The second point of difference relates to the way supernatural phenomena and occurrences are described in the same flat prosaic tone as real events (a technique that anticipates magical realism). An obvious example is the regular intrusion into the narrative of the dirty, dusty, demonic little creature known as the nedotykomka.15 This unusual dialect word from the north of Russia has the same meaning as nedotroga, a ‘touch-me-not’: an object that cannot be touched or a person of touchy and irritable disposition (like Peredonov). In Sologub’s poem ‘The grey touch-me-not …’ (‘Nedotykomka seraya …’, 1899), this creature traps the narrator in a fatal circle of evil, wears him out and cannot be exorcized except through his death. In the novel she makes her first appearance in Chapter 12, and then, with increasing frequency, from Chapter 18 until the end of the work. She turns from a grey creature into a dull gold, bloody and flaming one, squirms like a snake, dances and squeals with laughter (a sign of the devil in Russian folklore), urging Peredonov to commit increasingly foul acts, such as sadistic beatings, arson and murder. Although she is a figment of his imagination, she is described as an entirely real creature, a materialization of his delusions and evil impulses. Ronald Wilks’s decision to render this term as ‘little demon’ in his translation closes the gap between Peredonov and his alter ego, the composite image of his neuroses that he cannot get hold of or deal with.
The third most significant difference concerns the texture of the novel. Its caricatural plot, driven by random, unmotivated events, is marked by a nervous and sketchy rhythm. The narrative is bitty and fragmented, and the characterization shallow. Even the language is as flat and impoverished as the bleak surrounding landscape, studded by the wearisome repetition of monotonous images and key words. All the hallmarks of the great Russian literary tradition have been infiltrated by demonism. Not only has Peredonov’s consciousness been contaminated, so has the very fabric of the novel. As a result, the reader is drawn into and made to experience the demonically compromised version of reality offered by the narrative. On its opening page, after a brief glimpse of what appears to be an idyllic, friendly scene of worshippers leaving a church service, the narrator shifts straight to the gloomy picture seen through Peredonov’s small, swollen eyes, from behind gold-rimmed spectacles. Apart from a limited number of brief narrative digressions, the novel reduces and constrains the vision of its readers, who are sucked into its closed world and disorientated by what Shestov referred to as its ‘stupefying vapours’, designed to confuse the reader as well as the author.16 The reader becomes an accomplice as well as a victim, an active participant in creating a distorted view of the world.
In these three areas Sologub’s fiction represents an entirely new departure, anticipating modernist novels such as Bely’s Petersburg (Peterburg, 1916). Its ‘realism’ turns out to be superficial and illusory; it invokes the familiar traditions of provincial satire and literary demonism only to invert them. Most contemporary critics were quite unprepared for this reversal and tried to read the work in the light of the existing ‘redemptive’ tradition of literary demonism. This was partly due to the fact that the novel, although written during the early decadent phase of Symbolism, appeared during its second metaphysical phase, influenced by the theurgic teachings of the religious philosopher and mystic poet Vladimir Solovyov. The tradition of literary demonism reached a peak of popularity around this time (as witnessed by the publication in 1907 of an entire issue of the journal The Golden Fleece (Zolotoye runo) devoted to a competition on the devil), and was actively engaged on constructing its own genealogy to match the eschatological expectations of the era. Sologub’s novel appeared to fit into this agenda, but, in fact, went against the grain.
Finding a redemptive dimension in this dark tale was no easy task, but many reviewers, undaunted, seized on the self-contained story within the novel of the erotic affair between Lyudmila Rutilova and the adolescent schoolboy Sasha Pylnikov (Chapters 14–16 and 26). In one of the first articles to appear in 1907, the critic and folklorist Evgenii Anichkov, while paying full due to the horrors of peredonovshchina, seen as a reflection of the vulgar, soul-destroying state of Russia from the 1880s to the 1900s, claimed that the key to the novel’s inner unity was Lyudmila’s ‘strange love’ for the schoolboy Sasha; he presented this liaison as a pure, pagan idyll, extolling the beauty of the body and physical love as a means of countering the surrounding corruption.17 The Symbolist Aleksandr Blok went even further. His collection of Verses about the Beautiful Lady (Stikhi o Prekrasnoi Dame, 1905), published in the same year as the serialization of The Little Demon, paid homage to the Beautiful Lady as a manifestation of Solovyov’s cult of the Eternal Feminine or Sophia. In ‘On Realists’ (‘O realistakh’, 1907), he describes the affair of Lyudmila and Sasha as an innocent, uplifting arcadia and Peredonov as a figure originally in search of the Eternal Feminine, sadly transformed into a ‘loyal knight of the Nedotykomka’.18
To portray the seduction of Sasha as an example of pure love is to ignore its decadent aura and perverse, sado-masochist elements. In Chapter 26, the no longer innocent Sasha wonders: ‘Should he kiss her feet or beat her long and hard with supple birch twigs? Should he make her laugh with joy or cry out with pain? Perhaps she desired both: but that would not be enough.’19 Even Izmailov, who clung to the idyllic interpretation of the liaison, acknowledged that it was not recommended ‘reading for schoolgirls’.20 Others were more explicit. The critic A. G. Gornfeld described the love scenes as an expression of ‘unbridled depravity’, outstripping all other examples of erotic literature in its realistic excesses.21 More recently, Viktor Erofeyev and Mariya Pavlova have read the episode as a screen veiling the homosexual fantasies of Peredonov/Sologub towards Sasha the schoolboy, who looks like a girl (as Sologub did in his youth) and dresses up as one for the masquerade.22
Returning to the opening theme of doubles and demons – how should we understand the relationship between the doubles Teternikov/Sologub, and their joint creation, the demonic couple Peredonov and the nedotykomka? Sologub’s obsessive insistence in all his prefaces that Peredonov bears no relation to himself is contradicted by the biographical evidence and his statement, in the year before his death, that, like all great authors, he ‘processed Peredonov’ through himself.23 Clearly there was an intimate connection, but what was it based on?
To answer this question we may turn to an essay Sologub wrote in the same year as his novel was published. In ‘The Demons of Poets’ (‘Demony poetov’, 1907), he comes up with a provocative redefinition of the demon [bes] as the power that tempts writers like Pushkin to pretend that the ideal and the real, the heavenly and the earthly, can co-exist and be reconciled in this world. Sologub attacks Pushkin for giving into this ‘demon of pretence’.24 This paradoxical claim suggests that his own emphasis on the unredeemed evil of the earthly world, manifest in the ‘little demons’ of Peredonov and his associates, was an ethical act, a courageous refusal to succumb to the ‘demon of pretence’ by making out that beauty and truth can exist on earth untainted. Sologub did not flinch from portraying some of the darker impulses experienced by his alter ego, Teternikov, in their unvarnished, unredeemable form. The critic Shestov perhaps came closest to recognizing this when he described the author as a Pythian oracle or prophet of the unredeemed world.25
This, in part, explains why the novel is so saturated with textual references to the Russian literary tradition. It deliberately and explicitly incorporates allusions to its predecessors, not to develop them in the same direction, but in order to inscribe them into a quite different reading of the artistic text as a closed, demonic world, fated and beyond redemption, in which the reader, just as the author, is well and truly trapped. Readers of this novel would do well to heed the warning: ‘No, my dear contemporaries, it is of you that I have written my novel about the little demon.’
Pamela Davidson, 2013
NOTES
1. See Chapter 9, p. 85.
2. These beatings are recorded obses
sively and with alarming frequency in Sologub’s laconic autobiographical notes. See Fedor Sologub, ‘Kanva k biografii’, in Neizdannyi Fedor Sologub (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie), 1997. Many of the sources cited in these notes can be found online at the excellent Russian-language website www.fsologub.ru, which gathers together original works, contemporary reviews and criticism of the author. Sologub continued to receive beatings at the institute and even during his first teaching-post at Kresttsy. See M. Pavlova, Pisatel’-inspektor: Fedor Sologub i F. K. Teternikov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie), 2007, pp. 239–246.
3. With its negative hero, decadent aura and moral ambiguities, Sologub’s novel was antithetical to the requirements of socialist realism. However, cast as an indictment of bourgeois life under the old tsarist regime, it was published twice during the Soviet era (Moscow: Academia, 1933; Kemerovo: 1958). During the perestroika and post-Soviet periods, a plethora of new editions appeared in Russia (1988, 1989, 1991). The final ‘canonization’ of the novel is reflected in the academic edition prepared for the prestigious Literary Monuments series by the Sologub scholar Mariia Pavlova, complete with appendices, variants and detailed notes (St Petersburg: Nauka, 2004).
4. The first authorized translation, by John Cournos and Richard Aldington, appeared in London in 1916. Two translations were published in 1962: the present one by Ronald Wilks (London: New English Library, 1962; Penguin, 1994) and another by Andrew Field (New York: Random House, 1962; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). A fourth translation by Samuel D. Cioran came out in 1983 (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983; London: Quartet, 1990).
5. Aleksandr Blok, ‘Pis’ma o poezii: 2. Plamennyi krug’, in his Sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. N. Orlov (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962), vol. 5, p. 284.
6. Victor Terras, ed., Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1985, p. 383.
7. Lev Shestov, ‘Poeziia i proza Fedora Sologuba’, in O Fedore Sologube. Kritika. Stat’i i zametki, comp. An. Chebotarevskaia (St Petersburg), 1911.
8. Sologub cites these lines from Lermontov’s poem at the beginning of his essay ‘Demony poetov’ (1907), first published as ‘Krug demonov’, Pereval, 1907, no. 7.
9. See the essays by Simon Franklin, ‘Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Literary Demonism and Orthodox Tradition’, and Faith Wigzell, ‘The Russian Folk Devil and His Literary Reflections’, in Russian Literature and its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books), pp. 35, 64.
10. M. Iu. Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, in his Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. I. L. Andronikov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976), vol. 4, pp. 7–8.
11. See p. 4.
12. Aleksandr Izmailov, ‘Izmel’chavshii russkii Mefistofel’ i peredonovshchina. Melkii bes – roman F. Sologuba’, Russkoe slovo, no. 167, 21 July 1907.
13. Pushkin, ‘The Demon’ (‘Demon’, 1823) was followed by Lermontov’s two responses ‘My Demon’ (‘Moi demon’,1829, and 1830 or 1831) and the long narrative poem The Demon (Demon, 1839, published in fragments in 1842, and in full in 1856). For a discussion of the relationship between the demon and artistic inspiration in these poems, see Pamela Davidson, ‘The Muse and the Demon in Poetry’, in Russian Literature and its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 170–184.
14. The image first appeared in the journal Zolotoe runo, 1907, no. 1, p. 7. This issue was devoted to a competition for representations of the devil in literature, music and the visual arts.
15. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky also illustrated the nedotykomka (1906–7), depicted as an ugly, skinny creature with long limbs, distended belly and protruding tongue. Sologub kept this drawing behind glass in his cupboard.
16. Lev Shestov, ‘Poeziia i proza Fedora Sologuba’, in O Fedore Sologube. Kritika. Stat’i i zametki, comp. An. Chebotarevskaia (St Petersburg, 1911).
17. Evgenii Anichkov, ‘Melkii bes’, Kriticheskoe obozrenie, 1907, no. 3.
18. Aleksandr Blok, ‘O realistakh’, in his Sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. N. Orlov (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962), vol. 5, pp. 124–129. One of Sologub’s three favourite works of literature was Cervantes’s Don Quixote. See An. Chebotarevskaia, ‘Fedor Sologub’, in Russkaia literatura XX veka (1890–1910), ed. S. A. Vengerov (Moscow: Mir, 1915). This fact has led some critics to read Pere-don-ov as a transformed version of the idealist knight Don Quixote (in Russian the prefix ‘pere’ is associated with change and transformation), a ‘Don done over’, to cite Andrew Field’s formulation. See M. Pavlova, Pisatel’-inspektor: Fedor Sologub i F. K. Teternikov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), p. 276.
19. See p. 255.
20. Aleksandr Izmailov, ‘Izmel’chavshii russkii Mefistofel’ i peredonovshchina. Melkii bes – roman F. Sologuba’, Russkoe slovo, no. 167, 21 July 1907.
21. A. G. Gornfel’d, cited in Aleksandr Blok, ‘O realistakh’, in his Sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. N. Orlov (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962), vol. 5, p. 126.
22. This reading is substantiated by areas of overlap between biographical materials, including Sologub’s own letters and autobiographical notes and variants of the novel deleted by Sologub. M. Pavlova links Sologub’s treatment of the theme of homosexual love to the trial of Oscar Wilde, widely reported in the Russian press. See M. Pavlova, Pisatel’-inspektor: Fedor Sologub i F. K. Teternikov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), pp. 249–255.
23. See Sologub’s words, reported by E. Ia. Dan’ko in her memoirs about Sologub (1926), cited in M. Pavlova, Pisatel’-inspektor: Fedor Sologub i F. K. Teternikov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), p. 1.
24. Fedor Sologub, ‘Demony poetov’, first published as ‘Krug demonov’, Pereval, 1907, no. 7.
25. Lev Shestov, ‘Poeziia i proza Fedora Sologuba’, in O Fedore Sologube. Kritika. Stat’i i zametki, comp. An. Chebotarevskaia (St Petersburg, 1911).
Author’s Prefaces
Second Edition
The novel The Little Demon was begun in 1892 and completed in 1902. It first appeared in the journal Questions of Life, 1905 (nos. 6–11), but without the final chapters. The novel was first published in its entirety in the Shipovnik edition in March 1907.
I have noticed two contrary opinions in the printed reviews and in the verbal judgements I have happened to hear.
There are those who think that, since the author is a very depraved person, his aim was to provide a self-portrait and thus he depicted himself in the character of Peredonov. Being an honest person, the author had no desire to justify or idealize himself in any way, therefore he smeared his image with the blackest colours. He completed this astonishing undertaking so that he could ascend some kind of Calvary, there to suffer for some reason. This resulted in an interesting and harmless novel.
Interesting, because it shows what evil people there are in this world; harmless because the reader can say, ‘This wasn’t written about me.’
Other people, who are not so hard on the author, think that the state of Peredonovism as depicted in the novel is a fairly widespread phenomenon. And some people even think that if any one of us cares to take a close, careful look inside himself, he will find unmistakably Peredonovian characteristics.
Of these two opinions I prefer that which is more agreeable to me, namely the latter. I was under no obligation to create or invent anything with myself in mind. All the events in the novel, everything that concerns everyday life and the psychology of the characters, is based on the most precise observations – and I had plenty of models on my doorstep. And if my work on the novel has been so protracted, this was merely to elevate the contingent to the realms of necessity, so that inexorable Ananke* should be enthroned where once reigned Aisa,† the scatterer of stories.
It is true that people love to be loved. They are pleased if the loftier, nobler
aspects of their souls are portrayed. Even in villains they wish to see some signs of goodness, the so-called ‘divine spark’ as it was called in days of old. That is why they cannot believe it when confronted with a picture that is true, accurate, gloomy and evil. They want to say, ‘He’s writing about himself.’
No, my dear contemporaries, it is of you that I have written my novel about the little demon, about Ardalyon and Varvara Peredonov, Pavel Volodin, Darya, Lyudmila and Valeriya Rutilov, Aleksandr Pylnikov and the others. About you.
This novel is like a skilfully fashioned mirror. I have polished it meticulously, laboured over it diligently.
Smooth is the surface of my mirror and pure its construction. Repeatedly measured and painstakingly checked, it has not a single blemish.
The monstrous and the beautiful are reflected in it equally faithfully.
January 1908
Fifth Edition
Once I thought that Peredonov’s career was finished and that he would never leave the psychiatric hospital to which he was sent after cutting Volodin’s throat. Recently, though, rumours have started reaching me that Peredonov’s mental derangement was only temporary and that after a short while he was discharged. These rumours, of course, are highly improbable. I mention them only because, in our days, the improbable does happen. I have even read in one newspaper that I intend writing a sequel to The Little Demon.
I have heard that Varvara apparently succeeded in convincing someone that Peredonov was justified in behaving as he did, and that on numerous occasions Volodin had said something quite outrageous, had betrayed shocking intentions, and that before his death he had made an unbelievably impertinent remark that had brought about the final catastrophe. Varvara has interested the princess in this story, so I’m told, and the princess, who had previously never said one word on Peredonov’s behalf, is now taking a lively interest in his fate, so it seems.
The Little Demon Page 2