The Petty Demon

by Sologub, Fyodor

  Peredonov’s existential situation appears too complex to be (only) laughed at, in the spirit of enlightenment—however bitterly. The light which could illumine Peredonov is not the light of reason; reason could dispel Peredonov’s misconceptions of reality but not change his attitude towards it. Peredonov needs thinking less than feeling and perceiving—i.e., he needs the illumination of the Spirit, the source of knowledge beyond reason. “Animals” cannot be taught anything but to “sit,” but they can be enchanted by “music.” The Dionysiac frenzies and their purifying fires could perhaps transform the dancing doll Peredonov into at least a dancing satyr.

  The novel is in my reading a religious-philosophical allegory, showing the path to salvation through both negative and positive instruction. Its satirical elements are centered around the “Volodins” of the novel who are the true “philistines”—not Peredonov. The novel is filled with the “burning problems” of its day: the “revaluation of good and evil,” the “salvation through beauty” and the “restoration of human dignity” in a Nietzschean spirit. Rebellious but humiliated Peredonov represents the whole misery of mankind, dimly becoming aware of its condition.

  Peredonov, as a representative of human misery cannot be surrounded by the sombre majesty of “great Satan.”32 Comparing the petty demon Peredonov to Pushkin’s Germann (“The Queen of Spades”) as, through many allusions, is often done in the novel, it is Peredonov’s lack of romantic aura which emphasizes the compelling need for a new human dignity in the face of “higher powers.” The role of romantic rebel may reconcile man with his situation. The relentless depiction of Peredonov’s existential struggle precludes a reconciliation with the “human condition.”

  Peredonov’s “romance with Fate” is pure imagination—he does not even set eyes on his queen of spades, the elusive princess Volchanskaya. His bragging lies about having been her lover is the wishful thinking of a man who never was “the darling of Fate,” old cocotte as she is. All this is essentially true of Germann also, but this bitter truth is hidden under the veil of romantic events and the hero’s tragic aura. Grotesque Peredonov serves the symbolist “non-acceptance of the world” better than the romantic Germann.

  In his role of “victim without immediate appeal” Peredonov does not stand alone in contemporary literature. In Bryusov’s poem “The Madman” (1895) Peredonov’s situation is given “in a nutshell.”33 Gippius, in her stories about “subhuman creatures” posed the question “how did He dare” more than once. In Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo da Vinci, the artist—himself not a model of virtue in the accepted sense—does not condemn a wicked little boy, as he knows him to be one of “those innocent in their wrongdoing, because by nature formed for evil.”34

  Crudely simplifying a literary debate it could be said that the function of protagonists “by nature formed for evil” is the following: to demonstrate the need for a sympathy without bounds, a love without limits. These spiritual forces—it was hoped—would overcome even the crudest evil, the source of which resided in matter. The best manner in which to “vex” the Demiurge was to “infiltrate” matter with spirituality. Thus “black coal” could be transformed into “brilliant diamonds (VI. Solovyov), or “mud receptacles” into “alabaster amphoras.”35 Spiritualization would transform “animals” into (super)human beings who would master their own fate. During the reign of the Spirit it would finally be acknowledged that the world of realia is unreal and this insight would break its evil spell. The power of the Living God would be reinstated and the Demiurge dethroned. A new World of imperishable beauty would then be bound to arise and in it there would not be a single tear—neither that of the innocent child, nor the frightened devil.

  NOTES

  * From Scando-Slavica, 24 (1978), pages 107–124. Reprinted by permission of the editorial board.

  1. The quote refers to Z. Gippius’s essay “Peredonov’s Little Tear.” This and subsequent quotes from the essay are from Sharon Leiter’s translation in The Silver Age of Russian Culture, eds. C. and E. Proffer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975).

  2. The edition consulted for this study is: Melkii bes, (Shabby Demon), Letchworth, Hert.: Bradda, 1966. Page references (in parentheses) in the text are to this edition.

  3. The article is quoted from A Soviet Heretic, Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, ed. and transl. by Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago & London, 1970).

  4. For this parallel, see Edmund Kostka, “A Literary Quandary: Fyodor Sologub and Heinrich Mann,” Glimpses of Germanic-Slavic Relations from Pushkin to Heinrich Mann (Lewisburg, 1975).

  5. Cf. Ivanov-Razumnik’s view that the novel was not a satire on provincial life but a horror vision of the “philistinism of life generally.” See his O smysle zhizni (On the Meaning of Life), Letchworth: Bradda, 1971, p. 40.

  6. The tensions in Gippius’s paradoxial religiosity are well defined in Olga Matich’s The Religious Poetry of Zinaida Gippius, München 1972.

  7. The persona of She is masculine.

  8. The question as to whether Peredonov is a “portrait” of the author may be answered in similar terms. Peredonov may well be Sologub “without the latter’s intellect, talent and passionate self-criticism” (Gornfeld) but in this difference lies their incommensurability.

  9. K. Chukovskii, “Putevoditel’ po Sologubu,” Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh 6 (M. 1969), p. 342.

  10. Omry Ronen has interestingly deciphered the names Ojle, Ligoj and Mair in his “Toponyms of Fedor Sologub’s Tvorimaja Legenda,” Die Welt der Slaven 13, 1968, pp. 307–316.

  11. The expression is taken from Richard F. Gustafson’s “The Suffering Usurper: Gogol’s Diary of a Madman,” The Slavic and East European Journal 9, 1965, pp. 268–280. Peredonov’s situation is remarkably similar to Poprishchin’s as defined in this fine study. The allusions to Poprishchin are manifold in the novel; cf. the Spanish hairstyle Peredonov wants to acquire before his wedding, Varvara’s desire “po-frantsuzski nasobachit’sia,” etc.

  12. For a characterization of the Demiurge, see The Encyclopedia of Philosophy 3, New York & London 1967, title “Gnosticism.”

  13. The puppet motif was not only frequently used by the Symbolists but also discovered by them in other writers, e.g., Chekhov, whose characters in The Cherry Orchard, according to Bely, are “automatons.” See his “Vishnevyi sad,” Vesy 2, 1904, p. 48.

  14. Cf. A. Belyi, “Liudi poshli of pyli: vot kosmogoniia Sologuba”; “Dalai-Lama iz Sapozhka,” Vesy 3, 1908, p. 66.

  15. He and many others in town are “hylic,” i.e., “fleshly beyond redemption.” See Baker’s Dictionary of Theology, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1960, p. 163.

  16. For a discussion in stylistic terms of the realia-realiora tension in Sologub’s world, see Carola Hansson, Fedor Sologub as a Short-Story Writer, Stockholm 1975 (Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 3).

  17. Christ belongs to the “eternal messengers” which the true God at times sends to earth with a revelation of the truth. Others are Buddha and Zoroaster.

  18. In this pose Pylnikov appears as a variant of the paintings of Bacchus and St. John, as presented in D. Merezhkovsky’s “historical romance” Leonardo da Vinci (1902). Both these “divine figures” are androgynous, “fair as a woman” and point, smiling mysteriously, to something beyond themselves. See pp. 458–462 in the New York 1976 ed.

  19. For a discussion of the androgynous being as the model of the future “superman” and similar ideas of the times, see, N.A. Nilsson, “Strindberg, Gorky and Blok,” Scando-Slavica 4, 1958, pp. 23–42.

  20. Cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Boston 1963, p. 59: “The very creation of Eve and the scheme of reproduction initiated by it subserve the infinite further dispersion of light …”

  21. A. Blok stressed that the function of the Lyudmila episode was the demonstration of the “spiritualized flesh.” See his “O realistakh,” Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vls., Moskva & Leningrad 1962, vol. 5.—Lypdmila’s perfumed world is comparable to Trirodov’s alchemistic wonderland (The Created Lege
nd).—Her name has the “flavor” of a heathen goddess’s name.

  22. Galina Selegen suggests that the creation of the nedotykomka may have been inspired by J.K. Huysman’s novel En route, where a similar creature appears. See her Prekhitraia viaz’, Simvolizm v russkoi proze: “Melkii bes” Fedora Sologuba (Washington 1968), p. 87.

  23. The Demiurge is “clearly a polemical caricature of the Old Testament God,” the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (op. cit.) states. For a discussion of “revengeful Adonai” versus “allgood Lucifer,” see J. Holthusen, Fedor Sologubs Roman-Trilogie, The Hague 1960.

  24. In the view of the gnostics Cain and Esau are positive figures, whereas Abel becomes their “whipping-boy.” Interestingly enough Abel has retained his “gnostic status” in J. Olesha’s The Cherry Stone, where the well-adapted Soviet communal leader of a “flock” of obedient citizens (pastva) is celled Avel’.

  25. Cf. Peredonov’s horror vision of a fortress built by angry men in red shirts (p. 317).—In Sologub’s works there often appear “wicked sorceresses” whose function it is to veil the vision of true reality from eyes yearning to see it. Such an “evil witch” is Lepistinya (“The Earthly to the Earth”) or the Old Woman (“The Poisoned Garden”) who wants to hinder the Youth from looking into the enchanted garden by pulling the “curtains” of his “windows.”

  26. Paranoiac motifs are very common in symbolist literature. The agents of Bely’s novels are not only connected with the Third Section. Blok’s poem Est’ igra … (1913) deals with metaphysical secret agents.

  27. J.W. von Goethe: Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass.

  28. Gustafson, p. 272.

  29. Gustafson, p. 279.

  30. Quoted from O. Tsekhnovitser’s “Predislovie,” included in the Bradda edition, p. 20.

  31. Cf. Peredonov’s vision of people as “cards” with Chekhov’s early story “Whist.”

  32. Tsekhnovitser drew a line of development from Lermontov’s “great Satan” to Sologub’s The Petty Demon. “Predislovie,” p. 14.

  33. For a discussion of this poem, see my paper, “Limitation and Pain in Bryusov’s and Blok’s Poetry,” The Slavic and East European Journal 19, 1975, pp. 388–402.

  34. Op. cit., p. 77. Another example of a blatant “revaluation” of the times is L. Andreev’s “Judas Iscariot” (1907).

  35. The alabaster amphora made transparent by an inner light of fire is the symbol Merezhkovsky chose for the ideal relationship between spirit and matter, content and form, the inner and the outer. See his programmatic article “On the Reasons for the Decline and on the New Tendencies in Contemporary Russian Literature.” (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 5, Moskva 1914, [reprint] Hildesheim & New York 1973, p. 217.).

  FYODOR SOLOGUB’S

  LITERARY CHILDREN: THE SPECIAL

  CASE OF THE PETTY DEMON

  STANLEY J. RABINOWITZ

  AMONG THE MANY thematic components of the prose fiction of Sologub, one in particular is repeated with remarkable constancy: the theme of the child. A detailed investigation of this theme leads to the complex metaphysical issues which pervade Sologub’s work; it also provides a key to understanding his highly idiosyncratic vision of reality.1 Vyacheslav Ivanov’s famous contention that “the child is the central point of [Dostoevsky’s] doctrine concerning the world and concerning man,”2 is equally true of Sologub; indeed, it might serve, if one were interested in the problem, to initiate an extremely fruitful comparison of the two writers.3 Children appear in well over half of Sologub’s sixty-odd short stories in his Decadent-Symbolist period of 1894–1914,4 where they are, by and large, the author’s major focus of attention. Furthermore, in each novel of this period (Bad Dreams, 1895; The Petty Demon, 1905; the trilogy The Created Legend, 1907–14; Sweeter than Poison, 1912), children play a crucial, if not a central role. Sologub’s use of these characters is especially interesting from a structural point of view, for while the child is almost invariably the hero in his stories, this same character in his larger works serves an ancillary function: he is always closely and vitally associated with the adult-hero who is now at the center.5 Any attempt to understand the behaviour of Sologub’s protagonists, as well as the ideas and issues they embody, must take into account the special position which the child assumes.

  With few exceptions, Sologub’s stories read like elaborations of Ivan Karamazov’s litany of child abuse before his rebellion of the The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Imprisoned by his earthly existence, the child is tormented by a wide range of forces which Sologub is careful to define as inevitable and unvanquishable. In this sense they are, like Ivan’s children, a movingly effective device for uncovering life’s irrational and terrible evil. Arguing Sologub’s inheritance of an important component of Dostoevsky’s philosophy by noting his similar use of the child to express and justify his metaphysical rebellion against the insensitive laws of the universe, R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik claims that Sologub

  intentionally limits the field of his artistic creation by this circle of [children’s suffering] just as Ivan Karamazov with the same circle outlined his ethical questions. And the reason is the same. The absurdity, meaninglessness of life, its evil, its horror can be seen more clearly in children who still, speaking in Ivan’s words, have not eaten the apple and are still not guilty of anything.6

  Children, however, are more than mere vehicles for expressing moral outrage in Sologub’s fiction; they exist not only to pose ethical questions. The earliest stories betray the author’s profound concern with the purely personal dimensions of childhood. Works such as “Shadows” (1894), “The Worm” (1896), “In Captivity” (1896), and “To the Stars (1904) are essentially dramatizations of the emotional trials, of the late-juvenile of early-adolescent state which Sologub views as the most complex and crucial period in the development of human consciousness.7 Whatever else they may accomplish, the best examples of the writer’s short prose make abundantly clear the inseparability of Sologub’s interest in the psychic world of children from his broader philosophical concerns. The terrible anguish of a youngster on the border of two conflicting states—sexual innocence and sexual maturity—inevitably indicates a more general sense of ontological malaise which results from life’s “fatal contradictions.”

  Despite the undeniable mixture of abstract and intimate elements in Sologub’s child-centred stories, it would be inaccurate to argue the predominance of an emotional perspective in them.8 Nor, for that matter, do these sketches of childhood provide a thoroughly satisfactory literary portrayal of this perspective. The Soviet critic M. Dikman views Sologub as the creator of a fictional world where “that which was earlier a state, a psychological situation, becomes a philosophical position, a myth.”9 Only A. Gornfeld’s observation of Sologub’s somewhat depersonalized embodiment of the child in his short fiction suggests the imbalance which exists between these psychological and philosophical positions. “It is impossible,” he writes, “to say that in [Sologub’s children] there exist many different images: all of them in essence are fused into one image.”10 And his further contention that “the child” is not so much a person as he is an object of fate—a necessary conclusion of [Sologub’s] conception of life,”11 rightly emphasizes the writer’s intent to invoke the child in a manner which resembles Ivan Karamazov’s strategic presentation of children.

  Only when Sologub turns to the novel—namely to The Petty Demon—do we find a considerably more personal and specifically psychological treatment of the child. Nowhere in Sologub is the child’s inner chaos better understood and more subtly depicted, nor indeed the psychological and metaphysical levels more effectively integrated, than in this, his most highly regarded fictional work.12 This may partially be explained by the difference in genre, but Sologub’s failure to delve as elaborately into the peculiar realm of the young psyche in his other novels suggests that he is guided here by more than formal considerations alone. Indeed, The Petty Demon occupies a singular position in Sologub’s oeuvre. No other of his works discusse
s so candidly and convincingly the philosophical basis of what is to Sologub, life’s tragic sense. That this same work should contain the writer’s frankest investigation of complex youthful emotions is more than coincidental. Sologub’s honesty about the psychological world of children reflects, and goes hand in hand with, his openness in revealing a skeptical and disquieting vision of reality.

  Seen against the background of his predecessors in the stories, the central child figure of The Petty Demon, Sasha Pylnikov, alerts us to a critical stage in Sologub’s thought and helps us to appreciate the unique quality which characterizes this novel. Most of the stories which contain children were written before 1905, the year that Sologub published The Petty Demon in the periodical Questions of Life. Up until this time, Sologub’s work reflects the writer’s growing pessimism, which in many respects The Petty Demon, and Sasha in particular, epitomize. But after 1905 (and certainly by 1907, when The Petty Demon appeared in a separate edition) Sologub’s writing assumes a more upbeat mood, the seeds of whish can be found already in Sasha’s role in the novel. There is, admittedly, something contradictory and ambiguous about the child’s combination of fear and faith on Sologub’s part, but it is just this unsettling mixture which constitutes the novel’s special quality. The Petty Demon—if we cast our glance most fixedly on its central child character-stands on the brink of two fairly distinct psycho-philosophical states of mind in Sologub.

  Of all Sologub’s children, Sasha Pylnikov, the gymnasium student who becomes the object of Lyudmila’s amorous advances, is the most genuinely three-dimensional. His characterization exemplifies the writer’s most artistically original and psychologically sophisticated portrayal of the confusion, ambivalence and emotional turmoil which typify the transition from boyhood to manhood. Lyudmila’s observation that “the best age for a boy is fourteen-fifteen, he can still do nothing and doesn’t really understand, yet he senses everything, absolutely everything,”13 undoubtedly echoes Sologub’s own sentiments. His use of pre-pubescent children betrays an enjoyment of those tense climactic moments before change is finally affected and transition ultimately achieved. The frequent appearance of the child-adolescent in Sologub’s fiction demonstrates the author’s delectation in the perfect mixture of, and balance between, the two starkly diametrical opposites which this unique state represents, however brief it may be. Sologub’s penchant for capturing the heightened moment, when the Dostoevskian combination of psychological and metaphysical antipodes is at its peak, seems best gratified in the incipient struggle between child-like and adult forces within the newly awakened youth.14 Sologub was not a writer who specialized in scenes charged with dramatic tension and excitement, yet where such moments do exist, they are most likely to involve children. Sasha Pylnikov represents the fullest realization of this element of drama in Sologub’s prose.