Fyodor Sologub
1863–1927
Biography
Fyodor Kuzmich Sologub (1863–1927) was born in St Petersburg as Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov and took the pen name Sologub in place of his birth surname. He worked for years as a schoolteacher and school inspector in the provinces before making his name in literature. He was a Russian Symbolist poet, novelist, playwright and essayist, and an important figure in the Silver Age of Russian writing.
He was among the first Russian writers to bring the morbid, pessimistic mood of late nineteenth-century European decadence into Russian prose. His best-known novel, The Petty Demon (Мелкий бес, The Petty Demon), follows Peredonov, a provincial school inspector who grows suspicious, spiteful and finally unhinged. He imagines enemies everywhere and tries to win promotion, and the petty officials and gossip around him are grim and comic at once. The novel is often counted among the important Russian novels of the early twentieth century.
The Petty Demon is on this site under its Russian title. It is a psychological study of a mind worn away by spite, set against a stale provincial society, and it shows the fixation on death and the darker side of life that runs through Sologub's work. Readers who know him only as a poet will find the same concerns in his fiction, but in prose that is more pointed and more disturbing.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Мелкий бес
by Федор Кузьмич Сологуб
Peredonov, a schoolmaster in a provincial town, schemes to win a post as inspector and slides into spiteful paranoia, sure that everyone plots against him. Sologub's novel turns the small-town grotesque into a study of madness. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.