The Little Demon

By Fyodor Sologub

Book Overview

A dark classic of Russia's silver age, this blackly funny novel recounts a schoolteacher's descent into sadism, arson and murder.

Mad, lascivious, sadistic and ridiculous, the provincial schoolteacher Peredonov torments his students and has hallucinatory fantasies about acts of savagery and degradation, yet to everyone else he is an upstanding member of society. As he pursues the idea of marrying to gain promotion, he descends into paranoia, sexual perversion, arson, torture and murder. Sologub's anti-hero is one of the great comic monsters of twentieth-century fiction, subsequently lending his name to the brand of sado-masochism known as Peredonovism. The Little Demon (1907) made an immediate star of its author who, refuting suggestions that the work was autobiographical, stated 'No, my dear contemporaries ... it is about you'. This grotesque mirror of a spiritually bankrupt society is arguably the finest Russian novel to have come out of the Symbolist movement.

Fyodor Sologub was born in St Petersburg in 1863. His first two novels Bad Dreams (1896) and The Little Demon (1907) were drawn from his own experiences as schoolmaster in a remote provincial town. For many years Sologub could not find a publisher for The Little Demon but when in 1907 the novel was at last published - to immediate and resounding success - he was able to leave his restricting career and devote himself to literature. 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. He has translated many works from Russian for Penguin Classics, including books by Gorky, Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0141392932
• ISBN13: 9780141392936
• Release Date: December 2013
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Annotated Edition

This edition includes an Introduction and Foreword by the translator, various Forewards by the author, a section containing the textual variants of passages that were removed from the original published editions, and an appendix of 8 critical articles about the book. From the book's back cover: The Petty Demon is one of the funniest Russian novels. It is also the most decadent of the great Russian classics, replete with naked boys, sinuous giirls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting. He is at once a victim, a monster, a silly hypocrite, and a sadistic dullard. The plot moves from Peredonov's petty quest for promotion to arson and murder via one of the most incredible and uproarious scandal scenes in world literature, the masquerade ball which the boy Sasha attends as a beautiful geisha. The electricity of the relationship between the androgynous, pubescent Sasha and the lovely Lyudmila, with her exoptic perfumes, caresses and lubricious fantasies, seldom fails to hold the reader's attention. Even in its censored form, it is one of the most provacative and sexually open of Russian books. Sologub removed many pasages (15 percent of the text) which would have been unacceptable at the time of publication. In this edition these censored sections are appended, and are all keyed so that the reader can place them in the novel as it was originally written.

good, but.....

there are two main characters here. perodonov and the village. P is not quite a sympathetic figure. he starts about being pathetic and patronizing. he is led to believe some untrue things which makes his actions bizzare to the village, and therefore tension starts. between ambition and reality and lack of acceptance, p starts losing his sanity. the book is at times really great, but the plot isn't carried out masterly, and some of the things in the book seem to lack relevance in the end.

Intricate maze of selfish motives in a Russian village.

The Petty Demon is a turn of the century symbolistic novel set in a small Russian village. Many self-absorbed characters interact with only their own best interests in mind and attempt to deceive, mislead and cheat each other while the main character 'Peredonov' attempts to secure a school inspector's position for himself. A side plot is the unnatural relationship between Lyudmila (a young woman) and Sasha (a pre-pubescent male whom is often mistaken for a girl dressed as a boy). Lyudmila is obsessed with pagan thoughts about the young boy and pursues him in a slightly sexual manner without becoming a truly sexual relationship. Peredonov begins the novel as slightly disturbed and ends the novel by becoming completely mad and commiting murder in a fit of paranoia-induced rage.