The Petty Demon

The object the article is to study the parallels between E. Zola’s novel La Curee and F. Sologub’s novel The Petty Demon. In the author’s opinion the similiarity of the plot collisions and techniques of depicting a person’s unity with the ‘environment’, which characterize the two novels’ poetics, is indicative of the unquestionable impact of the naturalist writer’s creative experience on Sologub’s seeking.

The article compares two novels: The Conquest of Plassans by Emile Zola and The Petty Demon by Fyodor Sologub. The parallels (in the problem range, systems of images, poetics of the plot, in the psychological picture of the characters’ images) give us grounds to consider the novel by Zola to be one of the sources of plot collisions and poetics for The Petty Demon.

The article considers Inferno by Dante Alighieri as one of the precedent texts for the novel The Petty Demon. The author supposes that Dante’s‘infernal’ connotations transform in the novel into the motive of deception which forms the plot of the novel. The motives that go through the whole novel (of mud, swamp, blindness and madness) as well as zoomorphic comparisons and allusions to the first cantos also reveal other aspects of Sologub’s plan and the distinctness of the poetics of the novel.