The Petty Demon

by Sologub, Fyodor

  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.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE

  “SERGEI TURGENEV AND SHARIK”

  FRAGMENTS FROM THE PETTY DEMON

  THE 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 “d
emonic” 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.