Misanthropy and Sadism in Lermontov’s Plays1

ikhail Lermontov’s literary output can be broken down into M three periods: the immature, prior to 1834; the transitional, 1834–36; and the period of artistic maturity after 1837. He began writing at the age of fourteen. For the next six years he wrote numerous lyrics, several narrative poems, and three plays. No one would have ever heard of any of these writings were they not by the young Lermontov. They are the work of a juvenile graphomaniac who does not know where imita- tion stops and plagiarism begins, and who interlards his writings with unaltered or slightly altered passages, mostly from Pushkin, but also from Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Byron and other poets of the Romantic period. Where the young Pushkin could absorb any number of eigh- teenth- or nineteenth-century literary influences and then incorporate them into works that were unmistakably his own, the young Lermontov kept producing inferior versions of what Pushkin or Byron or Bestuzhev- Marlinsky had already written and written better. This derivative method can be illustrated by the first of his melodra- mas, Ispantsy (The Spaniards), written when he was sixteen. It combines elements from Schiller’s Don Carlos, from Kotzebue and Victor Hugo. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the most obvious French melodrama of hor- ror, descended from Guilbert de Pixérécourt (whose plays had been pop- ular in Russia since the early nineteenth century). The Spaniards features a diabolical Jesuit villain, who tortures the naive heroine, and a ranting hero, who stabs the woman he loves rather than let another man possess her. Sponge-like, the play soaks up ingredients from an incongruous array of other literary works. The persecuted old Jew and his beautiful daughter Noemi are Isaac and Rebecca from Scott’s Ivanhoe; Noemi’s bedtime col- loquy with her old nurse is simply lifted from Tatyana’s conversation with

1 Originally published in Studies in Russian Literature in Honor of Vsevolod Setchkarev, ed. Julian W. Connolly and Sonia I. Ketchian (Columbus, IN: Slavica, 1986), 166–74.

77 I. Pushkin and Romanticism her nurse in Evgeny Onegin; and the gravediggers are transferred bodily from Hamlet. Apart from sympathy for the persecuted Jewish characters, something that was extremely rare in Russian nineteenth-century litera- ture (Lermontov must have taken this attitude from Scott), there is noth- ing to recommend The Spaniards on any literary or dramatic level. Equally obvious and melodramatic but far more personal are Ler- montov’s next two plays. The first, written in 1830, bears a German title, Menschen und Leidenschaften: Ein Trauerspiel (People and passion: A tragedy) in homage to Menschenhass und Reue (Misanthropy and repen- tance) by Kotzebue and possibly also to Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and love) by Schiller. The play is sixteen-year-old Lermontov’s exorcism of the domestic situation which scarred him emotionally throughout his child- hood and adolescence: the ugly fight for his custody between his father and his wealthy maternal grandmother. Menschen und Leidenschaften is obviously autobiographical, portraying the poet’s grandmother, peasant nurse, father, and paternal uncle (of all of whom he was ostensibly fond) as a nest of hypocritical vipers who torment the idealistic young hero— Lermontov’s self-portrait—and drive him to suicide. “I am surrounded by such base creatures and everything is done to spite me,” the protagonist confides to his best friend, pretty much summing up Lermontov’s attitude to his family and to humanity in general. In the 1831 Strannyi chelovek (An odd man), a similar plot about a young idealist driven to suicide is replayed. But this time Lermontov’s relatives do not appear; the hero is persecuted by the high society in which he moves, and there is a sub- plot taken from Kotzebue’s Misanthropy and Repentance about the once faithless, now repentant wife and mother. The suicide of the young male protagonist who is starved for affection and understanding, with which both Menschen und Leidenschaften and An Odd Man end, must have been the young Lermontov’s way of signaling his misery and resentment to the unresponsive world. It is a somewhat different Lermontov that we meet in the transitional period of 1834–36. His attitudes and ideas did not change during those years (they never did), but he acquired the verbal facility and melodi- ous expressivity which were to give him his high position in the Russian literary pantheon. Important for this evolution were the erotic or porno- graphic (depending on the commentator’s viewpoint) poems he wrote at the age of twenty. Unlike his juvenilia, these stylistically more mature pro-

78 Misanthropy and Sadism in Lermontov’s Plays ductions do not appear in the academic editions of his writings because of their explicit eroticism. Five of them were, however, published in the West.2 Far from being mere literary curiosities, they are an important key to Lermontov’s outlook and poetics. Written while the poet was a cadet at a military academy, these po- ems are usually called his “Cadet Poems.” Russian commentators who do mention them are wont to bracket them together with Pushkin’s erotica, both sets of poems supposedly representing the two poets’ youthful high- spirited pranks. Actually, their respective notions of what constitutes the erotic could not be more different. Pushkin’s erotica are humorous, joy- ous, and life-affirming.3 Lermontov’s are grim, sadistic and censorious. Three of the five “Cadet Poems” deal with rape (gang rape of a peasant girl by a group of cadets, rape of a blind old woman by a drunken young lout, and the rape and beating of a prostitute by a customer who refuses to pay her), narrated with approval for the rapists and contempt for their victims. Two other “Cadet Poems” are about homosexual encounters at the mili- tary academy, described in a manner that combines prurience, moralizing censure, and, again, contempt for the participants. These poems exemplify the growth of Lermontov’s verbal elegance and lyrical power, qualities that will again and again cause his readers to overlook or accept ideas and subjects that might otherwise have repelled them.4 Lermontov’s two remaining plays date from the same transitional pe- riod as the “Cadet Poems.” Maskarad (Masquerade), published in 1835, is his best-known play and the only one occasionally performed on the stage. Dva brata (The two brothers), which he wrote one year later, is known only to Lermontov scholars. Both are lurid melodramas with strong sadistic overtones. The reason for the popularity of Masquerade and the obscurity of The Two Brothers is that the former is in verse—Lermontov’s verse— and the latter is in prose. Lermontov did not yet know how to write good

2 M. Yu. Lermontov, “Piat’ eroticheskikh stikhotvorenii,” Russian Literature TriQuar- terly, no. 14 (Winter 1976): 416–29. 3 See Anthony Cross, “Pushkin’s Bawdy; or, Notes from the Literary Underground,” Russian Literature TriQuarterly, no. 10 (Fall 1974): 203–36. 4 William H. Hopkins, “Lermontov’s Hussar Poems,” Russian Literature TriQuarterly, no. 14 (Winter 1976): 36–47, is a good scholarly examination of Lermontov’s “Cadet Poems,” containing a valuable tabulation of the references to them in Russian criti- cism. But the author fails to notice the sadistic tone of these poems and the glorifica- tion of violence and rape that is central to three of them.

79 I. Pushkin and Romanticism verse at the time of The Spaniards (Menschen und Leidenschaften and An Odd Man were in prose). The emergence of his own poetic voice is evident in a few of his earlier lyrics, such as “The Angel” (1831) and “The Sail” (1832), the famous first line of the latter being actually a quotation from Bestuzhev-Marlinsky. Lermontov’s literary craft was further perfected in the “Cadet Poems.” Yet when he came to write Masquerade he was still insecure enough to borrow the voices of two other poet-playwrights. More seductively melodious than any other work for the stage by Lermontov, Masquerade is even more derivative than his juvenile melo- dramas. The plot is a Romantic variation on Shakespeare’s Othello. The protagonist is a demonic ex-gambler named Arbenin, patterned in part on the semicriminal gambler-hero of Trente ans; ou, La vie d’un joueur by Victor Ducange, which was premiered in Russia in 1828. It kept playing in the capitals for the next two decades in two competing translations, one by Fyo­dor Kokoshkin and the other by Rafail Zotov. Part melodramatic gambler and part disillusioned Byronic hero, Arbenin has found peace and fulfillment in his marriage to Nina, an aristocratic young woman much younger than himself. Their happiness is wrecked by two unrelated plot stratagems. One is the clandestine affair between Nina’s friend Baroness Shtral and a young nobleman, which take place at a public masquerade and which Arbenin mistakenly assumes to have involved Nina rather than the baroness. The other concerns a mysterious avenger, who corresponds to Shakespeare’s Iago and is determined to bring about Arbenin’s downfall. These two plot lines are poorly meshed together. The imbroglio between the baroness, her lover, and Nina is shown as a random chain of accidental circum- stances. For the avenger to have caused all these events, as is implied at the end of the play, he would have needed to read the thoughts and predict the actions of Arbenin and of the three other principal characters. Yet he is not depicted as a supernatural being but as an ordinary victim of Arbe- nin’s earlier gambling operations. Like his prototype in Othello, Arbenin is manipulated into believing that his wife was unfaithful, murders her (by serving her poisoned ice cream), watches her die in horrible torment, and is then informed that she was innocent. The language of Masquerade was modeled by Lermontov on two works of Russian dramatic literature that appeared in print in the five-year period that preceded the writing of this play. They are the two first parts of

80 Misanthropy and Sadism in Lermontov’s Plays

Küchelbecker’s Izhorsky trilogy, which Lermontov had studied with great attention when they were published in 1830;5 and Griboedov’s Gore ot uma (Woe from wit), a censored version of which came out for the first time in 1833. No textual study of the dependence of Masquerade on these two works has yet been done, but even a cursory reading reveals constant phraseological borrowings, which Lermontov utilized with a great deal of ingenuity for his own melodramatic purposes. Lermontov considered Masquerade his best play and made deter- mined efforts to secure its production on the stage. But the objections of the censors proved insurmountable. As the history of censorship in Russia and elsewhere has shown again and again, repressive political con- trol invariably brings about the control of the moral content of literary works. The censors of Nicholas I were shocked by the sexual fling of the baroness at a public masquerade, by the cruelty of Arbenin’s taunting of his wife as she slowly dies of poison, and by the general idea of a husband murdering his wife out of jealousy. They required that Lermontov provide his play with a happy ending in which the spouses are reconciled, a rec- ommendation almost as asinine as the advice of Nicholas I that Pushkin convert his Boris Godunov into a novel in the manner of Sir Walter Scott. In his anxiety to get the play staged, Lermontov prepared two alternate versions, but the censors remained adamant. Masquerade was eventually freed from censorship restrictions after the reforms of the 1860s and had a few stage productions in prerevolutionary times. The single most famous staging of Masquerade was the one Vsevolod Meyerhold began preparing in 1911 at the Empress Alexandra Theater in St. Petersburg. Scheduled to open in 1914 so as to commemorate the cen- tenary of Lermontov’s birth, the production actually required almost six years of rehearsals and planning. With lavish, elaborate sets and costumes designed by Aleksandr Golovin (known in the West for his contributions to Diaghilev’s ballet productions) and music especially composed by Aleksandr Glazunov, this was Meyerhold’s most ambitious project prior to his ultra-Modernist postrevolutionary phase. It finally opened on the

5 For some of Lermontov’s borrowings from Küchelbecker, see my essay [included in the present collection] “Trilogiia Kiukhel’bekera Izhorskii kak primer romantichesk- ogo vozrozhdeniia srednevekovoi misterii,” in American Contributions to the Seventh International Congress of Slavists, Warsaw, August 21–27, 1973, vol. 2, ed. Victor Ter- ras (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 307–20.

81 I. Pushkin and Romanticism eve of the liberal-democratic Revolution of February 1917, and it played for many years after the October Revolution, when it came to be inter- preted as an opulent relic of the decay and corruption of prerevolutionary Russia. As was often the case with Meyerhold, his conception of the play departed radically from Lermontov’s text, with Arbenin represented as a poet victimized by an uncomprehending society and the anonymous avenger seen as a hired assassin,6 none of which is even hinted at in the original play. Masquerade is not the greatest Russian Romantic drama, as Russian commentators sometimes claim it to be, but it may well be one of the better Russian Romantic melodramas, superior to the specimens of that genre that were offered at the time by the temporarily successful Nestor Kukolnik. The suspense and the contrived coups de théâtre testify to a certain flair. Above all, the verse texture has the benefit of stylistic bor- rowings from Griboedov and Küchelbecker, which are combined with the contributions of Lermontov, the Lermontov who was on the verge of be- coming a genuinely major poet. He had not quite made that breakthrough when he was writing Masquerade, but he was close. A good insight into the importance of this play’s verse texture for its enduring high reputation can be gained from juxtaposing it with its companion in prose written one year later, Lermontov’s last work in dramatic form, The Two Brothers. A melodrama like everything Lermontov wrote for the stage, The Two Brothers tells of the victimization of a woman by the three men in her life. They are the idealistic Yury, whom she once loved, Yury’s cynical and sa- distic brother Aleksandr, who debauched her, and the dim-witted prince whom Aleksandr had forced her to marry. The heroine is Vera Li­gov­skaya, who was later to appear in somewhat altered form in Lermontov’s unfin- ished novel Princess Ligov­ skaya­ . She also appears as Vera in Hero of Our Time. Her fate in The Two Brothers is a prerequisite for understanding her character in those two later works of prose fiction. The evil Aleksandr and the sensitive Yury may well be derived from the similarly contrasted pair of brothers in Schiller’s The Robbers. But Aleksandr’s ruthless manipu- lation of Vera’s life and person is Lermontov’s own idea. Her prolonged torture is a form of spiritual rape, as are the tormenting of Emiliya by the

6 See V. E. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i pis’ma, rechi, besedy (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968), 1:296– 300 and 303–4.

82 Misanthropy and Sadism in Lermontov’s Plays

Jesuit villain in The Spaniards and the slow, cruel poisoning of Nina in Masquerade. Echoing the violent physical rapes described with so much relish in the “Cadet Poems,” these scenes add up to a demonstration of Lermontov’s strongly sadistic attitude toward women. The obsessive sadism in Lermontov’s plays and erotic poems of 1834–36, traceable biographically to various real and imagined rejections he suffered during that time, is also evident in his verse tales that date from the same period. In these tales—The Mountain Village of Bastundzhi, Hajji Abrek, and The Boyar Orsha—Lermontov first found the melodious fluency that characterizes his later verse narratives, such as Mtsyri and The Demon. All three describe the terrorizing, murdering, or incarcera- tion of helpless women by cruel males who seek to punish them for loving men of whom the male protagonists disapprove. Anton Che­khov showed a greater insight into this aspect of Lermontov than most Russian critics when he made the morbidly possessive, insecure, and murderous Cap- tain Solyony in Three Sisters pattern his personality and behavior after Lermontov. The literary quality of The Two Brothers is about equal to that of Mas- querade, but because this play lacks Masquerade’s seductive verse garb, its handicaps and deficiencies are all the more glaring. Meyerhold, whose love for Lermontov’s dramas was, if anything, uncritical, considered The Two Brothers Lermontov’s “most perfect play.” He insisted on staging it in 1915.7 The production lasted for three performances. It is the only known instance of the staging of a Lermontov play other than Masquerade. In his notes to the production, Meyerhold maintained that all Lermontov plays, beginning with Menschen und Leidenschaften, belong to his period of ma- turity. This opinion seems willfully perverse. The really mature period of Lermontov, the one in which his work is not preparation but achievement, begins only in 1837, after he wrote all the plays he was to write. It begins with his brilliant and hysterical invective against the society that allowed Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin, to die in a duel. This poem, for which Nicholas I banished Lermontov to the Caucasus, marks the point at which Lermontov became a brilliant poet and a heroic living legend. This was the Lermontov who wrote the fine novel Hero of Our Time, the moving narrative poem Mtsyri, and the lyrics of his last five years,

7 Ibid., 301ff., and K. Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol’d (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), 179.

83 I. Pushkin and Romanticism lyrics which Russian children still learn by heart as soon as they are taught to read. This consummate poet and novelist is every bit as misanthropic and bilious as the young graphomaniac who wrote Menschen und Leiden- schaften, but now he knows how to express his negativism in some of the most perfectly crafted and hauntingly melodious lines ever penned in Russian. People could not then and still cannot believe that something as beautiful and musical as those poems can really express such repugnance for the whole of humanity. The continuing national acclaim for Lermon- tov’s poetry proves Marina Tsve­taeva’s contention that in verse people will applaud ideas which they would have hated in prose.8 Charmed by Lermontov’s verbal magic, Vissarion Belinsky mistook his misanthropy for a form of social protest. This view was seized upon by the rest of the nineteenth century. It made the smoldering hatred of Ler- montov’s poems acceptable by providing it with a plausible raison d’être. In Soviet times, he has been adorned with the same revolutionary tinsel as all other important prerevolutionary writers. This can be done crudely, as in the academic editions of his writings,9 or, on occasion, with consider- able subtlety.10 Popular lore often brackets Lermontov with Pushkin, as if the two were a pair of matching giants, similar to Tolstoi and Dosto- evsky. Osip Mandelstam made a necessary correction when he wrote in The Noise of Time that even as a child he never thought of Lermontov as Pushkin’s brother or any sort of relative.11

8 Marina Tsve­taeva, Proza (New York: Che­khov Publishing House, 1953), 244. 9 Boris Eikhenbaum’s biographical essay, appended to vol. 4 of M. Lermontov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow and Leningrad: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1961–62), states that all factual evidence dating from Lermontov’s time is unreliable, except for the essays and letters of Belinsky and the statements on Lermontov by Aleksandr Gertsen (4:754). A great Tolstoi scholar who did not live to see the publica- tion of his fine study of Anna Karenina, completed thirty years earlier, Eikhenbaum was forced in the last decades of his life to disregard his own research and insights and keep restating officially decreed ideological platitudes. 10 Emma Gershtein, Sud’ba Lermontova (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1964), amasses a great deal of fascinating biographical information, but arranges it to support the official image of a saintly and progressive Lermontov, hounded and killed by a reac- tionary society. The book studiously disregards all contemporary evidence that might show Lermontov’s character in any different light and fails to mention any of his ac- tions that do not fit the desired image. 11 Osip Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii (New York: Inter-Language Literary Associ- ates, 1966), 2:96.

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