The Petty Demon

by Sologub, Fyodor

  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 worl
d 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.

  2. Fedor Sologub, Melkii bes (reprint ed.; Letchworth, Eng.: Bradda Books, 1966), 69. All subsequent references to the novel, placed in the article in parentheses, are to this edition.

  3. Ibid., 211. Some of the vocabulary that Sologub uses to describe this dance echoes that used by Innokenty Annensky in his essay “Dionis vlegende i kul’te” describing elements of the Dionysiac cult intended to induce ecstasy: “… agonizing dances, whirling (a ritual act), running, wild howling, the heady noise of flutes … intoxicating drinks.” Annensky uses the word khorovod, a folk dance form, to refer to the Maenads’ dance. See Vakkhanki, tragediia Evripida, tr. Innokentii Annenski (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, 1894), LXX-LXXI, LXXVII. Subsequent references to this book are placed in parentheses.

  4. G.J. Thurston, in his article “Sologub’s Melkiy bes,” Slavonic and East European Review, 1 (Jan. 1977) sees the connection between Dionysus and The Petty Demon, but he does not work out the implications of this allusion for an interpretation of the novel. The authors of this paper formulated their interpretation without knowing of Thurston’s work. We are delighted, however, that he confirms the general direction of our argument.

  5. Irene Masing-Delic sees these perfumes as “symbols of the flesh ‘transsubstantiated’ into ethereal beauty.” See “‘Peredonov’s Little Tear’—Why Is It Shed?,” below. Annensky emphasizes the intimate connection between Dionysus and nature. The aim of Dionysiac ritual, he writes, was to fuse man with nature and Dionysus was associated with the forces of nature (LXXI, LXXVII).

  6. Stanley Rabinowitz has stressed this derivation in his article “Fedor Sologub’s Literary Children,” note 22 (see below.) Pyl’nik also means “dust coat” or “duster,” perhaps indicating simultaneously Peredonov’s obsessive perception of Sasha—a symbol of beauty and innocence—as the omnipresent, hateful dust. Masing-Delic suggests that Sasha’s surname hints at his ultimate surrender to the “realm of dust” (114). Dionysus was the god of the vine, the bringer of fruit.

  7. Rabinowitz sees these “ever-present flowers and sweet perfumes” as creating “a climate of sensuality which can only accelerate Sasha’s physical desires.” Though the discussion of cyclamen perfume reflects Lyudmila’s own feelings, it can also be interpreted as an “allegory” about “the course of Sasha’s own sexual growth.” See below.

  8. Ivanov-Razumnik, O smysle zhizni: F. Sologub, L. Andreev, L. Shestov, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1910; reprint ed., Letchworth, Eng.: Bradda Books, 1971), 47. It is also curious that Dionysus was associated with fragrance—Annensky mentions this twice in his essay on Dionysus (LXXX and LXXIII).

  9. Sobranie sochinenii in 12 vols. (St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1909–1912), X, 217.

  10. The narrator tells us that Peredonov specifically did not like the colors of the sunset, fire red and gold (320).

  11. Sobranie sochinenii, X, 210. This is only one of many points in common with Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche praises the Greek “man of culture” for his unalienated, celebratory view of life which differs so radically from that of modern man. See The Birth of Tragedy, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 59–61.

  12. Nicholas Berdyaev, Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, tr. Katharine Lampert (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1951), 162. Thurston also remarks on this incident, 38–39, n. 41.

  13. See Nt. 3. Thurston posits this play as “the most important source available to Sologub,” 39. He is particularly strong on noting parallels between the Bacchae and the novel, especially the identification between Dionysus’, and Sasha, and Pentheus and Peredonov.

  14. Nietzschean themes appear in Merezhkovksy’s poetry as early as 1892. One of Lyudmila’s dreams recalls the myth of Leda and the swan. Some elements of the landscape in the dream may have been suggested to Sologub by Merezhkovsky’s poem. The latter can be found in: D.S. Merezhkovksy, Sobranie stikhov, 1883–1920g.(reprint ed., Letchworth, Eng.: Bradda Books, 1969), 77–79. The “Song of the Bacchae” was first published in 1894 in Severnyi vestnik, No. 12, 42. On Nietzsche’s influence on the Silver Age, see Ann Marie Lane, “Nietzsche in Russian Thought, 1890–1917” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1976), Chapter One; Bernice G. Rosenthal, “Nietzsche in Russia: The Case of Merezhkovksy,” The Slavic Review, Sept. 1974, 429–52.

  15. For a complete list of writings about Nietzsche in Russia during this period, see Richard D. Davies, “Nietzsche in Russia, 1892–1917: A Preliminary Bibliography, Part 1,” Germano-Slavica, Vol. II, No. 2 (Fall 1976), 107–46. Davies points out that much of the Russian intelligentsia undoubtedly read Nietzsche in the original German or even in French translations (108).

  16. Anastasiia Chebotarevskaia, “Aisedora Dunkan v prozren’iakh Fridrikha Nichshe,” Zolotoe runo, 4 (1908), 83.

  17. The Birth, 38. In the preface to the English translation of The Petty Demon of 1916, Sologub emphasizes that Peredonov represents the lonely, isolated individual, incapable of directing himself into “the general path of universal life.” This notion is similar to Nietzsche’s “gospel of universal harmony” and “the mysterious primordial unity,” 37 in The Birth.

  18. See especially Vakkhanki, lines 72–82, 378–86, 416–31, 902–11.

  19. Thurston refers to several passages in the Bacchae in which Dionysus betrays a sexual ambivalence, and, like Sasha, is described as pretty, with a fair, delicate skin, flushed cheeks, and the aroma of perfume. Also like Sasha, he spends all his time in the company of females. See 39–40 for these details and others that we have noted.

  20. See Vakkhanki, lines 453–59, the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, or Vases Like the Pronomos Vase (ARV2 1336). See also the description of Dionysus on p. 5 of Annensky’s translation. Annensky points out that Dionysus was a mixture of masculine and feminine features (XCVIII), and that Praxiteles’ statue of Dionysus shows him as a beardless, beautiful youth (XCIX).

  21. Thurston notes that in their frenzied drinking, dancing, and singing, they were behaving like maenads under the impact on them of the “Dionysian” Sasha (37). Annensky recounts a number of legends connected with Dionysus involving three sisters on LXXXIV, LXXXVII.

  22. Myths about Dionysus tend to feature the god in a sexually ambivalent disguise entering new cities and causing great social disruption until his cult is accepted.

  23. For a discussion of cross-sex dressing in Dionysiac cult and the broader effects of Dionysus’ undermining of traditional gender restriction, see Clara Galllini, “II travestimo rituale di Penteo,” SMSR, 34 (1968), 211–28 and C.P. Segal, “The Menace of Dionysus: Sex Roles and Reversals in Euripides’ Bacchae,” Arethusa, 11 (1978), 185–202. In the Bacchae the king Pentheus believes that Dionysus sexually corrupts his female followers, but he is proved wrong. Instead, he succumbs to the suppressed female element in himself, dresses as a woman, and is destroyed by the mad and masculinized women of his city.

  24. See Vsevolod Setchkarev, Studies in the Life and Work of Innokentii Annensky (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), 223. Merezhkovsky compares the bacchae to dogs in his poem “
The Song of the Bacchae.” See p. 4 of our text.

  25. Annensky, Vakkhanki, LXXI, LXXVII.

  26. Thurston makes the connection between Peredonov’s visit to Sasha and the subsequent appearance of the nedotykomka (36). Rabinowitz has noted this verbal connection. Sasha and the nedotykomka are further connected through the verb “to squeal.”

  27. Pentheus, unlike the chorus in the Bacchae, cannot see the bestial side of the god until he goes mad. Peredonov typically sees the Dionysiac in a threatening guise. Another whole series of animal images plays a major role in the novel in the characterization of Peredonov and the town. But these images are used differently by Sologub to dehumanize his grotesque characters in the Gogolian tradition. See Masing-Delic, 111.

  28. This article is found in the collection Tear, kniga o novom teatre (St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1908). See p. 191.

  29. E.R. Dodds, Euripides’ “Bacchae” (2d ed., Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), xiv.

  30. Thurston has pointed out that the snake was one of Dionysus’ symbols, 39.

  31. See the discussion above of Merezhkovsky’s poem “Leda.”

  32. S.A. Tokarev, Religioznye verovaniia vostochno-slavianskikh narodov XIX—nachala XX v. (Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1957), 51.

  33. See Masing-Delic on the novel’s puppet and dance motifs, 110. Thurston also notices Peredonov’s inability to experience ecstasy, 30, 40.

  34. Thurston interprets the masquerade as “a comic version of a Dionysian Festival” (40). He also elaborates on the many parallels between the Bacchae and the masquerade scene, 41–43. In his article “The Theater of One Will,” Sologub views the masquerade as a means of engaging the spectator in play-acting, a hybrid form between play and spectacle. It could serve as a stepping-stone toward the higher attainment of “mystery” (tainstvo) in the theater. See 183.

  35. Vakkhanki, lines 1084–85.