The Petty Demon (53 page)

Sasha’s responses are either conveyed via internal monologue (as is his early sense that Lyudmila “came and went … and left
only … a vague excitement in my soul, which is creating a sweet dream,” p. 235) or reported by the omniscent narrator (as
is his later query: “What is this mysteriousness of the flesh? How could he sweetly sacrifice his blood and his body to Lyudmila’s
desires …?” p. 362). Yet in each case they reveal undeniable insights into his own psychological growth and emotional condition
which had not been admitted, or not so clearly expressed, in the case of Sologub’s other children. To be sure, Sasha’s experience
with Lyudmila reveals more than Sologub’s awareness of the child’s capacity for deep, complicated emotion; L.N. Tolstoi, for
one, had already treated this phenomenon in his
Childhood
(1852). Rather, the incident demonstrates an acknowledgement of this character’s
own
awareness of his ability to arouse passionate interest while he himself experiences erotic desire. In this sense, Sologub
expands considerably the dimensions and possibilities of literary portraiture of the child. He handles the theme of the child
as a sexual subject in a new way by viewing the problem largely through the child’s eye. No longer is the latter’s characterization
limited to a conflict free sexuality as observed from a removed or dispassionate third-person perspective.

Such a perspective is conspicuously present, for example, in Tolstoi’s description of Nikolenka Irtenev’s inner development
in
Adolescence
(1854). “But none of these changes which had taken place in my outlook on things struck me more than the one in which I had
ceased to see a housemaid of ours merely as a servant of the feminine gender, and began instead to view her as a
woman,”
²⁰
the narrator reflects. The grown-up Nikolenka’s recollection of the time when he first noticed Masha’s enticing voluptuousness
and strove to imitate his brother’s sexual advances to her is characterized by sobriety and distance. Yet precisely such qualities
preclude the kind of convincing evocation of those complicated feelings and tense emotions, so prevalent in Sologub’s depiction
of a similar psychological passage. Dostoevsky’s literary account of such a moment, “A Little Hero” (1857), also eliminates,
or at least diminishes, the sense of tortured anxiousness and fearful confusion which accompany the youngster’s awareness
of his amorous feelings toward an older woman and his realization that his childhood had ended. For all three writers the
incident is virtually identical; however, Sologub’s narrative technique and his emphasis on the sexual aspects of the maturation
process signal his originality.

William Rowe notes that images such as the sun, drops of water and sweet fragrances highlight both Dostoevsky’s and Sologub’s
accounts of the child’s emotional growth.
²¹
But Sologub’s imagery creates a provocatively sensual and suggestively erotic atmosphere which more effectively captures
the child’s innermost thoughts and desires at this stage. The frequent references to heat which accompany the Sasha-Lyudmila
relationship reinforce the boy’s awakening passion as he increasingly burns with excitement in the presence of his young temptress.
Lyudmila’s “torrid African dreams” about Sasha, her bright, sunny room with its colourful wallpaper, all create an exotic,
tropical and seductive background, more conducive to Sasha’s ripening sexuality. Her ever-present flowers and sweet perfumes
also provide a climate of heightened sensuality which can only accelerate Sasha’s physical desires. Her spraying him with
fragrant scents, like the moistness of her chamber, contributes to the sticky, vapourish atmosphere, so suited to their erotic
carnal games. This spraying also recalls an act of baptism—in this case into Lyudmila’s avowed religion of the flesh.

But the imagery works on yet another level. The negative connotation of heat and fire in the novel—Peredonov’s incendiary
act at the masquerade ball and the book’s epigraph, “I wished to burn her, the wicked witch,” are but a few examples—suggests
the decidedly destructive aspect of Sasha’s ardent love. Lyudmila loves to sprinkle Sasha with drops of perfume, yet she also
perversely delights in the drops of Christ’s blood as He hangs from the Cross. And the same seductive charms which lure the
boy into Lyudmila’s world of pleasure, also hypnotize him, much as Peredonov is mesmerized by Vershina as she entices him
into her luxuriant garden. Sasha is very much the victim in his erotic escapades, rendered submissive and helpless by the
very things which have stimulated and attracted him. Thus the imagery which Sologub employs to describe the inception of first
love implies the bitter-sweet, contradictory nature of Sasha’s private adventure while also integrating it into the broader
thematics of the novel. The unmistakably decadent view of sex as a sweet and pleasurable experience which is nonetheless connected
to decay, perversion and ultimately death, penetrates the very core of Sologub’s nightmare of a once-beautiful world condemned
to corruption and
poshlost’
.

On the narrative level, Sologub achieves a unique effect in portraying Sasha Pylnikov, an effect which his predecessors fail
to realize with their overly articulate and emotionally steady characters. Sasha’s conflict is related not necessarily through
clearly articulated utterances, but rather through the recounting of his vague and ambivalent feelings, his timid, hesitant
movements and his often faltering speech—all of which more persuasively conveys the confusion and sense of incomprehension
which the child experiences at this crucial stage in his life. By eliminating the emotional control and rather even tone which
predominate in Tolstoi’s and Dostoevsky’s renditions, Sologub presents more dramatically the sense of growing catastrophe
as the distressing process of adolescent maturation continues.

The wide variety of feelings which Sasha endures—pain, joy, shame, exhilaration—are all the more significant because they
contrast so poignantly with the deadened senses of those characters who people the protagonist’s lifeless realm. Sasha’s personal
experience seems particularly refreshing in a loveless, feelingless world of mechanized puppets: the merchant Tishkov thoughtlessly
spurts his mechanical rhymes; Vershina’s ward Marta dreams about her virtues dressed as dolls; and Peredonov himself moves
slowly and apathetically like a “wound-up doll” (p. 289). Tortuous as it is, the child’s ordeal asserts the existence of natural
human feelings, genuine emotional tenderness and the presence of concerns and drives which are neither perverted nor destructive.
Sasha’s realization of the full implications of his and Lyudmila’s amorous adventures, coming on the heels of his questions,
“And what does she want?,” provokes a reaction of excited animation and free, spontaneous movement, unlike anything else in
the book.

And suddenly he blushed purple and his heart pounded ever so painfully. A wild ecstasy overcame him. He did several somersaults,
threw himself on the floor and jumped on the furniture. Thousands of absurd movements hurled him from one corner to another.,
and his joyful, clear laughter resounded throughout the house. (p. 358)

Yet despite such happy moments, the broader dimensions which Sasha’s personality attains neither continually evoke simple
joy nor do they totally possess positive qualities. With the onset of desire and sexual appetite arises the problem
of how this newly acquired strength will be applied—constructively or destructively. Lyudmila characteristically ignores the
question when she insists that her and Sasha’s stimulations “were far from coarse, loathsome attainments” (p. 246). Yet in
a thoroughly Dostoevskian manner, Sologub acknowledges that beneath desire can lie a drive toward dominance and that hatred
as well as love can express affection. That these contradictory tendencies extend to children, too, is seen by Sasha’s perplexed
state of mind after he has been kissed by Lyudmila.

[Her] tender kisses aroused languid, dreamlike thoughts. He wanted to do something to her, pleasant or painful, tender or
shameful—but what? To kiss her legs? Or beat her, long and hard, with supple, long twigs? So that she laugh from joy or cry
from pain? Perhaps she desired both…. How could he sweetly sacrifice his blood and his body to her desires and to his shame?
(p. 362)

Sasha’s momentary vacillation between the urge to fondle or torture recalls another literary child who exhibits a corresponding
capacity for opposing impulses toward love and hate: Liza Khokhlokova in
The Brothers Karamazov
. Admitting her approval of parricide and her delight in child-suffering, the lame fifteen year-old is more articulate and
extreme about her own propensity toward evil. But Sasha at least shares a similar potential for such feeling. Whether it is
an expression of
Weltschmerz
or sadism, the tendency of each toward cruelty is undeniable. In Liza’s case this cruelty comes to light in the chapter significantly
entitled “A Little Demon” (“Besonok”), when she personally substantiates Alesha’s observation that “there are moments when
people love crime.” With Sasha the revelation occurs when, for example, we learn that “contradictory feelings mingled in his
soul—dark and nebulous: perverse because they were premature and sweet because they were perverse” (p. 349). The little demon
which is seen harbouring in Liza’s soul is not without its counterpart in Sasha. The predominance of conscious irony as well
as the continual use of double entendres in Sologub’s novel make Kokovkina’s reaction to her boarder’s exhilaration particularly
meaningful. “Are you possessed or something?” (“chto eto ty besnueshsia!” p. 358), she exclaims. In the root of the verb is
found the same “bes” which characterizes Peredonov and which constitutes the book’s very title. The implication here is that
Sasha contains within him at least the seeds of evil, and as such he mirrors—as does Liza—the adults, who are more central
to the novel’s action and plot.

By suggesting Sasha’s corrupt tendencies, Sologub’s analysis of the child’s psyche becomes disturbingly double-edged. The
novel is built on a series of paradoxes which gradually unfold to jolt and perplex the reader. A fundamental one is connected
with Sasha Pylnikov. The very honesty which allows Sologub to reveal the uniqueness of this personality by investigating its
complex emotions during “spring’s awakening” also serves to debunk its special status. The Romantic fallacy of the child’s
unquestionable innocence is now destroyed. With his inclination toward desire and enjoyment of drives heretofore dissociated
from his character, a likeness to an ordinary adult is intimated. Duality pervades everything. Upon further investigation,
even the seemingly inviolable purity of childhood must be questioned. Yet it is precisely this discovery of duplicity in Sasha’s
emotional world which signals his full importance in the novel. The psychological crisis of conflicting good and evil which
Sologub depicts in the individual child mirrors the metaphysical calamity which underlies his larger vision of
the world. Sologub’s newly found doubts about Sasha on the behavioural level find their counterpart in his suspicions about
life in general on the philosophical plane, and both work hand-in-hand in contributing to the book’s pervasive sense of nervousness
and insecurity. It is here that
The Petty Demon
supports Dikman’s claim of the inseparability of psychological states from metaphysical issues in Sologub’s art. The intimacy
which Sologub achieves in his personalized portrait of Sasha adds credence to the more general dimensions of his ideological
argument.

Sasha’s assumption of negative worldly qualities—aggressiveness, deceptiveness, vanity—inevitably results from his continuing
integration into adult life. However, beyond its significance as an important factor in the child’s personal history, this
metamorphosis contains crucial and far-reaching metaphysical implications. The novel’s pervasive sense of tragic gloom is
eventually extended to the world of children in a passage whose tone of inevitable doom resonates with growing intensity throughout
the remainder of the work.

Only the children, tireless and eternal vessels of God’s happiness on earth, were lively and ran and played. But sluggishness
descended even upon them, and some sort of faceless, invisible monster, nestling behind their shoulders, looked out now and
then with its menacing eyes on their suddenly dulled faces. (p. 141)

Here Sologub strikes a major theme which Sasha’s characterization vividly realizes. Because of the omnipresence of a demonic
energy in life, all beauty is ultimately rendered invalid and all things, even the purest, face gradual and inevitable extinction.
This destructive force reaches its most devastating impact when it strikes Sasha, but is is already forecast in Lyudmila’s
tale about the cyclamen, “which gives pleasure and induces desires, both sweet and shameful, and stirs up the blood” (p. 245).
This tale is an allegory which refers specifically to “spring’s awakening” in the child. Lyudmila’s attribution of three colours
to the flower and the corresponding sensations which they provoke—all in order of the increasing intensity of their sensuality—actually
charts the course of Sasha’s own sexual growth. That the flower’s own transformation from joy, to desire, to passionate love
represents the extermination of childlike beauty is verified during the remainder of the novel. Once again the imagery works
on two levels: Lyudmila’s flowers are as much “fleurs du mal” as they are fragrant blossoms of beauty and enchantment.

References to Sasha’s increasingly destructive strength or to his unattractively “heavy, awkward hands” (p. 359) indicate
the child’s continuing degeneration. But nothing signals this process as blatantly as the symbolic scene in which Lyudmila
leads Sasha into a ravine in order to continue their amourous games. The languid atmosphere and the specific vocabulary which
Sologub uses to convey the setting are highly suggestive. The description of the “warm, heavy air … [which] recalled that
which was irrevocable, [where] the sun, as if sick, was shining dully … in the pale, tired sky, [where] dry leaves lay peacefully
on the warm earth, dead” (p. 350) signals the final realization in Sasha of the corruption to which Sologub had earlier doomed
all things, in the scene of similar colouring and tonality cited above. “Irrevocable” suggests Sasha’s permanently lost innocence;
the lifeless leaves imply the extinction of a once-blossoming plant, of Sasha-the-flower-himself.
²²
Images of heat and warmth, which the writer formerly used in a positive manner,
are
now
exclusively
negative. Significantly, it is here, against the background of exhaustion and death, that
the child’s transformation reaches its apex. Its accomplishment confirms the ultimate sense of disaster which continually
hangs like a pall over the novel. If
peredonovshchina—the
constant slippage of all phenomena into an intensified state of corruption and decay—represents the major component of Sologub’s
philosophical vision in
The Petty Demon
, then it is Sasha’s psychological metamorphosis which demonstrates the potency of this vision.