Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1472638 in Books
• Published on: 1991-01-01
• Original language: Russian
• Binding: Paperback
• 314 pages

Customer Reviews

The Petty Demon - Fyodor Sologub
The Petty demon takes us through the life and increasingly bizarre mental state of the main protagonist Peredonov, a teacher at the local high scool in a smallish town in provincial Russia during the late 19th century. He's the nastiest person to appear in a book: a bully, a sadist, a drunk, a glutton, paranoid, utterly compelling in his unpleasantness, and permanently tormented by his very own petty demon.

For all this, it's a funny book, even though at one level it can be read as a study of one man's descent into madness. Sologub takes us through small-town politics and love-affairs, endless match-making, and even a grown woman seducing an 14 year old schoolboy! It's hard to think that this book was written just over 100 years ago, but easy to see why it created such a scandal when it was first published. Like Dostoevsky's best works (with which it can be compared), it has not aged, and many of its characters you can meet in provincial Russia and Ukraine to this day.