The Little Demon (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

'No, my dear contemporaries, it is of you that I have written my novel about the little demon ... about you.'
Thus Sologub emphatically refuted suggestions that The Little Demon (1907) contained elements of autobiography. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that his schoolmaster hero is one of the great comic monsters of twentieth-century fiction. Peredonov is exercised first by the idea of marrying to gain promotion, later by arson, torture and murder. His descent into paranoia and sexual perversion (he subsequently lent his name to the brand of sado-masochism known in Russia as Peredonovism) mirrors the obsessions of a petty provincial society, tyrannized by triviality and senseless bureaucracy.
The Little Demon is a formidable technical achievement in its portrayal of a spiritual wasteland. It brought Sologub immediate and lasting fame, and is arguably the finest Russian novel to have come out of the Symbolist movement.