and the will of the people in the late century, the intellectuals now turned to discovering the inner recesses of their own wills. They now sought to discover not just 'the other shore,' the new society dreamed of in the nineteenth century, but also 'the other side' of human personality. It is significant that both phrases came from German-the language of romantic longing. The original title of Herzen's call for Russia to fulfill the revolutionary hopes that had been betrayed in the West by the failure of 1848 was Vom andern Ufer; and Die andere Seite was the title of a widely studied German treatise in psychology calling for a new 'psycho-graphic' art.67
In part, the new sensualism was a Nietzschean effort to find 'bloody truths' capable of supplanting the lifeless truisms of a society just entering into a phase of bourgeoisation and national delusions, such as that which Germany had experienced in Nietzsche's lifetime. But Russian sensualism was more than an aristocratic program for replacing Christ with Dionysus in the manner of Nietzsche or Stefan George. It was also at times a confused plebeian effort to revitalize the image of Christ with the flesh that had been taken away from him by the official churchmen in the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky's Schilleresque praise of the earthy and spontaneous, his allusion to 'the indecent thoughts in the minds of decent people . . . which a man is afraid to tell even to himself'68 was taken as a signpost pointing to a new world of experience. Ivan Karamazov's dictum that, in the absence of God, 'all things are permissible' became a kind of invitation to sexual adventure for a new generation.
The final repeal of the censorship in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 led to an increasingly candid public discussion of sex. A feverish
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
In the first part, Drops of Blood, we are in the same town that provided the site for The Petty Demon; but attention is now focused on the mysterious poet Trirodov, who has taken up residence there. Perversion is projected onto the phallic towers and subterranean passageways of his country estate, where he presides over a weird colony of 'silent children' but ventures forth to take part in revolutionary agitation. The second part of the trilogy, Queen Ortruda, takes one to an imaginary kingdom of lithesome virgins and naked boys on a Mediterranean island, where a volcano is continually preparing for a final eruption, which kills the queen and serves as a mixed symbol of sexual orgasm, political revolution, and death. In the last section, Smoke and Ash, Trirodov leaves Russia to take over the vacant throne of the burned-out Mediterranean kingdom. Thus, the poet-magician reaches a kind of Nirvana by fleeing the real world of the Peredonovs and petty demons to the non-being of an imaginary kingdom- beyond good and evil, beyond male and female (as his name 'three genders' suggests), beyond the
1. i^rescenau
different reincarnations of his personality (also suggested by the variant reading of his name as 'three types'), perhaps beyond life itself.
In one of his late stories, 'The Future,' Sologub speaks of 'a place where the future gleams through an azure veil of desire . . . where those as yet unborn rest in peace.'74 Four souls in this happy place suddenly conceive the desire to be born into the world, each expressing a special fondness for one of the primal elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Sologub goes on to tell how the first became a miner and was buried alive, the second was drowned, the third burned alive, and the fourth hanged. He concludes by asking:
Oh, why did Will lead them forth from the happy place of non-existence!76
In one of his late short stories, 'The Kiss of the Unborn,' he lends a certain lyric beauty to this gloomy view of the world. The story begins with the suicide of a fifteen-year-old boy, who had become discouraged by reading in the works of Tolstoy and other Russian intellectuals that truth could not be found in life. The boy's unmarried aunt sets off to console her sister, the boy's mother, but soon turns to thinking about her own unborn son: the purely imaginary fruit of an unrequited early love. Suddenly, in the midst of her lonely weeping before the door of her
