God bless writers. How can I not admire a bunch of brave, drunk sociopaths who keep doing the same thing that I love to do? Lermontov showed us the path. All we have to do is keep getting back up on the horse. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Of course, I was still flunking a math class at the age of twenty-six, so beware.
NEIL LABUTE
Introduction
Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin is a hero without a cause—to pervert a latter-day aphorism. He is a cynical young man who fights duels, seduces maidens, hunts wild boar, and stirs up trouble. He will tell you this himself: “I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? . . . There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul . . . But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the bait of passions, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life . . .”
His questions are as relevant today as ever, but Pechorin’s story takes place in the 1830s. Nicholas the First was on the throne, despised by the Russian intelligentsia for his repression of discourse. He had crushed the Decembrist revolt, which had attempted to prevent his ascendancy to the throne. In his book on Russian literature, Maurice Baring describes Nicholas the First’s rule as “a regime of patriarchal supervision, government interference, rigorous censorship, and iron discipline.” The decade was a time of constraints, when young men like Pechorin felt stifled and ineffectual.
Lermontov’s hero is serving in the army, based in the Caucasus, where Russian forces are attempting to subdue its mountain tribes. This mountainous region to the south of Russia today encompasses lands such as Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, and Dagestan. National boundaries have changed over time, but one cannot underestimate the metaphysical place that the Caucasian landscape fills in the Russian consciousness: it is the landscape “where in the mountains martial robbery occurs and the savage genius of inspiration is hiding in the mute silence” (Pushkin,
The Prisoner of the Caucasus
). Lermontov is often called the “poet of the Caucasus” and it is no surprise, given his descriptions of the terrain: “What a glorious place . . . ! On every side there are unassailable mountains, and reddish promontories, hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of plane trees; there are yellow precipices, covered with the lines of gullies; and right up high: a gold fringe of snow.”
Picture these mountains where
dzhigits,
skilled horsemen, twirl their steeds on jagged promontories; where
abreks,
Caucasian freedom fighters, roam the hills in hordes, adhering to nothing but their own moral code; where the chimneys of
saklyas,
mountain huts, send up smoke, visible to travelers from across vast valleys. The Caucasus was home to some of the fiercest Cossacks, who fought with the Russians in their efforts to conquer the mountain regions. They were also assisted by so-called peaceable princes (tribal leaders who cooperated with Russian forces). If a soldier was fortunate, he might become a
kunak
of such a peaceable prince—a sworn friend, an adopted brother, on whom great generosity was bestowed. Both the ethnic groups and the languages of the Caucasus are many and varied. These mountains are home to Georgians, Lezghians, Ossetians, Circassians, and Chechens, among others. According to an anecdote told by Edmund Spencer in his
Travels in Circassia, Krim Tartary, Etcetera
of 1837, when a Turkish sultan sent a learned man to discover the languages of the Caucasus, he returned with just a bag of pebbles. When the sultan asked the man to present his findings, the man shook the bag of pebbles—it was the best imitation he could conjure, having failed in the hopeless task of learning anything of them. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky remarked in 1841: “It is a strange business! It is as if the Caucasus is destined to be the cradle of our poetic talents, to be the inspirer and bear-cub of their muse, the poetic motherland!”
1
While its setting may be very exotic and remote, the historical position of
A Hero of Our Time
places it right in the thick of things literary. It is a pivotal book that sits on the cusp between Romanticism and Realism, at a moment when Russian literature was forging its path from poetry to the novel. Until 1840, Russian writers had merely flirted with the novel. As the Russian literary critic Boris Eikhenbaum wrote, “Lermontov died early, but this fact bears no relation to the historical work which he accomplished, and changes nothing in the resolution of the literary-historical problem which interests us. It was necessary to sum up the classical period of Russian poetry and to prepare the transition to the creation of a new prose. History demanded it—and it was accomplished by Lermontov.”
2
Pushkin had just died after producing short stories and his famous novel-in-verse,
Eugene Onegin,
and Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy had yet to emerge. Gogol was writing prose but had produced only short stories until this point. With his book, the young Lermontov, only twenty-six when he wrote
A Hero of Our Time,
called the Russian novel into being.
As a writer, Lermontov is said to have been influenced by the works of Byron, Chateaubriand, Constant, and, of course, Pushkin. The novel with which
A Hero of Our Time
is often compared is Alfred de Musset’s
La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle
for their similar titles and descriptions of moral malaise. In turn, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy were each influenced by Lermontov—his metaphysics, his ironic stances, and his descriptions of the Caucasus. But, as scholar John Garrard explains in his essay “Old Wine in New Bottles: The Legacy of Lermontov,”
A Hero of Our Time
occupies a special place in the development of Russian literature:
[F]ar too much time is spent tracking down possible domestic and foreign sources for his works and far too little time is given over to an exploration of what Eikhenbaum called many years ago Lermontov’s “art of fusion” (
iskusstvo splava
), his ability to combine a variety of available elements into a new and original form. . . . It is arguably true that Lermontov had a more lasting impact on the shape and contours of the Russian novel than either Pushkin or Gogol.
A Hero of Our Time
possesses three of the most central characteristics of the Russian novel: 1) psychological analysis; 2) concern with ideas; 3) sociopolitical and ethical awareness. None of these features is the exclusive property of the novel in Russia, but the intensity with which they are engaged does help define the Russian novel and differentiate it from the novel elsewhere.
3
As a piece of social commentary,
A Hero of Our Time
created quite a stir when it emerged, immediately garnering both praise and criticism. It came out at a time when the debate between Slavophiles and Westerners about Russian cultural identity was coming to a crescendo. Slavophile critics such as S. P. Shevyrev and Apollon Grigoriev complained that Pechorin represented the vices of the West, not of Russia. Belinsky, on the other hand, defended the work’s validity as a portrait of a Russian type by placing it as descendant from Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin.
Indeed, as Vladimir Nabokov describes in a piece called “The Lermontov Mirage” (
The Russian Review,
November 1941), Pechorin and Onegin may be cut from the same cloth—but fashions have changed in Lermontov’s hands:
In Russian schools, at least in my day, a favorite theme for compositions was “Onegin and Pechorin.” The parallel is obvious, but quite superficial. Pushkin’s Onegin stretches himself throughout the book and yawns. Lermontov’s Pechorin does nothing of the sort—he laughs and bites. With his immense store of tenderness, kindness, and heroism behind his cynical and arrogant appearance, he is a deeper personality than the cold lean fop so delightfully depicted by Pushkin.
Indeed,
A Hero of Our Time
is a much greater step toward the Russian novel as we know it largely because it is an effort in prose, which adjusts narrative perspectives from poetical practices. In broad terms, traditional prose lends more dimension to a character than traditional poetry. John Stuart Mill wrote that “all poetry is of the nature of soliloquy,” that when we read poetry we are somehow overhearing the poet, who is addressing himself. Epic poems and novels in verse belong more to the category of sung stories, where the narration is delivered from the poet or bard to his audience. Novels, on the other hand, expand the notions of narration by exploring perspectives. The poem requires you to suspend disbelief—you must agree to its terms. A novel is an act of persuasion of the reader—it seduces a reader into believing it. As the Russian literary canon goes, you could say Onegin is the ready, Pechorin is the aim, and the rest are the fire.
Much has been made of the narrative structure of this novel—which has three narrators in total. The story emerges over the course of various episodes that aren’t chronologically ordered. In fact, originally the novel wasn’t written as one singular work. Lermontov published most of these various episodes separately in journals such as “Notes of the Fatherland” in 1839 and early 1840. He put it all together for publication in 1841. As he did so, one can only assume that he had the liberty to rearrange the text as he saw fit, to sew it into a chronological narrative. But Lermontov chose to leave it in its prismatic, nonlinear, patchwork form. It is a portrait of a man, not a simple tale per se. Most nineteenth-century novelists in the European and later the Russian tradition gave us their characters chronologically intact, showing us their development over the course of time. This is not the case in
A Hero of Our Time.
If they were delivered in sequential order, the stories would read, “Taman,” “Princess Mary,” “Bela,” “The Fatalist,” “Maxim Maximych,” and, finally, the Foreword to Pechorin’s diary. In fact, if you’re looking for the ending, it appears as a mere comment on page 55, at the beginning of the Foreword to Pechorin’s Journal. But that’s irrelevant—you can’t ruin the ending of this book. The book is a portrait, told as a page-turning adventure story, a psychological look at a young man who exemplified the frustrating quandary of his type. Pechorin is a literary prototype of the “superfluous man” of Russian literature; he is another version of the Byronic antihero; and he is an early model of what would later become a nihilist.
A Hero of Our Time
gives us Pechorin delivered from a few different angles, but there is nothing static about this depiction. The hero himself doesn’t evolve exactly, but during the progress of the novel Lermontov brings the reader ever closer to its hero. The first narrator listens to Maxim Maximych, a staff captain posted alongside Pechorin, who describes at length his experiences with our hero. Then this narrator, together with Maxim Maximych, encounters Pechorin himself. And finally, we are given Pechorin’s journal—an episode in a dark corner of Russia near the Sea of Azov and an episode that occurs in a pocket of high society in the Russian spa town of Pyatigorsk—all from the horse’s mouth. Lermontov doesn’t sacrifice any suspense with this structure but rather gives us his hero in ever-closer increments and builds delightful anticipation in so doing.
As C. J. G. Turner writes, “The absence of the author, in the sense of a guiding point of view, is a fundamental—and distinctly modern—feature of
A Hero of Our Time.
Instead, the values of the text are nicely balanced, leaving the reader free to be primarily repelled by the immorality of Pechorin, or fascinated by his personality . . .” There are two inroads for the reader into Pechorin’s character—the first is this narrative movement, which becomes increasingly intimate, culminating in Pechorin’s diary. The second is through the perceptions of the characters surrounding Pechorin. Each begins with admiration for him and eventually feels betrayed. Maxim Maximych describes him as “a wonderful fellow, I dare say,” only to feel snubbed by him afterward. Grushnitsky is his friend, and later his adversary. Princess Mary falls in love with him, and sheds many tears as time goes on. Meanwhile, his journals show a sense of poetry, evidence of higher education, and a love of nature. He is self-reflective and sometimes contrite. In a review in 1840, Belinsky wrote that, “In his very vices, a certain greatness shines through, like lightning through black storm-clouds, and he is beautiful and full of poetry, even at those moments when our human feeling is roused against him . . .”
4
A simple reading has the reader looking for redemption in Pechorin but experiencing a cycle of hopes and disappointments along the way. Some adore his roguishness and derring-do. Others find him repellent and exhausting.
In the preface to Pechorin’s diaries, which is written by the book’s first narrator, a nameless travel writer, we are given the contradiction of the work: “Perhaps several readers will want to know my opinion of Pechorin’s character? My reply is the title of this book. ‘What vicious irony!’ they will say. I don’t know.” A lot has been written about the ironic content of
A Hero of Our Time.
Pechorin’s remarks are often ironic and indeed sarcastic. The title might be both of these. The reader is constantly invited to reject a literal interpretation of the text. But the beauty of this fiction, and all fiction, is that literal and ironic readings can coexist. Things seem to be one thing and turn out to be another—a novel is a long and nuanced answer to a question. As Roland Barthes wrote, “the essence of writing is to prevent any reply to the question—who is speaking?”
5
And in the author’s preface, which was added to the second edition of the book, Lermontov does warn against simplemindedness when considering his book with a swipe at Russian readers: “Our audience is still so young and simple-hearted, it wouldn’t recognize a fable if there weren’t a moral at the end of the story. It doesn’t anticipate jokes, it doesn’t have a feel for irony; it is simply badly educated. It doesn’t yet know that overt abuse has neither a place in proper society, nor in a proper book; that the contemporary intellect has devised sharper weapons, almost invisible, but nonetheless deathly, which, under the clothing of flattery, deliver an irresistible and decisive blow.”