This study explores a recurring pattern in Russian decadent narrative that I call the “merged polarity.” Each of these texts generates a sharp binary between two elements that are clearly marked as negative and positive. However, the binary driving the story is simultaneously undermined by a network of parallels suggesting that the positive element is a latent repetition of its negative counterpart. This intertwining of opposites encourages a relentless questioning of binaries on the part of the reader and thus constitutes a special ethic on its own terms. Its message is one of caution—namely, that constant vigilance be invested in one's scrutiny of the seemingly most straightforward oppositions that organize the world. This study devotes four chapters to the examination of this narrative pattern. Chapter One describes how Sologub's first novel, Bad Dreams (1895), offers us the Sologubian merged polarity in its embryonic form. Chapter Two demonstrates how Petty Demon (1907) builds upon the aesthetic developed by Bad Dreams and expands the merged polarity, allowing this pattern to penetrate multiple layers of the text's artistic code. Chapter Three focuses on Mikhail Artsybashev's At the Brink (1911–12), a novel that generates a strikingly similar proliferation of merged polarities. Chapter Four discusses another contemporary of Sologub's, Leonid Andreev, whose short stories testify to his enduring obsession with a structural paradigm that closely resembles the merged polarities in Sologub's and Artsybashev's novels. This study concludes by pointing out how this recurring pattern in decadent prose embodies a form of skepticism that testifies to deeply moral concerns—even though decadent literature is typically associated with an amoral outlook. In connection with this idea, I suggest some reasons for comparing the works of Sologub and Zamyatin, whose dystopian novel We (1921) reactivates this structural paradigm.