by Fyodor Sologub, Ronald Wilks (Translator), Pamela Davidson (Introduction)
FYODOR SOLOGUB was born in St Petersburg in 1863. He wrote several novels, including Bad Dreams (1896) and The Little Demon (1907), which brought him immediate fame. He also published many books of poems and short stories, and two plays.
RONALD WILKS (translator) has translated many works from Russian for Penguin Classics, including books by Gorky, Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov.
PAMELA DAVIDSON (introducer) is a professor of Russian Literature at the University College of London.
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A blackly comic Russian classic about 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. This grotesque mirror of a spiritually bankrupt society is arguably the finest Russian novel to have come out of the Symbolist movement.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
