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 Perednov'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. The electritricity of the relationship between the androgynous, pubescent Sasha and the lovely Lyudmilla, with her exotic perfumes, caresses and lubricious fantasies, seldom fails to hold the reader's attention.