songs. The mixture of traditions suits Sasha’s ambivalent sexuality. The setting of the
second dream introduces a note of decay that undercuts its passion: “It smelled of warm, stagnant water and slime and grass
languishing from the sultry heat.” (212) In the third dream Lyudmila observes Sasha publicly beaten by naked youths. As he
laughs and cries, Lyudmila experiences the ecstasy of self-oblivion and death. Like the “affair” between Lyudmila and Sasha,
the dream sequence moves from the innocent, mythic realm to mortality and sexuality, from private to public.

Lyudmila’s passion remains unfulfilled and her pleasure in violence is always tinged with beauty and sensuality. Peredonov’s
similar impulses are gross, literal, and unecstatic. He revels in the ugly violence of tearing off wallpaper (57), whipping
school boys, performing a mock funeral for his landlady (71), ripping Varvara’s dress (186), and subduing her beautiful body
with its harlot’s head to his gross lust (102). The Rutilov sisters, when drunk, sing, dance, and become ecstatic and frenzied
like Greek maenads (211); the drunken Peredonov dances like a puppet or mechanical doll (69).
³³
The Rutilov sisters drink cherry liqueur; Lyudmila asks Sasha on their first meeting if he likes grapes (207). Their drunkenness
is by implication Dionysiac, while the vodka-drinking Peredonov never reaches the ecstasy of a union with nature. He fears
the country, and feels safe only in closed and stuffy interior spaces.

The climactic masquerade
³⁴
and Peredonov’s “sacrificial” killing of Volodin reveal the destruction that ensues from the denial of the Dionysiac. Euripedes’
Bacchae
, the ultimate literary prototype for the festival turned destructive, offers remarkable parallels to Sologub’s text. In the
Bacchae
, Dionysus revenges himself on Pentheus for rejecting his cult. He dresses the king as a woman and sends him off to be torn
apart by his mother, two aunts, and the women of Thebes, who have been maddened by the god. The festive ecstasy of the women
explodes into mob violence. In Greek myth, Women (usually three women) often tore apart their children under the influence
of Dionysus; in Orphic myths the young god himself is torn and dismembered by Titans.

In Sologub’s masquerade, the three fantasy-loving Rutilov sisters, dressed exotically as a gypsy, a Turkish woman, and a Spanish
woman, take revenge on the town which has threatened to destroy Lyudmila’s affair with Sasha by dressing the young “god” as
a geisha and sending him off to a festival in which he barely escapes being torn apart. The townspeople are overpowered by
the greed, jealousy and impulse to revenge that has characterized them throughout the novel. In the
Bacchae
, a silence Which offers a terrible parody of the preliminary stages of sacrificial ritual preceeds the lynching of Pentheus.
³⁵
A comparable moment of silence intervenes before the judging and the explosion of
the crowd at the masquerade (393). Gudaevskaya, significantly costumed as a fertility figure—an ear of corn—leads the lynch
mob.
³⁶
But at the last moment the actor Bengalsky, dressed as a beautiful foreigner, wards off the logical tragic consequences of
the action as a kind of
deus ex machina
.

Masquerades and festivals allow the participants to break the standard rules of behavior in a temporary fashion that releases
social tension and restores a sense of community. But the possibility of explosion remains imminent. The action at the masquerade
can be suggestively read in relation to René Girard’s theory concerning the origins and role of sacrificial ritual and festival
in human society.
³⁷
For Girard, early society enforced the social order through religion. The origin of the religious system and of sacrifice
can be found in the unanimous lynching of a scapegoat. Through this generative act, the violence of the community, which results
from an uncontrolled proliferation of “mimetic competition,” is transferred to a deity.
³⁸
Through religious ritual the community continues to re-act this relation to the god(s), whose beneficial violence ensures
peace and order. During times of social crisis, a human sacrifice can serve to re-unite the community and to restore or re-create
the religious system. Such “sacrificial crises” emerge when a society is trapped in the kind of religious atrophy and uncontrolled
“mimetic competition” and vengefulness that we see in Sologub’s novel. Like the Thebes of Pentheus, the townspeople reject
Lyudmila and Sasha’s Dionysiac cult in its benign form. Yet Peredonov’s world fails to enact the mythical scenario of the
Bacchae
in which the sacrificial death of Pentheus establishes the Dionysian cult by violent means. Sasha escapes, and the masquerade
aborts and is forgotten. Bengalsky, the
deus ex machina
who interrupts the expected scenario, seems, like Sasha, to have associations with Dionysus. Dionysus was god of and actor
in Greek tragedy, and Annensky (XCIV) notes that every two years the god returned from a campaign in lndia. Like Dionysus
in the
Bacchae
, those who consciously adopt the Dionysiac transformation of self through costume and enter into his festival voluntarily
remain in control.
³⁹
Dionysus, the seer Tiresias, and Cadmus know how to act. Similarly, for Bengalsky, Sasha’s disguise is a mere prank, the
masquerade no more than a play. And indeed, this theatrical intervention in a scenario that almost completes the plot of Euripedes’
play, does turn the masquerade of the novel into a mere play; for the world of Peredonov is, apparently, not yet ready for
a real tragic conversion to the Dionysiac. Instead, Peredonov’s perverted sacrifice of Volodin removes the memory of the scandal
from the minds of the townspeople, while the scandal itself is obscured by lies.

Peredonov, the embodiment of anti-festivity, comes to the masquerade simply as himself, and ends it by sending the hall up
in smoke. Throughout the novel Peredonov, the Pentheus figure, has opposed and perverted the Dionysiac. The main plot of the
novel precisely inverts the world of the subplot between Sasha and Lyudmila. Peredonov’s sexual and sensual life is gross
and devoid of liberating visions of beauty. His pleasure in violence unjustly destroys the lives and property of those around
him. He accentuates the worst characteristics of his world and mobilizes it against Sasha. He tries to convert the town, which
is only too susceptible, to his own special “religion” of anti-fesitivty and sadistic violence. Like Pentheus, Peredonov cannot
understand his own sexuality. He rejects healthy brides for the false Varvara. Pentheus falls prey to the Dionysiac in himself
and is lured by Dionysus to dress as a woman. Peredonov at one point tries to differentiate himself from Volodin by wearing
a woman’s corset (313).
Pentheus fences with Dionysus’ false image in a palace which goes up in a blazing demonstration of divinity about him; Peredonov
tries to destroy his private demon, the
nedotykomka
, by setting fire to the hall in which the masquerade takes place. In both cases obsessive resistance to Dionysus leads to
a distorted view of reality and finally to madness. Yet in the
Bacchae
the mass sacrifice of Pentheus leads to the establishment of the Dionysiac cult in Thebes. In
The Petty Demon
Peredonov helps to destroy the masquerade with his fire. He then substitutes a purely private ritual, performed in isolation from the community, for the cult-establishing public lynching. Peredonov’s pervasive fear of nature and its
Dionysiac mysteries are finally embodied for him in his double, Volodin the ram, whom he kills by slitting his throat; just
as Dionysus in the
Bacchae
sacrificed Pentheus dressed in his ritual garb, Peredonov, in a paranoid rage at the failure of the town to accept his views
of the world, sacrifices his ritual double in an explicitly pagan fashion.
⁴⁰
Both the choice of victim and the mode of death are borrowed from ancient sacrificial Practice. But while Peredonov pre-empts
the Dionysiac sacrificial scenario for his own perverted ends, the effect of Volodin’s death is to distract the town from
either the sublimation or recognition of its own greed, vengefulness, jealousy, and repressed sensuality displayed at the
masquerade.
⁴¹
The parallels with the
Bacchae
serve to underline the almost total repression of the Dionysiac in Sologub’s fictional Russia.

The ambiguities of Lyudmila’s and Sasha’s relationship are precisely those expressed by Euripides in his presentation of Dionysiac
cult in the
Bacchae.
⁴²
Dionysus promises the city of Thebes happiness and ecstasy through his cult, a liberating mixture of pleasure and violence
(the tearing apart of wild animals). The women of Thebes, safely isolated from society in the wilds, participate in the cult
without becoming directly involved in sexuality. But as the city rejects and intervenes in the cult, the new religion becomes
increasingly dangerous. Finally, when the city fails to incorporate the Dionysiac into its social structure by peaceful means,
the god forces them to accept it through violence. Similarly, the affair between Sasha and Lyudmila begins quite innocently;
Sasha’s youth makes consummation impossible from the start. Lyudmila at first obscures the impossibility of the romance from
herself, denying Sasha’s schoolboy reality in a haze of perfume. In the privacy of her house she can play a modern day Aphrodite
or
rusalka
, liberating mind and body through fantasy, maenadic dance and folk song, the medium which for Nietzsche contained “Dionysiac
elements” at its core.
⁴³
ln isolation her pursuit of pleasure and pain remains innocent. Yet the increasing pressures of the outer world make the
amorality of Lyudmila’s romance immorality, and turn her to violence and revenge. Daria’s song introduces morality into the
affair; the naked shepherd leads the naked shepherdess to the water’s edge, where “fear chases shame, shame chases fear,”
and the shepherdess orders the shepherd to forget what he has seen (209). Sasha and Lyudmila are forced to lie, and to resist
shame.

Only a life lived apart from the town remains untainted by shame, gossip, and jealousy. Nadezhda (“Hope”) Adamenko alone escapes
town involvement and gossip in a world of books and gracious hospitality. She generously ignores Volodin’s impertinence in
proposing to her. The Rutilov sisters act vengefully in a Dionysiac style; they tolerate Peredonov’s refusal to marry them,
and content themselves with mockery until the town threatens their private life. Nevertheless, they participate in some of
the town’s activities and are partially susceptible to its mentality. Hence they are increasingly trapped between two worlds.

We conclude, then, that through a system of allusions to the pagan (Greek, Japanese, and Russian), Sologub creates in the
Lyudmila-Sasha relationship a world of Dionysiac amoral beauty, violence, and creativity which is opposed and finally destroyed
by the unnatural, mechanical, and perverted vengefulness and pettiness of the world of Peredonov. Like Dionysus’ cult in the
Bacchae
, the former at first appears to be beyond morality and culture. The hostility of non-initiates direct the volatile, innocent
mixture of pleasure and pain toward an explosion of violence. Sasha and Lyudmila resort to lies and deception; her increasingly
violent fantasies lead to the near sacrifice of Sasha by the masquerade crowd. The masquerade fails to affirm the unity of
contradictions in life, or to unify the town in a collective Dionysiac experience which could transform their way of life.
The festival is aborted and forgotten in the wake of Peredonov’s mad crime. Like Euripides, Sologub refuses to judge Lyudmila’s
myth of liberation and beauty; we only know that the world of Peredonov has remained impervious to it.

NOTES

1
. This is a slightly revised version of “Symbolic Patterning in Sologub’s
Melkii bes,”
which appeared in
The Slavic and East European Journal
, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring 1982), 43–55.