Love and Death in a Russian Novel
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Love and Death in a Russian Novel By Stanley Edgar Hyman FYODOR Kuz'mich Teternikov was born in St. Petersburg in 1863, and died in the same city, renamed Leningrad, in...
...Varvara sweats, and it is uncomfortable to sleep with her...
...His age is not given, but it is clear that like Lolita he has not yet reached puberty...
...he smears the floor with glue so that the demon will stick fast...
...A third scene, with particular brilliance, switches from Ludmila kissing Sasha's body, "in a thrilling and mysterious worship of the blossoming Flesh," to discover her two sisters watching through the keyhole, "numb with passionate and burning excitement...
...He is interested in nothing outside himself...
...In another aspect, The Petty Demon is Gogolesque satire of Russian provincial life...
...Peredonov is the principal accuser of Ludmila and Sasha, and their affair is taken to be one of his delusions...
...And of course in his deepest meaning Peredonov is ourselves: the mindless greedy id, the cruel superego, the ego driven mad by inner war...
...As he waits for the appointment, he slowly sinks into madness, and ends by cutting the throat of his best friend...
...He humiliates the Rutilov girls, and encourages the brother of a poor girl to set fire to her only dress as a joke...
...The irony here is that Sasha is very ambivalent sexually, and that Ludmila's erotic hothouse is bringing that ambivalence to blossom...
...In Freud's view, the paranoid transforms and disguises his repressed homosexual attachment ("I love him") by means of projection ("He loves me") and reaction-formation ("He hates me...
...he inks "P" all over his body so that his friend Volodin cannot change places with him...
...Beneath this vicious bully is Peredonov the paranoid schizophrenic...
...In his madness Peredonov commits a series of increasingly wild acts...
...Another is a scene in which Peredonov and the mother of a student whip the student, secretly in the night because of the father's opposition...
...In the subsidiary action, a sensual young woman named Ludmila Rutilova falls in love with and halfseduces a beautiful young schoolboy called Sasha...
...Come to me and fulfill my need.' " A number of scenes are masterly...
...Now I cannot wait to read the others...
...he denounces his enemies to the police...
...She's like an oven...
...He uses short sentences to marvelous effect...
...With this superb book as a glass through which to see our own natures more clearly, we may not forever be blind and pitiful...
...Although of unimpeachable working-class origins—his mother was a chambermaid—he had no use for the Revolution...
...On Peredonov's bloated face, even a momentary look of animation appears "dull and morose...
...As he gets crazier, Peredonov comes to believe that the cat has gone to report him to the police, or has itself become a policeman, and that an "eyebird"—consisting of nothing but an eye and two wings—is spying on him...
...He destroys a dress of Varvara's, in which a demon might be hiding...
...he burns down a dance hall to release the demon in the fire...
...The Petty Demon is a masterpiece...
...He calls boy pupils by girls' names and addresses them as "sweetie pie...
...Sologub is almost unknown in the United States, and I had never read, or seen, a book of his until this one...
...He bullies and humiliates his pupils, enjoys their tears, and tells their parents invented misdeeds to get them whipped...
...Peredonov spits in Varvara's face, and forces her to kiss the head of his cane, which is carved in the form of a "fig...
...We watch his psychosis develop in the course of the book...
...he stabs at spies behind the wallpaper...
...Peredonov's letter to the Princess, when madness finally gives him courage to write her, is a triumph: " ? love you,' he wrote, 'because you are cold and distant...
...Beneath this ludicrous figure there is a much less laughable bully and sadist...
...Peredonov clearly has a strong latent homosexuality...
...On the surface level he is a dull fool, bored and boring...
...This ultimate irony seems to be Sologub's point...
...I want to have a cold and distant lover...
...Not everything is imagination, there's also truth in the world," he mumbles sadly...
...Peredonov's slaughter of Volodin has been beautifully foreshadowed by a constant identification of Volodin with sheep and rams, and by Peredonov's frequent terrified hiding of kitchen knives...
...Petersburg in 1863, and died in the same city, renamed Leningrad, in 1927...
...Ludmila's boldest act is to costume Sasha as a geisha for a masquerade ball, and once at the ball Sasha cooperates by flirting and coquetting shamelessly with the men, as a result of which he wins the prize...
...One had only to compare the mad, coarse, dirty Peredonov with the gay, delightful, well-dressed, sweetsmelling Ludmilochka...
...Peredonov's vision of happiness is: "a town where all the teachers will bow down low to me, and where all the students will be afraid and whisper in fear...
...The heart of the book is Peredonov, and Peredonov is many-layered...
...In one of Sologub's characteristically Manichaean touches, both Varvara and her crony Grushina have lovely bodies, "slender, beautiful, and supple," but Varvara's is topped with "the head of a faded harlot," and Grushina's is marred by a wrinkled, dusty skin covered with flea bites...
...One section of the book has Peredonov going the rounds of the town's worthies to clear his name of fancied slanders, and like Chichikov's journey it becomes a series of comic set pieces: the sententious mayor, the health fanatic district attorney, the pompous corseted marshal, the leading landowner with his fake peasant furniture, and so on...
...finally he cuts Volodin's throat as one would slaughter a ram...
...Ludmila, in rapport with the Dionysian ecstasies, can transfigure reality...
...The scenes in which Ludmila tears off Sasha's clothing and kisses his body, or costumes him as a girl and drenches him with perfume, or takes off most of her own clothing, lies at his feet, and pleads to be ravaged, are overpoweringly erotic, perverse and disturbing...
...For his wedding, Peredonov puts on his wife's rouge and tries to put on her corset, rationalizing these acts as attempts to look more youthful...
...The quality of the town's coarseness is best imaged at Peredonov's wedding to Varvara, with a crowd of boys running alongside the carriage and hooting, and Varvara spitting at them out the window...
...Peredonov, a hater of life, makes any truth false...
...With impressive prescience, Sologub anticipated Freud's theory of paranoia as a defense against homosexuality...
...The covert significance of the dual plot, I believe, is to caricature and mock the Christian mystery, the slain Lamb, and to replace it with an older joyous pagan mystery, the blossoming Flesh...
...The erotic tension between them crackles, and the scene is broken off as they stand together at the bedroom door, then resumed with Peredonov walking home, mumbling "It wasn't my fault...
...When he steals and gobbles a pound of raisins from his own kitchen, he charges the maid with eating them, and takes their cost out of her pay...
...he denounces a ram to the police as an imposter pretending to be Volodin...
...In the main one, a thoroughly repulsive schoolteacher named Ardal'on Borisych Peredonov—gluttonous, rotten with superstition, cowardly and mean—is duped into marrying his mistress Varvara by her pretence that by means of her influence on a Princess she can get him a job as a school inspector...
...At first it seems merely neurotic...
...One is a drunken party at which the Peredonovs invite their guests to help them soil the walls before they move, that being their spiteful custom...
...he has no opinions and no desire to form any...
...He assumes that anyone laughing is laughing at him, he believes that everyone is hostile to him and spreading slander, he is afraid of poison in his food or drink, he is terrified of black magic and witchcraft, he fears that at any time a berserk schoolboy might bite him fatally (human saliva being poisonous...
...The town is a vision of dirt streets, always dusty or muddy, and the people in it are fools and bores...
...It is of you that I have written my novel," Sologub insolently told his readers in the introduction to the second edition...
...Teternikov published verse and fiction over the pen name Fyodor Sologub, and was the most talented of the Russian Symbolists...
...Two actions dominate the book...
...To the extent that such things can be seen through a good translation, Sologub is a writer of great distinction...
...he denounces the court cards to the police, and burns the decks...
...he stabs out the eyes of the court cards in his decks, "so they would not stare at him...
...His novel The Petty Demon appeared in 1907...
...He abuses the cat, and if it shows its claws, whips it terribly...
...Peredonov, Sologub explains, "could not understand the spontaneous Dionysian ecstasies triumphantly calling in nature...
...He is childishly greedy, munching caramels as he daydreams of naked girls, gobbling jam tarts washed down with vodka as he fights with Varvara...
...He is terrified of drafts and catching cold, and so cowardly that when he makes an obscene gesture at the postman he does so in the privacy of his pocket...
...It is written as though they were committing adultery...
...he becomes convinced that Sasha is a girl in disguise, or both a boy and a girl, and dreams of Sasha beckoning him and leading him "along dark and dirty streets...
...She herself wanted it...
...Before he became a professional writer Sologub had been a teacher and school administrator...
...After the murder, the rumors about Ludmila and Sasha are accepted by everyone as "the ravings of a madman," and Ludmila's calm lying is accepted as the truth...
...he imputes lurid wickedness to them...
...It was recently reprinted in the Soviet Union, in a tiny edition, in a series of "writers hostile to the state.' A translation was published by Knopf in 1916, and now we have a scholarly new translation by Andrew Field, with an introduction by Ernest J. Simmons (Random House, 355 pp., $4.95...
...He was blind and pitiful—like many of us...
...Peredonov is a comic figure, but it is comedy that grows increasingly monstrous, and one's laughter sours in the mouth...
...But perhaps there is something of Sasha's beauty and Ludmila's passion in us too...
Vol. 45 • September 1962 • No. 18
