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.