Interesting Facts About the Novel “The Petty Demon” by Fyodor Sologub

The hero of Fyodor Sologub’s famous novel “The Petty Demon” (1907), a provincial teacher and loyal philistine, embodied all the vulgar and vile things the author saw in the life of his time. The novel depicts the soul of the sadistic teacher Ardalyon Peredonov against the backdrop of the dull, meaningless life of a provincial town. Envy, malice, and extreme egoism drove Peredonov to complete delirium and loss of reality.

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“This novel is a mirror, skillfully made. I polished it for a long time, worked hard on it… The surface of my mirror is smooth and its composition is pure. Repeatedly measured and carefully checked, it has no curvature. The ugly and the beautiful are reflected in it with equal precision,” said Sologub. In “The Petty Demon,” the homes of Russian philistines become transparent, and all the evil, foul, and terrible things happening within them are revealed to us. Peredonov, whose name has become synonymous with stupidity and malice, is the central figure.

A contemporary critic, A. Izmailov, said: “If demons were assigned to different places, then Sologub understood the one assigned to our provinces astonishingly well.” Others also wrote about Russian petty demons, and this novel occupies a worthy place among such famous works as Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” Dostoevsky’s “The Double,” Garshin’s “The Red Flower,” Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” and “The Man in a Case.”

Sologub’s novel “The Petty Demon” enjoyed the greatest readership success: it went through 11 editions during his lifetime.

The work was conceived at the very beginning of the 1890s, when Fyodor Sologub, like his hero, served as a teacher in a gymnasium in the town of Velikiye Luki. Moreover, the book incorporated, in a slightly altered form, some episodes from his teaching practice and caricatured portraits of colleagues; a prototype for Peredonov also existed in reality.

Sologub always began his work on major pieces in the same way—by filling out cards slightly smaller than bibliographical ones (exactly the same way unbeknownst to him — Nabokov would write several decades later). Individual episodes, fragments of dialogues, some successful phrases, toponyms, and aphorisms were recorded on these cards. A special place in the preparatory materials for “The Petty Demon” is occupied by excerpts from botanical reference books with names and characteristics of plants. At the turn of the century, the first, rough draft of the novel was completed (the manuscript is dated June 19, 1902).

By the time the novel was finished, “Severny Vestnik” (Northern Herald), the main journal of the early Symbolists, where Sologub was readily welcomed and published, had already closed. Attempts to place “The Petty Demon” in one of the many thick liberal-leaning journals were futile. The reasons for refusal are unknown to us—whether it was due to the originality of his creative style or the numerous barbs scattered throughout the text, sensitive to the Populist heart (Peredonov kept Pisarev’s collected works in a prominent place to emphasize the breadth of his views; he relegated a portrait of Pushkin to the outhouse for being a chamberlain, and replaced it with an image of Mickiewicz). The first chapters were printed by the journal “Voprosy Zhizni” (Questions of Life), but then it also closed. Three major Symbolist publishing houses — “Skorpion,” “Grif,” and “Zolotoye Runo” — also refused. Meanwhile, in 1907, after the release of a separate book by the famous (and apolitical) publishing house “Shipovnik” (Wild Rose), the novel instantly became a bestseller.

“The Petty Demon” changed the author’s fate. Thanks to a skillfully drawn-up contract with the publisher, he received half of the net profit from the sale of the book, whose circulation reached 15,000 copies in the first three years (an unprecedented number for Symbolist prose). In the following years, the novel was translated into German, Italian, English, Spanish, French, and Finnish. Sologub, dismissed from the Andreevsky School after many years of irreproachable service, never returned to pedagogical work and spent his remaining years exclusively on literary endeavors.

The protagonist of “The Petty Demon” was destined for a long life. The author himself adapted the novel into a play of the same name, which was successfully staged on the Moscow and provincial stages; in 1916, a film based on “The Petty Demon” was shot, although the author did not participate in writing its screenplay. Moreover, Peredonov would reappear in the next novel, “The Created Legend” — and it would turn out that Princess Volchanskaya, whose patronage he awaited in “The Petty Demon” and whom the reader might consider a figment of his feverish mind, actually existed. And it is precisely thanks to her that Peredonov in the next novel is released from the asylum and makes a career in the provincial administration, but that is another story.

During the Soviet era, the novel was rarely published. In 1926, the book was published in Leningrad by the “Mysl” publishing house, and the author received a fee of 1000 rubles. In 1958, the Kemerovo Book Publishing House released the novel as a separate book. It was also printed in an abridged version in one of the university anthologies. Starting from 1988, “The Petty Demon” and other works by Sologub have been published in mass circulations.

Yulia Basharova,

2025, Ireland

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