The Petty Demon Read Online Free Page B

eventually ended in universal outrage. Many readers
     attacked Sologub for turning his back on the earlier brilliant portrayal of Peredonovism to indulge himself in his own willful
     fantasies: “[Russian social thought] … has lost a great master who, after Gogol, represents the most remarkable portrayer
     of that entire astounding slime of triviality of which Russian life is composed.” 11 Gorky was in a perfect frenzy over Sologub’s novel. Struggling for social conscience in literature, Gorky felt that writers
     like Sologub were anathema to the moral dignity and political future of society in Russia. He promptly cut off his affiliations
     with the journal that began the serialization of the novel, calling it “indecent”. His letters were filled with expressions
     of disgust over the content of Sologub’s work and he was particularly horrified at what he was later to call, in his address
     at the 1934 Congress of Writers, the presence of “eros in politics”. This deviation was best exemplified in Sologub. Several
     letters to Lunacharsky in December of 1907 highlight his reactions and explain some of the origins for the animosity between
     Sologub and Gorky:
You know, that rotten, bald-headed bastard by the name of Sologub is having his novel
The Created Legend
printed in the almanac
Shipovnik
. In the novel you find his hero, an indubitable sadist, and a certain woman who is a social democrat and a propagandist.
     She comes to him, strips naked, and after suggesting first that he photograph her, she then gives herself to the beast, gives
     herself like a chunk of cold meat. Anatoly Vasilievich, he ought to have his face smashed in for that! Get the book and read
     it. By God, you must! 12
    … You can say the filthiest things possible about Sologub and it would still not be enough for his vile, slimy, froglike soul! 13
    If there were socially committed critics like Gorky who felt that fantasy and eroticism were incompatible with politics, others
     found the novel more or less symptomatic of their times: “This derangement of the imagination, this capricious mixture of
     the real with pure fantasy, the involuntary manifestations here and there of an erotic sensibility which is not entirely healthy,
     finally this disjointed and nervous, translucent style which reminds one of a careless first draft or comments for a notebook—all
     this represents the incontestable symptoms of a sick age.” 14
    Indeed, how was the reader supposed to react to Sologub’s hero, Grigory Sergeyevich Trirodov? He could not only communicate
     with spirits from the beyond, raise dead children from freshly dug graves back to a zombie-like existence, reduce his enemies
     to glass prisms, and concoct powerful potions in his secret laboratory, but he was also involved in politics, actively aiding
     various democratic and revolutionary organizations, as well as operating a very avantgarde school where both children and
     instructresses ran about in the altogether. Moreover, what did the reign of Queen Ortruda in the distant kingdom of the United
     Isles have to do with the plan of this modern-day poet-alchemist? And what could be more absurd thanhe, a Russian commoner, applying officially for the position of King of the tiny island kingdom in the Mediterranean after
     the demise of Ortruda? Finally, Sologub must have left readers shaking their heads in disbelief when Trirodov, in order to
     escape the brutal attack of the militant Black Hundred organization on his estate, takes refuge in his garden green house-which
     is actually a cleverly concealed spaceship-and blasts off into space. The fact that an old adversary, Peredonov, from
The Petty Demon
, is resurrected in
The Created Legend
as the vice-governor, certainly added to the general muddle. As one reader aptly mused: “It is difficult to find a parallel
     to this novel in the past of our literature … The reader, bewildered and wracking his brains, is given the task of trying