ABSTRACT

Bulgakov’s story Diaboliad (D’yavoliada) was first published in 1924 in No 4 of the almanac Nedra.1 In his monograph on Bulgakov Colin Wright describes the contemporary reception of this early work by Bulgakov: its literary predecessors were immediately identified as Gogol’s The Overcoat and Dostoevsky’s The Double.2 In Diaboliad Bulgakov develops one of Russian literature’s classic themes: the theme of the “little person”. Korotkov, the employee of the Main Central Supply of Matchmaking Materials, is indeed a latter-day incarnation of Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, while the Dostoevskian motif of the double finds “inverted” comic reflection in the persons of the Kal’soner brothers.3