A Hero of Our Time (with an Introduction by George Reavey)

A HERO OF OUR TIME

By MIKHAIL LERMONTOV

Translated by

J. H. WISDOM & MARR MURRAY

Introduction by GEORGE REAVEY

A Hero of Our Time

By Mikhail Lermontov

Translated by J. H. Wisdom and Marr Murray

Introduction by George Reavey

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5186-8

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5187-5

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Cover Image: A detail of Portrait of General Alexei Yermolov (1772-1861) (oil on canvas), Dawe, George (1781-1829) / Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FOREWORD

THE AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

BOOK I. BELA

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

BOOK II. MAKSIM MAKSIMYCH

FOREWORD TO BOOKS III, IV, AND V

BOOK III. THE FIRST EXTRACT FROM PECHORIN’S DIARY

BOOK IV. THE SECOND EXTRACT FROM PECHORIN’S DIARY

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

BOOK V. THE THIRD EXTRACT FROM PECHORIN’S DIARY

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

Introduction

MIHAIL LERMONTOV AND THE MODERN MAN

Mihail Lermontov (1814-41) was a remarkable poet. He was also an incisive prose writer and a provocatively fascinating man. His meteoric life, his creative intensity, and his tragic destiny, would all seem to combine to make the ideal subject for biography. His life and work have deeply affected the national imagination of Russia. In 1840 Bielinsky, the famous Russian critic, had called Lermontov a profound and a mighty spirit. This assessment was based on a knowledge of the man as well as of his work.

Mihail Lermontov, the successor to Alexander Pushkin, was himself killed in a duel at the age of twenty-seven. But, like Keats and Shelley, he left a considerable body of memorable lyrical and narrative poems, some of which he had begun to write at the age of thirteen. Even his juvenilia bears the stamp of youthful genius. Many of his lyrics have become part of the national poetic tradition. His long poem, The Demon (1829-39), abounds, for all its romantic faults, in images of grandeur and a sense of almost supernatural beauty. Lermontov also discovered the wonders of the Caucasus. And he was the first to write a serious prose novel in the Russian language. This was A Hero of Our Time (1840), a landmark in Russian prose. Pushkin’s earlier attempt at a contemporary novel—his Eugene Onegin (1825-32)—had been written, like Byron’s Don Juan, in narrative verse. Thus Lermontov may be said to have begun the age of the Russian prose novel. Gogol was of course completing the first part of his Dead Souls (1842), but this proved a novel of a very different genre in its ornamental rhythm, fantasy, and strangely surrealist imagery. Lermontov’s prose, by comparison with Gogol’s, was terse, sparing, and lean.

Mihail Lermontov was, on his father’s side, descended from a 17th-century Scottish ancestor (the family name had been Learmont); on his mother’s side, from the Russian gentry. He was educated as a cavalry man at a military academy and was then commissioned in a Hussar Guards regiment. But he soon found himself in disgrace, and was sent to the active army in the Caucasus, where a campaign of pacification was being conducted among the once independent tribes in Georgia and elsewhere. His first Caucasian exile in 1837 was the result of his bold, but poetically necessary gesture of writing and circulating a poem of sorrow and anger on the occasion of Pushkin’s death in a duel with the Baron D’Anthés, a favorite in court circles. In his poem, The Death of a Poet, Lermontov blamed the higher circles of the land for being implicated in the murder of his great predecessor. (You, a greedy crowd standing near the throne/Are the executioners of Freedom, Genius, and Fame.) This poem at once made him famous; it also involved him in persecution. The Emperor himself intervened to have him removed from St. Petersburg to the active army. From then on he was a marked man. In 1840, another duel in St. Petersburg led to his arrest and second exile to the Caucasus. Within a year, he was killed in circumstances somewhat similar to those previously described in his novel (the duel between Pechorin and Grushnitzky).

Thus Lermontov, as a nascent novelist, had just had time, in the year before his death, to affirm his gifts as a prose writer of insight, daring and great future potentiality.

A Hero of Our Time, in its atmosphere, characterization, and brief but sharp comment, revealed not only Lermontov’s psychological penetration and acute critical perception, but also his ability to create and manipulate character (Pechorin, Maxim Maximovich, Grushnitzky, Princess Mary, Doctor Werner). The 1840s were, of course, the early days of the Russian novel, and Lermontov’s youthful contribution was soon to be surpassed by works of deeper and weightier import—those of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy.

A Hero of Our Time, in the hundred and twenty years of its literary existence, has survived as much more than an early contribution to the development of the Russian novel. It is a work of art with a very distinct and strange atmosphere of its own, for it has unforgettable characters who raise the problem of egotism that is so inescapable for us today. The novel owes its vitality to Lermontov’s own spirit and character, which were both energetic and desperate (not despairing!), as well as to the contrast, both subtle and striking, introduced between various conflicting elements. These elements may be summed up in the exotic background of the Caucasus with its wild and warlike natives, a background suggesting the romance of the Northwest Frontier; in the civilized society of the mountain watering places—a life of petty intrigue, gossip, and amorous adventure; in the scenes of Russian army life (which Tolstoy was to treat more realistically in The Cossacks and Hadji Murat; and, finally, in the ironically detached attitude and behavior of Pechorin, the hero of the novel. It is Pechorin’s attitude that critically underlines his difference from the other characters. Pechorin is, of course, the hero of our time. And it might be interesting, for example, to compare and contrast this hero of 1840 with a hero of the 1940s—say Croft, in The Naked and the Dead.

What sort of a hero is Pechorin? In a sense, Pechorin is one of that school of heroes at odds with their environment, but about whose background we are given very little information. We are told nothing of his youth or previous career. He is the chance traveler whom one meets, an officer whose past is shrouded in mystery and whose present is curiously enigmatic. He is not talkative. He has no very close relations with anyone. He keeps turning up like a bad penny; and whenever he appears, trouble is always likely to follow; some incident like a duel erupts or a woman’s heart is broken. Our first brief encounter with him is through a second narrator, Maxim Maximovich, in the story Bela. Then we meet him face to face very briefly in a chance encounter in the story Maxim Maximovich. But, after his unexplained death, we meet him again, more intimately this time, through his own diary. But the glimpse we get of him from the Diary is confined to his attitudes and behavior when involved in only three episodes narrated in the stories, Taman, Princess Mary, and The Fatalist.

Lermontov, as we can see, abstains from telling us everything about his hero. We see Pechorin in action on several occasions; we watch him move among various strata of society; and we are afforded some insight into his point of view. In spite of this apparent paucity of information, we derive a strangely powerful impression of Pechorin’s character—that of an homme fatal; but, in the end, our curiosity is provoked rather than satisfied. Lermontov would appear to tease us deliberately with an enigma. And in his Introduction to Pechorin’s Journal, he most provocatively informs us that there still remains in my possession a fat notebook wherein he [Pechorin] narrates all his life. Someday it, too, will be presented to the judgment of the world, but for the present there are important reasons why I dare not assume such a responsibility. This statement may of course be a mere device on Lermontov’s part to pique the reader’s curiosity. On the other hand, it is possible that Lermontov may have intended, at a later stage and in another novel, to develop and illuminate more fully the character of his hero.

It is possible, too, that Lermontov, because of his ambiguous position vis-a-vis the authorities, might have judged it more prudent not to provoke the wrath of those circles by being too explicit. In the reign of Nicholas I, as in some other periods of Russian history, it was not wise to be too explicit, as the troubles of Pushkin’s life had already clearly demonstrated. In 1840, Russia had not yet become accustomed to the idea of a native literature, and especially a literature which could speak frankly on all subjects. It would be even truer to say that Russia has never become quite accustomed to the idea of such a literature.

It is in the pages of the Diary, in the episodes of Princess Mary and The Fatalist, that we penetrate most intimately into the inner world of Pechorin—that inner world which, for all the veil of reticence hanging over it, pushes the hero to fatal action. In a sense, Pechorin is like a dice player who will stake everything on a single throw. Pechorin cannot resist tempting fate, a trait that was also true of Lermontov himself. In another sense, Pechorin has a highly developed critical mind, a mind too critical to tolerate the everyday routine of aristocratic society. His is a mind with a bite to it, ironical and sarcastic, with an undertone of sardonic ruthlessness. It is the mind of a contemporary, who has detached himself critically from the established order of his day, but who is as yet incapable of a constructive effort such as Prince Andrey attempted later in War and Peace. Such a mind, however gifted, when it is charged with great energy, daring, and dynamic temperament, will more often than not turn to destruction as the only possible means of assertion. Critics have indeed called this type the superfluous man.

Lermontov was well aware of the implications of his hero. In The Author’s Foreword, he refers to a man as amoral as the Hero of Our Time. True, Lermontov argues that he is not painting the portrait of just one man, but rather a portrait built up of all our generation’s vices in full bloom. He had attempted, he tells us, to portray the modern man as he sees him and as he has found him to be. . . . He also claims to have diagnosed the disease. What is this disease? In a sense, it is the disease of any modern man. For to label oneself modern is to take a critical stand about the immediate present. Such an attitude naturally produces a dichotomy in the spirit—a dichotomy such as had also occurred at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation; it is certainly apparent in a number of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, for example. It is a dichotomy also clearly evident in The Brothers Karamazov.

Pechorin’s split, his estrangement from those around him, is very evident, but it is not as clearly defined as that, let us say, between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov. But Pechorin is already infected with the modern principle of egotism, which Gogol likewise analyzes in Dead Souls. Pechorin tells Werner, for example, that he is incapable of friendship, indifferent to everything except himself. In Pechorin’s world, communication has begun to break down—There is no exchange of emotions or ideas between us. Pechorin despises Grushnitzky for his false romanticism, but, instead of avoiding him, pushes him mockingly to his doom. Here there is waste and superfluity: Pechorin’s energy, courage, and suppressed passion, are in themselves admirable and, thus, worthy of a greater objective than revenge upon the clownish Grushnitzky.

But this portrait of Pechorin is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Pechorin has traits in common not only with the Byronic heroes but also those of Stendhal. Both Byron and Stendhal admired men of action, who no longer fitted ideally into the post-Napoleonic age of swordless middle-class pursuits. In Lermontov’s novel, we see an early conjunction of both the romantic and the realist strains. The realistic aspects of A Hero of Our Time were to be further developed by novelists like Leo Tolstoy. But it was a great moment in Russian literature when the young poet Lermontov first set himself in prose the task to portray the modern man.

GEORGE REAVEY

New York, October 1961.

Foreword

This novel, known as one of the masterpieces of Russian Literature, under the title A Hero of our Time, and already translated into at least nine European languages, is now for the first time placed before the general English Reader. The work is of exceptional interest to the student of English Literature, written as it was under the profound influence of Byron and being itself a study of the Byronic type of character. The Translators have taken especial care to preserve both the atmosphere of the story and the poetic beauty with which the Poet-novelist imbued his pages.

The Author’s Preface to the Second Edition

The preface to a book serves the double purpose of prologue and epilogue. It affords the author an opportunity of explaining the object of the work, or of vindicating himself and replying to his critics. As a rule, however, the reader is concerned neither with the moral purpose of the book nor with the attacks of the Reviewers, and so the preface remains unread. Nevertheless, this is a pity, especially with us Russians! The public of this country is so youthful, not to say simple-minded, that it cannot understand the meaning of a fable unless the moral is set forth at the end. Unable to see a joke, insensible to irony, it has, in a word, been badly brought up. It has not yet learned that in a decent book, as in decent society, open invective can have no place; that our present-day civilisation has invented a keener weapon, none the less deadly for being almost invisible, which, under the cloak of flattery, strikes with sure and irresistible effect. The Russian public is like a simple-minded person from the country who, chancing to overhear a conversation between two diplomatists belonging to hostile courts, comes away with the conviction that each of them has been deceiving his Government in the interest of a most affectionate private friendship.

The unfortunate effects of an over-literal acceptation of words by certain readers and even Reviewers have recently been manifested in regard to the present book. Many of its readers have been dreadfully, and in all seriousness, shocked to find such an immoral man as Pechorin set before them as an example. Others have observed, with much acumen, that the author has painted his own portrait and those of his acquaintances! . . . What a stale and wretched jest! But Russia, it appears, has been constituted in such a way that absurdities of this kind will never be eradicated. It is doubtful whether, in this country, the most ethereal of fairy-tales would escape the reproach of attempting offensive personalities.

Pechorin, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of one man only: he is a composite portrait, made up of all the vices which flourish, full-grown, amongst the present generation. You will tell me, as you have told me before, that no man can be so bad as this; and my reply will be: If you believe that such persons as the villains of tragedy and romance could exist in real life, why can you not believe in the reality of Pechorin? If you admire fictions much more terrible and monstrous, why is it that this character, even if regarded merely as a creature of the imagination, cannot obtain quarter at your hands? Is it not because there is more truth in it than may be altogether palatable to you?

You will say that the cause of morality gains nothing by this book. I beg your pardon. People have been surfeited with sweetmeats and their digestion has been ruined: bitter medicines, sharp truths, are therefore necessary. This must not, however, be taken to mean that the author has ever proudly dreamed of becoming a reformer of human vices. Heaven keep him from such impertinence! He has simply found it entertaining to depict a man, such as he considers to be typical of the present day and such as he has often met in real life—too often, indeed, unfortunately both for the author himself and for you. Suffice it that the disease has been pointed out: how it is to be cured—God alone knows!

Book I. Bela

THE HEART OF A RUSSIAN

Chapter I

I was travelling post from Tiflis. All the luggage I had in my cart consisted of one small portmanteau half filled with traveling notes on Georgia; of these the greater part has been lost, fortunately for you; but the portmanteau itself and the rest of its contents have remained intact, fortunately for me. As I entered the Koishaur Valley the sun was disappearing behind the snow-clad ridge of the mountains. In order to accomplish the ascent of Mount Koishaur by nightfall, my driver, an Ossete, urged on the horses indefatigably, singing zealously the while at the top of his voice. What a glorious place that valley is! On every hand are inaccessible mountains, steep, yellow slopes scored by water-channels, and reddish rocks draped with green ivy and crowned with clusters of plane-trees. Yonder, at an immense height, is the golden fringe of the snow. Down below rolls the River Aragva, which, after bursting noisily forth from the dark and misty depths of the gorge, with an unnamed stream clasped in its embrace, stretches out like a thread of silver, its waters glistening like a snake with flashing scales.

Arrived at the foot of Mount Koishaur, we stopped at a dukhan.{1} About a score of Georgians and mountaineers were gathered there in a noisy crowd, and, close by, a caravan of camels had halted for the night. I was obliged to hire oxen to drag my cart up that accursed mountain, as it was now autumn and the roads were slippery with ice. Besides, the mountain is about two versts{2} in length.

There was no help for it, so I hired six oxen and a few Ossetes. One of the latter shouldered my portmanteau, and the rest, shouting almost with one voice, proceeded to help the