The Little Demon
Page 1
Fyodor Sologub
THE LITTLE DEMON
Translated by
Ronald Wilks
Introduction by
Pamela Davidson
Contents
Introduction
THE LITTLE DEMON
Author’s Prefaces
The Text
Variants
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE LITTLE DEMON
Fyodor Sologub is the pen name of Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, who was born in St Petersburg in 1863. After his father’s death, his mother became a domestic servant and with the help of her employer Sologub received a good education at a teachers’ college and obtained a post as schoolmaster in a remote provincial town. His first two novels Bad Dreams (1896) and The Little Demon (1907), which he wrote between 1892 and 1902, are drawn from his experiences as a schoolmaster facing provincial stagnation and petty bureaucracy. For many years Sologub could not find a publisher for The Little Demon and it wasn’t until 1905 that the novel appeared in magazine instalments. When in 1907 the novel was at last published in book form – to immediate and resounding success – he was able to leave his restricting career and devote himself to literature. His later novels, however, were less successful; The Created Legend (1908–12), a trilogy of novels in which Satanism, politics and fantasy are curiously interwoven, and The Snake Charmer (1921) had indifferent receptions. Superior to these later novels are his many short stories, particularly the collections Shadows (1896), The Sting of Death (1907) and Decaying Masks (1909). In addition to being a novelist, short-story writer and the author of several lyric dramas, Sologub was one of the leading poets of the Symbolist movement of the end of the century and wrote many volumes of highly polished poetry. The collections The Fiery Circle (1908) and Pearly Stars (1913) epitomize his dualistic, Manichean view of the universe as essentially evil, where in love, truth and beauty lurks the diabolical. Like most of the Symbolist writers, Sologub had little interest in politics and remained ‘coldly aloof’ after the 1917 revolution. His life in the following years was difficult and he was seldom published. He scraped a living mainly from translations. In 1921 his wife committed suicide and Sologub died a few years later in 1927.
Ronald Wilks studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his PhD in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings by Pushkin, and seven volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories and Ward No. 6 and Other Stories. In addition, he has also translated The Shooting Party, Chekhov’s only full-length novel, as well as Notes from Underground and The Double by Dostoyevsky, all for Penguin.
Pamela Davidson is Professor of Russian literature at UCL (University College London) and previously taught at the Universities of Birmingham and Surrey. After studying Russian, French and Italian at Newnham College, Cambridge, she completed a PhD at St Antony’s College, Oxford, on the reception of Dante in Russian Symbolism. Her books include Russian Literature and its Demons, The Poetic Imagination of Vyacheslav Ivanov, an anthology of poems dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, Viacheslav Ivanov: A Reference Guide, and Vyacheslav Ivanov and C. M. Bowra: A Correspondence from Two Corners on Humanism.
Introduction
‘The lofty gave him no comfort, the earthly brought him no joy, and now, as always, he looked on the world with lifeless eyes, like some solitary demon consumed by fear and dejection.’1
Russian literature is populated by a surprising number of doubles and demons. The writer Fyodor Sologub did not officially come into existence until 1893, but his alter ego, Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov (1863–1927), was born in St Petersburg three decades earlier, just two years after the serfs were granted emancipation. Given Sologub’s unusual origins, this timing is not without significance. His father, the illegitimate son of a landowner and a peasant woman, earned a living as a tailor, but died when Fyodor was only four years old. His mother, also of peasant stock, was then obliged to return to domestic service to support her two children, and resumed work as a servant in the St Petersburg household of her former employer, the widow Galina Agapova, known to Fyodor as babushka (grandmother). These circumstances enabled him to be raised in a cultured home, with access to a library and regular visits to the theatre and opera; he attended a good school, followed by four years boarding at the St Petersburg teacher-training institute, and was already writing verse at the age of twelve. However, straddling these different worlds came at a high price. All the way through to adulthood Fyodor was subjected to regular beatings by his mother, who misguidedly ‘disciplined’ him to ensure that he conformed to her strict expectations. ‘Grandmother’ joined in as well, and his sister, Olga, took over this role after their mother’s death in 1894.2 A heightened sense of dualism and the incongruities of life, together with marked sado-masochist tendencies, were therefore embedded in him from the start.
At the age of nineteen, Fyodor determined to better his family’s lot by embarking on a teaching career. Accompanied by his mother and sister, he left the capital for a succession of small provincial towns in the north of Russia (Kresttsy, Velikie luki, Vyterga), where he spent ten years, from 1882 to 1892, working as a school teacher. During this period, despite living in complete isolation from literary circles, he continued to write poetry, began a novel and translated German verse.
Yet it was only when Fyodor returned to St Petersburg in 1892, to take up a job as a teacher of mathematics, that he was able to make his entry into the cultural world of the capital and fashion a new literary identity for himself. He began to publish his poems in the journal Northern Messenger (Severnyi vestnik), and, on the advice of its editors, Akim Volynsky and Nikolai Minsky, adopted the aristocratic pseudonym of Sologub (first used in 1893). Over the next decade, from 1892 to 1902, between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-nine, he wrote his second novel, The Little Demon (Melkii bes, 1907). Like his earlier novel, Bad Dreams (Tiazhelye sny, 1896), it draws on his experiences of the previous decade and features a provincial school teacher as the central protagonist. The anti-hero, Ardalyon Borisych Peredonov, is a singularly unattractive, dull-witted teacher of Russian literature, who dreams of promotion to the rank of inspector. Caught up in a web of deception, he is driven by self-interest and petty ambition to calculated acts of sadism. The novel charts his growing paranoia, destructive cruelty and descent into madness, culminating in arson and murder. With few exceptions, the characters that surround him and make up the life of the provincial town are equally off-putting. The murky world of ‘peredonovism’ (peredonovshchina), as it was soon dubbed, is a grim one, a ‘woeful city’ worthy of Dante’s inscription above the entrance to Hell: ‘Abandon every hope, you who enter’ (Inferno, III, 9).
As a relatively unknown author, Sologub had difficulty in finding a publisher willing to take on this unconventional novel. In 1905 it began to appear in instalments in the religious-philosophical and literary journal Questions of Life (Voprosy zhizni, nos. 6–11). Publication was interrupted (omitting chapters 25 to 32) when the journal closed down in December of that year, but, in March 1907, the entire novel was finally printed in book form by the Symbolist publisher Shipovnik. Its immediate success led to five further, virtually identical editions between 1908 and 1910 (amounting to 15,000 copies). For the seventh edition of 1913, Sologub undertook some fairly substantial stylistic revisions, resultin
g in the standard final version on which subsequent editions are based.3
In tsarist Russia, where rank and career were invariably determined at birth, it defies all the odds that Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, the son of a tailor and domestic servant, managed to become the renowned writer Fyodor Sologub, publishing his first collected works in twelve volumes in 1909–11, followed by a second collection in twenty volumes in 1913–14. His rapid rise to fame was almost entirely due to the triumph of The Little Demon, translated during its author’s lifetime into several languages, including German, Czech, English, French, Danish, Italian, Slovak, Polish, Swedish and Hungarian. It is a testimony to the popularity of the novel in the English-speaking world that is has been rendered into English four times, from as early as 1916.4
In 1907, the Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok declared that The Little Demon had already become a ‘classic work’, read by ‘the whole of educated Russia’.5 But what exactly made the novel so successful? How was it received by contemporary readers, and how does it fit into the Russian literary tradition?
Many of Sologub’s contemporaries saw The Little Demon as a welcome addition to the familiar and much-loved tradition of satirical portraits of Russian provincial society. It was frequently compared to Gogol’s Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi, 1842). Peredonov’s calls on all the important figures in town, to further his own petty agenda, recall Chichikov’s visits to local landowners in pursuit of lists of recently deceased serfs. Sologub’s eye for grotesque detail, leading to a dehumanization of personality, mirrors Gogol’s technique of characterization. The provincial theme was further developed by Saltykov-Shchedrin in The History of a Town (Istoriya odnogo goroda, 1870), a chronicle of events in the town of Glupov (from glupyi, ‘stupid’), and The Golovlyov Family (Gospoda Golovlyovy, 1880), recording the fated decline and moral disintegration of a gentry family over three generations. Saltykov-Shchedrin, aptly described as an ‘apostle of negation’,6 comes closest to Sologub in the unrelieved gloom of his portrait of provincial life, but not in his manner of narration.
Sologub was also often likened to his contemporary, Anton Chekhov, famous for his ability to evoke the stagnant atmosphere of provincial life in his stories and plays. But, despite the overlap, there is a world of difference between the two writers. In Chekhov’s work, drab provincial settings are used to frame fine psychological portraits of the protagonists, whose wasted potential is lamented. By contrast, in The Little Demon, characters lack inner development and inspire no sympathy, because they have no potential, no past or future; they exist only in a meaningless present as monstrous exemplars of humanity reduced to its lowest common denominator. As the philosopher and literary critic Lev Shestov noted in 1909, Sologub does not have the ‘gift of tears’, nor does he know how to lament: The Little Demon is ‘worse than an animal’s shriek’.7 This fundamental difference is cleverly highlighted in a scene from Chapter 6 of the novel. Although Peredonov is a teacher of Russian literature, he dismisses contemporary fiction as stupid nonsense and announces that he has no intention of reading Chekhov’s ‘Man in a Case’ (‘Chelovek v futliare’, 1898). This subtle tale of Belikov, a provincial school teacher trapped by his own anxieties into a rigid mode of behaviour that eventually drives him to death, is Peredonov’s closest literary predecessor, yet Peredonov remains immune to the lessons that could be derived from his example.
Contemporary readers were also quick to relate the novel to the well-developed Russian tradition of literary demonism – the title signals its pedigree. The phrase melkii bes (meaning ‘petty demon’, rather than ‘little demon’) occurs in two of the most important founding works of this tradition. In Pushkin’s novel in verse, Evgenii Onegin (1833), Tatiana struggles to decipher Onegin’s nature on the basis of the books in his library. Who is this ‘Creation of hell or heaven / This angel, this arrogant demon [bes]’? Could he be an ‘imitation’, a ‘Muscovite in Childe Harold’s cloak’, or just a ‘parody’ (Chapter VII, stanza 24)? Onegin, the man she is fated to love, is clearly a prototype of the literary demonic hero, riddled with ambiguities. By contrast, two stanzas later, the hapless Pykhtin, a keen suitor spurned by the heroine, is characterized as a mere ‘petty demon’ [melkii bes] (Chapter VII, stanza 26). The second source of the title is Lermontov’s narrative poem, A Fairytale for Children (Skazka dlia detei, 1842), which introduces an entirely new type of demon, distinct from the romantic demon [demon] of his youthful verse. The new demon’s identity is uncertain; the narrator wonders whether he is ‘the great Satan / Or a petty demon [melkii bes] from the lowest ranks’ (stanza 5).8
In both these passages the juxtaposition of a ‘petty’ demon alongside a ‘greater’ demon invites speculation on the origins of evil, its embodiment in human personalities and ambivalent relation to the narrative voice and literary text that it inhabits. Neither in Russian Orthodox demonology nor in folk tradition was there ‘much emphasis on the towering figure of Satan in splendour’, instead little demons in a multitude of guises proliferate.9 Sologub has clearly aligned himself with Orthodox and folk belief by opting to cast his hero as the petty variety of demon. Readers should not fall into the trap, however, of thinking that little demons represent a lesser degree of evil than greater ones – the very opposite is true.
Sologub’s novel engages with the literary demonic tradition, but in a provocative and innovative way. As if keen to lure his readers into a false sense of familiarity, he deliberately underlines his debt to the existing tradition by including numerous overt references to its seminal works. Peredonov’s promise to marry Varvara if Princess Volchansky can arrange his promotion echoes Pushkin’s tale ‘The Queen of Spades’ (‘Pikovaya dama’, 1833), in which Hermann exploits Lisa’s love to gain access to her companion, the aged countess, who knows the secret of the three winning cards. The straightforward parallel on the level of plot is given a new twist in Peredonov’s diseased imagination, which transmutes abstract thoughts and anxieties into literal realities requiring action. In Chapter 20, after poking out the eyes of all the kings, queens and jacks in the set of playing-cards to stop them spying on him, he hears the Queen of Spades furiously gnashing her teeth and later dreams that she is sneaking up on him in bed. At the end of Chapter 25, his erotic fantasies about the princess lead him to imagine that she is the Queen of Spades and to burn the whole pack of cards.
Further parallels are drawn with the first novel in prose of the Russian tradition of literary demonism. Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 1840) features the archetypal demonic protagonist Pechorin, Onegin’s successor and one of Peredonov’s most illustrious precursors. In the preface to the second edition of The Little Demon, Sologub echoes almost word for word the preface that Lermontov wrote in 1841 to the second edition of his novel. Lermontov rebutted the opinions of naïve, provincial readers, who objected to being presented with such an immoral hero or claimed that the author had portrayed himself and his acquaintances in the novel: ‘A Hero of Our Time, my dear gentlemen, is indeed a portrait, but not of one man: it is a portrait composed of the vices of our entire generation, in their full development’.10 If the readers he was addressing could not believe in the reality of such an evil character, it was because there was more truth in him than they cared to admit. Sologub makes exactly the same points in his preface, appealing to his readers to identify Peredonov’s features within themselves: ‘No, my dear contemporaries, it is of you that I have written my novel about the little demon’.11
In addition to Dead Souls, already mentioned above, Sologub also drew on several other novels in the demonic tradition. Contemporary readers were well prepared for his focus on the individual’s corruption by evil and descent into madness by the psychological novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In The Double (Dvoinik, 1846), Goliadkin’s wish to marry a woman above his social rank leads to the creation of his double and descent into madness. In Notes from the Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864), the narrator’s delusional ravings are driven by paranoia, ange
r, sadism and self-destruction. In The Demons (Besy, 1872, also known in English as The Devils or The Possessed), the traditions of provincial satire and literary demonism join together: the psychology of evil is broadened to include its social and political impact on a stultified provincial town through the activities of a group of demonic radicals. Sologub shares Dostoyevsky’s fascination with the most perverse forms of evil and includes in his novel deeply disturbing sado-masochist scenes that turn the reader into a complicit voyeur (some of the most unpleasant episodes can be found in the variants that he did not include in the final version of the novel). However, unlike his celebrated predecessor, he does not explore the metaphysical and religious roots of sin and offers no redemptive dimension.
Although all these literary precedents clearly affected the reception of The Little Demon and paved the way for its success, Sologub’s novel remains essentially different and quite unique. As the critic Aleksandr Izmailov took pains to underline in his review of 1907, it should not be hailed as a ‘second Dead Souls’, but as a ‘first Little Demon’.12 In this he was absolutely right – the novel represents a radical new departure. What, then, was so distinctive about it?
The first point of difference follows from the author’s decision to align his novel’s main character with the little demons of Orthodox and folk tradition, rather than with the grander Byronic figures of temptation invoked by Pushkin and Lermontov in their poems on the Demon.13 Sologub’s demon lacks seductive charm; he is no creature of ice or fire, does not inhabit exotic landscapes, and is most at home in the banal lukewarm zone of indifference and inertia. As a result, he cannot serve as a springboard to salvation, as Russian literary demons so often did. The Little Demon offers a static image of an enclosed world, cut off from and offering no access to the metaphysical, transcendent dimension. Its iconographic equivalent is Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s 1907 depiction of the devil as a giant spider, trapped within prison walls, dwarfing a group of barely distinct identical human beings, condemned to trudge round and round in an endless circle.14