Showing results for "The Little Demon" in Classics

The Petty Demon is one of the funniest Russian novels. It is also the most decadent of the great Russian classics, replete with naked boys, sinuous girls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting. He is at once a victim, a monster, a silly hypocrite, and a sadistic dullard. The plot moves from Peredonov's petty quest for a promotion to arson and murder via one of the most incredible and uproarious scandal scenes in world literature, the masquerade ball, which the boy Sasha attends as a beautiful geisha.

This story, also translated as "The Imp and the Bread", concerns a peasant whose piece of bread was stolen by a little demon who hoped it would make the peasant curse. The opposite happened. The devil was displeased, and the imp set out on a successful three-year plan to make the peasant sin.