The Icon and the Axe

climax was reached in 1907 with the appearance of Viacheslav Ivanov's semi-mystical exaltation of sex in his collection of poems, Eros; his celebration of the varieties of the sexual act in Veneris Figurae; and an apologia for homosexuality in the story Wings, by Michael Kuzmin, who suddenly became one of the favorite authors of the age.69 The most remarkable literary events of this time of titillation were the two best-selling novels of 1907, Sanine by Michael Artsybashev and The Petty Demon by Fedor Sologub.70 Sanine, read today, appears as a bad imitation-even a caricature- of the cheap sexual novel. The scene is continually being prepared for seductions in stereotyped nocturnal surroundings to the accompaniment of pretentious monologues on the artificiality of everything but sex, with names like Lida used for added metaphorical suggestion. The reason for the extraordinary impact of Sanine was simply that Russian readers saw in it a new philosophy of life. Its philosophical asides (sometimes referred to as "mental ejaculations") ridicule Tolstoy and other moralists, urging men to be true to their sensual desires in the realization that life is senseless and death the only ultimate reality. The novel reaches a climax with three suicides; and self-inflicted death becomes the main theme of many of Artsybashev's subsequent works, such as At the Brink in 1911-12. But the preoccupation with sex as the only source of meaning in life was all the public remembered about Artsybashev.

Turgenev's novels had offered to the tired liberals of the 1840's the Schopenhauerian consolation that sexual love provided man with a "focus for willing," "the kernel of the will to live," and suicide a means of overcoming the meaningless monotony of life.71 In like manner, Artsybashev-shchina-the most tongue-twisting of all isms of the late imperial period- rehabilitated for a large segment of the disillusioned and apolitical aristocracy the cult of sex and suicide.

Far greater than Sanine was The Petty Demon, on which a little-known St. Petersburg schoolteacher, Fedor Teternikov (Sologub), had been quietly working for ten years. The book puts on display a Freudian treasure chest of perversions with subtlety and credibility. The name of the novel's hero, Peredonov, became a symbol of calculating concupiscence for an entire generation. The name literally means "a Don done over," and may refer to the hero of Don Quixote, Sologub's favorite book from childhood.72 His Don, however, seeks not the ideal world but the world of petty venality and sensualism, poshlosf. He torments his students, derives erotic satisfaction from watching them kneel to pray, and systematically befouls his apartment before leaving it as part of his generalized spite against the universe. The sexual perversion that underlies his hallucinations and paranoia is underscored by a secondary plot featuring a love affair between the youthful Sasha

and Ludmilla, which has undertones of voyeurism, transvestism, and-• above all-homosexuality.

The theme of voluptuous corruption even in "innocent youth" is a constant feature of Sologub's eerie short stories-and of many written in imitation of him. It seems appropriate that this theme should be presented to the mass audience of the West most dramatically and effectively through the work of a transplanted Russian, in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Yet Sologub's world of perversion is far more subtle and profound, suggesting more universal involvement in the all-consuming world of poshlost'. Peredonov, far from being the source of vulgar depravity in the novel, is merely the heightened expression of the general condition of man. The petty demons are everywhere; and no one can be sure where fantasies end and perversions begin, because one man's dream is another man's act and men and women are involved even in one another's gender.

After the extraordinary success of his Petty Demon, Sologub turned to the writing of a trilogy designed to satisfy his own Quixotic desire to redeem man from the world of sensuality and mediocrity. Unlike Gogol, Sologub was able to finish his attempt at a Divina Commedia; but the Purgatorio and Paradiso of his poetic imagination tend to offer only more subtle forms of the same preoccupation with sex that had characterized the Petty Demon. Written between 1907 and 1911, the trilogy bears the title Legend in the Making, although its original title was Charms of the Dead. It begins with the famous declaration that although life is "vulgar . . . stagnant in darkness, dull and ordinary," the poet "creates from it a sweet legend . . . my legend of the enchanting and beautiful."73