Unselfish Laughter And Queerness In Sologub's The Petty Demon

Will Hamilton

Professor McFadden

WLIT118: Queering the Russian Novel

May 10th, 2023

Unselfish Laughter: Demonic Laughter and Queerness in Fyodor Sologub's The Petty Demon.

In an 1855 essay titled De l'essence du rire, French philosopher Charles Baudelaire posits his theory concerning the root of human laughter: "If you are prepared, then, to take the point of view of the orthodox mind, it is certain that human laughter is intimately linked with the accident of an ancient Fall, of a debasement both physical and moral" (Jacob and Baudelaire 13). Baudelaire theorizes that the comic is an expression of human pride, writing that "Laughter comes from the idea of one's superiority" (Jacob and Baudelaire 17). He concludes that laughter is an explicit

He had no thoughts. Finally, the people gathered their courage and entered. Peredonov was sitting downcast and mumbling something incoherent and senseless" (Sologub 260). By the end of the story, Peredonov is entirely dejected, overrun by the anxiety and stress that haunted him throughout the text. Heteronormativity, epitomized by demonic laughter, is shown to be profoundly unconstructive and provides no path to potential but rather only one to misery and disaster. Revisiting back to Bahktin's notion of polyphony, the narrator's role as a mediator in the story allows them to have a dialogue with the reader without carrying notable bias. Professor Greene writes, "An attentive reading shows that Peredonov's world is itself a symbol of the unutterable pettiness of our own world and that the narrator considers the reader no different from Peredonov and his friends'' (Greene 33). Above all else, The Petty Demon is a warning to its readership concerning the failures of Russian society. Fyodor Sologub, responding to assertions that he wrote the Petty Demon about himself, famously said, "No, my dear contemporaries, it is about you that I have written my novel" (Sologub 30). As shown in the text through Baudelaires' theory of demonic laughter, modernizing Russia was a society plagued with a profoundly flawed construction of heteronormativity. Only through their relationship and queer construction of laughter are Sasha and Lyudmilla able to overcome the miserable fates of Varvara and Peredononv and harness their potentiality. In doing so, they provide a template for Russian society to break free of its destructive