The Little Demon (Penguin Classics)

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.