Sologub

The article describes the image of the city in the literary texts comprising 20 issues of the literary digest Zemlya (Moscow Publishing House, 1908–1917). Various city images (buildings and surrounding nature, urban dwellers) are analyzed in the literary works (both prose and verse) by the authors of Zemlya (M. Artsybashev, A. Kuprin, F. Sologub, V. Vinnichenko, N. Krasheninnikov, E. Chirikov, etc.). The analysis is accompanied by the journal and newspaper reviews of popular literary critics of the beginning of the 20th century.

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.