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.
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