A dark classic of Russia's silver age, this blackly funny novel recounts a schoolteacher's descent into sadism, arson and murder. Mad, lascivious, sadistic and ridiculous, the provincial schoolteacher Peredonov torments his students and has hallucinatory fantasies about acts of savagery and degradation, yet to everyone else he is an upstanding member of society. As he pursues the idea of marrying to gain promotion, he descends into paranoia, sexual perversion, arson, torture and murder. Sologub's anti-hero is one of the great comic monsters of twentieth-century fiction, subsequently lending his name to the brand of sado-masochism known as Peredonovism. The Little Demon (1907) made an immediate star of its author who, refuting suggestions that the work was autobiographical, stated 'No, my dear contemporaries ... it is about you'. This grotesque mirror of a spiritually bankrupt society is arguably the finest Russian novel to have come out of the Symbolist movement. Fyodor Sologub was born in St Petersburg in 1863. His first two novels Bad Dreams (1896) and The Little Demon (1907) were drawn from his own experiences as schoolmaster in a remote provincial town. For many years Sologub could not find a publisher for The Little Demon but when in 1907 the novel was at last published - to immediate and resounding success - he was able to leave his restricting career and devote himself to literature. In 1921 his wife committed suicide and Sologub died a few years later in 1927. Ronald Wilks studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College,Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University. He has translated many works from Russian for Penguin Classics, including books by Gorky, Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov.

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The refusal of the Russian people to be either bribed or deceived into hostility to the Jews is clearly enough demonstrated by the feeling of affection on the part of most intelligent Jews towards the Russian people The only exceptions are those Jews which come from the Polish cities far within the Jewish Pale and do not know the Russian people except by hearsay Unfortunately, this is a considerable portion of the total of the Jews in Russia, and it is from these cities and towns in the heart of the Pale that most of our immigrants come But all the more educated Jews-and a very large part are educated-all those who know Russia either by a travel or through Russian literature and newspapers, feel a deep affection for their country, for in spite of all, Russia belongs to them just as much as it does to other Russians One of the editors of the present volume, Fyodor Sologub, says: "Whenever I met Russian Jews abroad, I always marvelled at the strangely tenacious love for Russia which they preserve They speak of Russia with the same longing and the same tenderness as the Russian emigrants; they are equally eager to return and equally saddened, if the return is impossible Wherefore should they love Russia, who is so harsh and inhospitable toward them?"

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The original Shield was published in 1916 by the Russian Society for the Study of Jewish Life under the joint editorship of three eminent writers, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, and Fyodor Sologub. In the words of William English Walling, "this is not merely a book about the Russian Jews. It is a marvellous revelation of the Russian soul." Nowadays The Shield is as timely as ever. As Pavel Milyukov, the founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party, says, anti-Semitism of the new type "is the product of the constitutional epoch. It is a response to the need for new means of influencing the masses."

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.