SOME ASPECTS of LERMONTOV's a HERO of OUR TIME Downloaded from by Guest on 28 September 2021

SOME ASPECTS OF LERMONTOV'S A HERO OF OUR TIME Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021

. . . und wozu Dichter in diirftiger Zeit ? ... in such spiritless times, why to be poet at all ? (Holderlin) " The poet and the dreamer are distinct, Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. The one pours balm upon the world. The other vexes it." (Keats)

A Hero of Our Time, first published in 1840, is a short work of prose fiction by one of Russia's greatest poets,1 bears a strong family resemblance to the confessional novel, is centripetal structurally and thematically, stylistically and ideologically, and has for its hero a man conceived as typical of his generation* and, at the same time, as the exception par excellence : an artist of genius. It is one of the most " European " works of prose fiction in Russian literature, and this may be one of the reasons for its comparative neglect by general readers and professional students of literature in the English-speaking world. It blends too easily into the West-European literary landscape, seems to lack the challenging " Russianness " of a Tolstoy and a Dostoyevsky, to offer too little resistance to the process of absorption into the mainstream of European post-Napoleonic prose, even less resistance than the novels of Turgenev, James's "beautiful genius", who for so long has been regarded as the most " Western " of Russian novelists. Turgenev's novels seem more " Russian " than Lermontov's fiction by virtue of their obvious high moral earnestness, the prominence given to contemporary social issues (shading into politics at one end of the spectrum, and into metaphysics at the other), and the author's lyrical involvement with the landscape of central Russia. In A Hero of Our Time the Western reader

1 H. Gifford has rightly emphasized the strong bond with poetry that characterizes the tradition of the Russian novel, from Evgeny Onegin to Dead Souls and Dr Zhivago (The Novel in Ruttia, Hutchinson University Library, London 1964). • Lennontov does not use the word " type " in the published version of his preface to the second edition of the novel in which he polemically asserts the representative quality of his hero, but he did use it in the draft version of the preface, in a sarcastic address to the reader : " Do you know what a type is T Congratulations." M. Yu. Ler- montov, Collected works, ed. B. Eikhenbaum (Academia, Moscow-Leningrad, 1936-37), Vol. V, p. 461. Unless otherwise stated, references to Lermontov's works are to this edition. 23 tends to find that the concern with moral values has an elusiveness un- characteristic of Russian literature (except, of course, during the heyday of Symbolism), while social issues seem to him either excessively generalized, in a manner which we associate with poetry, not the novel, or particularized to the point of triviality. Nature, it is true, is potently present, but the hero's destiny is acted out, in the main, against the background of the exotic splendours of the Caucasus—a region where the Russia of Lennontov's age was an alien intruder in more than one sense. A brilliantly executed varia- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 tion on the familiar European theme of alienation and self-alienation, but brittle, of slight substance, lacking those fruitful ambiguities which are inherent in the rich orchestration of human experience of the great 19th- century novelists, coming to life only when the novelist in Lennontov falls silent and the poet takes over !3 Russian scholars and critios, both before the Revolution and since the early 1920's, have laboured to show that Lermontov's prose is firmly rooted in the traditions of Russian literature, that, in particular, it owes as much to Pushkin and Gogol and to their creative transmutation of Russian and Western literary traditions as it owes to the direct impact of Western literatures ; that, on the other hand, A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov's only completed major prose work, was the first Russian " analytical " psychological novel, a work of greatest intrinsic value and, at the same time, the soil that nourished the art of Do8toyevsky and Tolstoy ; that in this novel Lennontov speaks with the voice of a Russian of his age, a Russian who, far from remaining aloof from the great ideological debates and the passionate search for new values which characterized the post-Decembrist period in Russia (the men of the " mar- vellous decade " went through their formative years in the 1830's, as did Lennontov), was deeply involved in them. But their findings and their hypotheses have not yet been critically sifted and synthesized in the West. There is need for an extended study of Lennontov, and in particular of his prose, that would make full critical use of the work done by Russian Lennontov scholars (not least of the numerous publications occasioned by the 150th anniversary of Lermontov's birth in 1964), and at the same time relate Lennontov's work to the West-European literary traditions both more fully than has been done so far and with greater awareness of the kind of questions which contemporary Western critics want to ask about

' The response of undergraduates studying Russian literature in some British Uni- versities may be a useful corrective to this generalised description of Western responses : oompelled to read A Hero of Our Txme, they kindle to the novel in a manner in which they fail to kindle to any other set book on then1 19th-century syllabus—with the significant exception (in my experience) of Crime and Punishment. Not even Anna Karenxna seems to satisfy their youthful appetites for moral discussion to the same extent—perhaps because the nature of Tolstoy's art impedes conceptualisation of moral issues, -while Lermontov's prose creates the illusion of encouraging this process. The structure of Lermontov's novel makes the reader acutely conscious of the author's desire to distance himself from his hero and urges him to read the five sections of the narrative as five parts of the trial of Pechonn (in the course of which witnesses for the defence and the prosecution get a fair hearing), and Lermontov's poetic-dramatic tendency to isolate the " fateful moments " in human existence, to lift them out of the stream of life, further enhances the illusion of an easily discernible pattern and an easily detachable message. 24 literature. It is not the purpose of this essay, of course, to attempt this task, or even part of it. The purpose is rather to discuss some aspects and implications of the description of A Hero of Our Time given in our first sentence. A recent study by P. M. Axthelm of the confessional genre in literature* sees ite origins in Augustine's Confessions and the origins of the " Modern Confessional Novel " in Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, and, after looking at the " disintegrated world " in the works of Gide, Sartre Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 and Camus, and tracing Koestler's and Golding's " search for a reconstructed order ", culminates in an examination of the way in which the hero of Saul Bellow's Herzog reaches, through confession, that " full perception " which is " an end to confession and an entrance into meaningful life ",s thus, we are led to infer, realising the full potential of the confessional novel. Axthelm sees the unique nature of this perception reflected in a unique structural feature of Herzog : " Moses Herzog is the only confessional hero who calmly and willingly concludes his own confession."6 Bellow, it is pointed out to us, has no need for " editor's notes " which tell the reader that what they have read is but a fragment of a much longer journal, or indicate by some other means the inconclusive, ambiguous nature of the ending and the probability that, " if left to himself ", the hero would go on writing about himself. My concern is not with the validity of these generalizations about the place of Herzog within the history of the confessional genre, but with their relevance to the question whether A Hero of Our Time can be meaning- fully and usefully described as a confessional novel. This kind of question, of course, is only worth asking if one is convinced that Lermontov's work is good literature, a work that demands a committal response from the reader. For the purpose of my present observations, I must simply assume that such a conviction is present, although at the same time these observations are intended to throw indirect light on some of the reasons for arriving at suoh a conviction. When speaking of the confessional novel, it seems expedient to distinguish between those novels which, to a marked extent, use the confessional form (from confessions presented to the reader as written by the hero " for himself alone " to various kinds of confessional communications, oral or written, from the hero to other fictional characters, to the reader or to posterity), and, on the other hand, those novels which, whatever the artistic methods they use, are confessional in respect of the relationships we perceive to exist between the author and his work. It is, of course, those in the first category which are grouped together as belonging to the " genre " of the " confessional novel ", while those in the second are defin- able as a specific type of literature only in terms which are extrinsic to the individual work and presuppose our ability to relate their themes, structures and styles both to other works of the same author and to our knowledge of the author's " life " derived from sources other than his works. • The Modern Confessional Novel, Yale University Press, 1967. • Ibid., p. 177. • Ibid., p. 130. 25 A Hero of Our Time uses many of the devices characteristic of the genre of the confessional novel, but I see in it also a confessional work in the wider sense of the word, in the sense in which Tolstoy's novels are confessional and Dostoyevsky's are not. It marks a stage in the author's search for values, for a meaningful pattern of life, for self-knowledge, and it does so not only in the sense in which all art does so, but by conscious design : it is autobiographical in its basic concern, irrespective of the extent to which the author uses what is technically termed " autobiographical " material. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 I do not wish to look at this issue in its entirety, but merely propose to point to two features of A Htro of Our Time which do not appear to have received sufficient attention. A Hero of Our Time has an artist for its hero. Lennontov, the artist, is thus mirroring himself in his hero. Yet it is not the artist's predicament with which the author is concerned. It is the man's predicament. It is at this point that we must relate the novel to Lermontov's other works. Lermontov's poetry, taken together with his work on A Hero of Our Time suggests that somewhere between 1838 and 1840 an important inner reorientation took place in Lermontov's attitude to his own art and in his conception of its relation to his destiny, to his vocation as a human being. The poem Do not Trust Yourself . . . (1839) indicates the tendency of this reorientation: "the young dreamer" ("mechtatel"') is warned not against making himself vulnerable by exposing his innermost experiences to the gaze of the mob (the traditional Romantic warning), but against the over- weening pride of the artist who assumes that he alone knows agony, that he alone has plumbed the depths of human suffering, who cannot see that the " crowd " consists of human beings each of whom bears traces of " severe torture ". It is a much more complex poem (though, of course, not necessarily a better one) than Tyutchev's famous Silentium.7 The theme of SUentium is the incommunicable nature of man's deepest and most valuable experiences, the inadequacy of the poet's language and, at the same time, the destructive effect of the act of artistic creation on the artist's spirit, the impoverishment of the poet's human substance through his insistence on speaking of that " whereof one cannot speak ", the need to protect the deep organic growth of the poet's self from the " noise " and the " bund- ing rays " of the " external " day-time world. Lennontov's Do not Trust Yourself ... is not concerned with protecting either the man or the artist in the poet—Lennontov insists, with passionate bitterness, on the reality of the " crowd's " suffering and, identifying himself with the crowd (by using the pronoun " we " in a manner which is not ironical, not analogous to Pushkin's use of " we " in such lines in Evgeny Onegin as " we all aim at being Napoleons "), rejects art as artificial, as incapable of embodying the awe-inspiring reality of " ordinary " human suffering. If we turn to ' Written in 1830, first published in 1833, and then again in 1836 in Pushkin's The Contemporary -which Lermontov can be assumed to have read as eagerly as did Behnsky and Gogol. 26 the poem The Journalist, the Reader and the Author (1840),8 we are first confronted with an epigraph (probably written by Lermontov) which once again ruthlessly rejects the inspirational fallacy : " Les poetes ressemblent aux ours, qui se nourrissent en sucant leur patte ". We then hear a drama- tized conversation which ends with, and culminates in, an outburst by the " author ", leading us back to Do not Trust Yourself . . ., but also leading us beyond it. Despite the scholarly evidence adduced by B. Eikhenbaum to prove that the author-character must not be identified with Lennontov,8 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 the lyrical intensity of this passage, as well as stylistic and thematic com- parisons with Lermontov's other poems and the prose which he was writing at the time, compel one to see in this outburst that which Belinsky saw in it—the poet's " confession ", in the sense that it is a poetic statement in which Lermontov is concerned with his own predicament, whether past or present. Twice the " author " joins in the conversation with the words " What is one to write about ? ", but while on the first occasion it is the impossibility of finding a fresh theme, one not yet written about ad nauseum, that he briefly laments with flippant irony, on the second occasion the question leads him to reject, in terms of anguished sincerity, the very possibility of practising art as a profession, in his case : of writing for publication. The value of art is not questioned. On the contrary, the ideal of an " austere art " (" strogoye iskusstvo ") is affirmed, and it is by the exacting standards of this ideal that he assesses his own work, dismissing as unworthy those outpourings which flow from his pen during periods of serene " inspired labour ", when his spirit soars freely and the world lies before him purified, " washed clean " in his noble vision. The " noble dream " is dismissed as " infantile emotions ", as " airy ", irrational, as " delirium "—unworthy of " austere art " : " the world will ridicule, will forget it." We ask : can the opinion of the world, of society, matter to a poet who has castigated society so fiercely, lashed out against it so ruthlessly with his " iron verse "?10 If we are right in refusing, on grounds of internal evidence, to see in the author-character of the poem the ironical portrayal of an artistic predicament wholly alien to Lermontov himself, it would appear that the opinion of the " world " does matter, that the remark is not ironical, that it links on to the theme of Do not Trust Yourself . . . The " author " continues : sometimes he writes in a state which is not serene, a state of acute distress caused by an involuntary, compulsive re-living of all the sufferings that life had brought him ; at such moments it is his " conscience " that dictates to him, it is his " angry mind " that guides his pen —at such moments he writes about men and women as he knows them,

• Vol. H, p. 70. The poem was written while Lermontov was under arrest in St Petersburg, precisely during the weeks when the first edition of A Hero of Our Time was being printed for publication m May 1840. • Eikhenbaum believes that in the " author " we must see an ironical sketch of the Slavophil Khomyakov. of. Ltferaturnaya positsia Lermontova, Literaturnoye natledstvo, Vol. 43-44, Moscow, 1941, pp. 62-64. 10 In such poems as Meditation (1838), or How often, when surrounded by a motley crowd . . . (1840). 27 he is " merciless and cruel ". For such " bitter " art there is no public, he " dares not " offer it to the " unprepared ". He sums up : to publish is a " criminal " desire. The " crowd " (here used as a term of condemnation, " the ungrateful crowd ") will call his prophetic speech evil slander, the innocent heart will be perturbed—to no purpose—by his " scorching pages ", the weak heart will be carried away and engulfed—to no purpose. One implication of the poem is that the reader-character's demand for a Russian work in which " thought " would, at long last, learn to speak in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 simple language and with " the noble voice of passion "—a demand which by poetio means is given unqualified validity in the context of the poem— cannot be met by the " author ", not yet. A further implication seems to be that the voice of the inspired visionary for whom the world is " purified " by his " noble dream " is not " the noble voice of passion ". Is it the case then that the noble dream lacks passion while the dark, deeply personal passion which yet impels the poet to take up his pen and to submit to the dictates of his " conscience " and his " angry mind " lacks nobility ? Is it a synthesis that is needed if a work is to be brought forth which it would not be " criminal " to publish ? It is not necessary for the present purpose to show conclusively that the answer must be in the affirmative. The point here is that Lermontov, who had just handed over to his publishers the manuscript of A Hero of Our Time, felt impelled to state, in the medium of verse, his conviction that there existed readers in Russia to whose voice it was his duty to listen, whose demands were just, and that these readers needed an art that was neither a visionary's noble dream nor a bitter un- masking of the evil in human life, but something else. We know nothing of Lermontov's own assessment of his novel, beyond that which he chose to say in the preface to the second edition and the meagre implications of Belinsky's account of his conversation with Lermontov in Spring 1840, but we have the evidence of the novel, and of the verse and prose written after the novel to give us a sense of the direction in which Lermontov pursued his anguished search for the art that would speak with the " noble voice of passion."11 Taman, the first section of the Journal written by Pechorin, the hero of A Hero of Our Time, has been recently described as marking " the final stage in the externalised portrayal of the hero ", and as acting, at the same time, " as a bridge to the second part of the novel in which the hero is to un- burden his soul " (i.e. to Princess Mary and Fatalist).11 This approach needs qualifying. To begin with, we must squarely face the fact that while 11 The concept of " passion " occupies a central place in Lermontov's language. Much has been written about the meaning attached to it by Lermontov, and B. Eikhen- baum has considered the influence on Lermontov's thought not only of Mme de Stael's writings, but also, and more significantly, of the writings of the Samt-Simoniste with which Lermontov was undoubtedly familiar. See e.g. B. Eikhenbaum, " O smyslovoy osnove ' Geroya nasbego vremeni ' " (Russkaya Ltteratura, No. 3, Leningrad, 1969, pp. 13-19). u B. A. Peace, The Role of Taman' in Lermontov's " Geroy nashego vremeni " (The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. XLV, No. 104, 1967, pp. 12-28). 28 it is true that, in terms of the reader's psychological response to what one might call a succession of scenes from the life of the hero (which together form the novel), Taman is indeed " nearer in feeling to the ' external' portrait we have of Pechorin in Bela and Maksim Maksimych ",ls Lermontov chose to present Taman as a story written by Pechorin (although not for publication, to be sure). Thus the really important question to ask is whether a man who is an artist " reveals " himself more significantly in his art or in the " direct " record of his experiences and his emotional and intellectual Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 response to these experiences. In our case, then : is Taman not at least as " inward " as the rest of Pechorin's Journal ;does the fact that the hero was capable of writing Taman not force us to revise our interpretation of the novel's theme ? The manifold manifestations of irony in Taman have often been noted.14 On the one hand, the " I " of the story, the narrator, is given to ironic juxtapositions of romantic illusion and dismally prosaic reality, and to ironic comment on his own frequent failure to distinguish between that which he projects into reality and that which it is in " objective " fact, while the " author ", on the other hand, is given to ironio devices uncovering the limitation of the narrator's self-knowledge, the incomplete or self- contradictory nature of his image of himself. Not sufficient attention has been paid, however, to the implications of the fact that it is Pechorin who is the author of Taman. Whenever we read in Taman that the narrator " involuntarily " reacted in a certain way,16 it is Pechorin, the author of the Journal, who notes these involuntary responses. It is not Lermontov who allows us to catch his hero unawares, but the hero himself who reveals his ironic awareness of the limitations of the narrator's ability to see himself and his conduct " objectively ".16 The point is not that Lennontov's hero is capable of self-irony—this is obvious throughout the novel. The point is that Peohorin the author is distancing himself from the narrator of Taman in the same way in which Lermontov distances himself from his hero, and that, at the same time, Pechorin bears as strong a family resemblance to his creator, Lermontov, as the narrator of Taman bears to Pechorin. In other words, if A Hero of Our Time is a confessional novel in the wider sense of the term, then Taman is, by the same token, as confessional and "Ibid., p. 12. 14 The nature and function of irony in A Hero of Our Time and, in particular, in Taman, has been extensively discussed in Russian, ».o. by V. Vinogradov, B. Eikhen- baum, B. Tomashevsky, and E. Mikhaylova ; in English i.a. by J. Mersereau (Mikhail lermontov, Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), R. A. Peace (op. cit.) and F. D. Reeve (The Russian Novel, Longmans, 1964). " R. A. Peace, op. cit., pp. 26-26. lf A somewhat different type of refusal to face the implications of Pechorin's author- ship for our interpretation of Lennontov's conception of his hero is to be found in V. Vinogradov's artiole on Lennontov's style : " Taman is in a sense a direct reply to Bela. The theme of Taman is the triumph of irony, an irony which is directed against the favourite romantic sujeis and illusions of the 1820'B. Everything, except the action of the narrator himself, is hidden behind the veil of romantio semi-mystery, which at the end of the nouveUe is being realistically unmasked. Peohorin involuntarily (my italics, I.A.) becomes the author of a subtle literary parody." Literatumoye nasledetvo, Vol. 43-44, Moscow, 1941, p. 693. 29 therefore also as " inward " as is the " diary " part of Pechorin's Journal.17 Pechorin pursues the search for knowledge of his self and his destiny hy " objectifying " some aspects of his being, part of his own inner spectrum. He succeeds in creating at least one story of highest artistic merit (it is not possible here to consider the role of Fatalist in the novel), but he rejects his art as " unworthy ", does not wish to publish. The thematic functions of Taman in the novel are manifold, but far from effecting the " collapse " of the heroic image of Pechorin built up in the preceding two sections of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 the novel (as Peace suggests)18 it serves above all to establish the situation of a man who is capable of shaping life to his will in the medium of art, who is not a poite manqui., but who knows that unless he can divine and fulfil his destiny as a man, as a moral being, unless he can be creative in the medium of historical reality, those " noble aspirations " implanted in his breast which he declares to be the " finest flower of life " cannot be realised. It is well known that in a draft version of Maksim Maksimych Lermontov made an explicit reference to Pechorin's literary ambitions : " I looked through Pechorin's notes, and I could see from some of the passages that he had been preparing them for publication . . .", " Indeed, in several places Pechorin is addressing the reader . . .".19 Why was this eliminated ? We must surely distinguish between the question : why did Lermontov eliminate from his manuscript certain specific references to Pechorin as a writer ? and the wider question : why did Lermontov altogether drop the idea of explicitly making Pechorin if not a professional man of letters then at least a writer wishing to publish ? Not all answers to the first question are relevant to the second. Mersereau follows Eikhenbaum in placing the emphasis on Lermontov's need to prove the " sincerity " of Pechorin's Journal : " Thus depriving Pechorin of any literary aspirations, Lermontov has underscored the private nature of the Journal and endowed it with the prestige of a completely sincere confession . . ,".*° But what was there to stop Lermontov, once he had decided to justify the publication of Pechorin's notes by announcing Pechorin's death, from introducing samples of Pech- orin's writings intended by Pechorin for publication, suitably modifying the preface to the Journal so as to distinguish between its " private " and " public " sections, had he wished to do so ? Similarly, when Eikhenbaum points out that Taman was written before Bda and either conceived entirely independently of the Pechorin theme, or at least written before all the other

17 It is worth noting that B. Tomaahevsky, in hia important article on " Lermontov's Prose and the West^European Literary Tradition " (Literaturnoye nasledstvo, Vol. 43- 44, Moscow, 1941, p. 509) suggests that there is no need to make heavy weather over the inclusion of Taman in Part I of the novel; this division, he believes, was due to " polygraphioal considerations ", since the early editions of the novel were published in two parts, and it was found desirable to make the two halves of approximately the same length. " Op. oit., p. 13. " Vol. V, p. 464. See also, in the draft version of Taman, Pechorin's outburst : "... and yet surely I am not to blame : curiosity is a characteristic of all travelling and writing people." Ibid., p. 466. n Mersereau, op. oit., p. 104. 30 sections of the novel81 we are still left with the fact that in the end Lermontov did make Pechorin the author of Taman, as well as of Fatalist, and thus with the question : If Lermontov came to find that he needed the reference to professional curiosity (originally made in Taman) as a motivation for the narrator's manner of teasing the Bela-Pechorin story out of Maksim Maksimych in Bela, what was there to stop him from explicitly drawing the reader's attention to Pechorin's " literariness " in some other way, had he wished to do so ? It would appear that it was important to Lermontov Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 to present Pechorin as a writer who is a creative artist but does not wish to publish. A desire to publish would have been incompatible with Pech- orin's attitude to the age and the society in which he was destined to live, as well as with his conception of heroic destiny. At the same time, Lermon- tov, when conceiving the novel as a novel (as distinct from writing several stories not yet necessarily related to a unifying theme), desired to pose the problem of the creative, heroio personality in an age hostile to creativity and heroism, in terms of human destiny, not in terms of of the tragedy of artistic vocation. In creating Peohorin, Lermontov not only " omits" several crucial facets of his own destiny as he knew it, above all—but not only—his certainty that he was a poet of genius, and his love for his mother- land, but, even more importantly, he takes those facets of his own predicament which he dots embody in the novel at a certain stage of then- development, thus writing what one might call a historical novel about himself (which is, of course, what all great confessional authors do, what Tolstoy did again and again). Is Pechorin's predicament, then, that of the " author " in the poem The Journalist, the Reader and the Author ? It would appear that it is. The two modes of inner response to life, that of the dreamer and that of the cruel castigator, which the " author " describes at the end of the poetic conversation, are essentially Pechorin's two modes, and like the " author " in the poem, he does not want to publish. But Lermontov is not Pechorin, though Pechorin is part of him. Lermontov did want to " publish "—this we would know even if by some historical accident none of his works had ever been printed and no record of his aspirations other than his creative work had survived. During the last years of his life, when the agony of living became less and less bearable for him, the foreknowledge of an un- timely death more and more certain and hatred for the despoilers of human life more and more profound, he increasingly turned to artistic forms, both in poetry and prose, which presuppose either the artist's desire to influence the ways of men here and now, or the desire to give to the expressions of his most inward experiences the kind of accessibility which can only be achieved by objectification and only is worth achieving, only has value to him for whom, in the words of Keats, " the miseries of the world / Are miseries, and will not let them rest ".

11 Jstoriya rustkogo romana, ed. G. M. Fridlander, Moscow-Leningrad, 1962, pp. 295- 297. 31 Once in his dramatic work and twice in his prose fiction Lennontov made the hero an artist. The hero of his youthful drama The Strange Man (1831) is a poet; his poetry is read by his friends, as part of the dramatic action, and his friends declare him to be a poet of genius. Pechorin is a writer, and his Journal is there for us to judge the quality of his writing.22 Lugin, the central character in a prose fragment, written in Spring, 1841 (often published under the title of Shtoss) is a painter of whom the author

says that he is a " true artist ". Only Lugin's friends, however, " were Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 allowed the privilege of enjoying his beautiful talent " ; his paintings " bore the stamp of that bitter poetry which our poor age has sometimes distilled from the heart " of its best artists.23 Lugin tries to escape from his " bitter " art into another, super-natural, reality, but the only means fate puts at his disposal to achieve his aim are of a kind to call in question the value of the aim : he has to win possession of his vision at cards,14 by playing against a ghost, a petty ghost, almost the kind of ghost that might visit a Svidrigaylov (though the affinities with Gogol and the German Romantics are, of course, more striking). The escape into dreams, into otherworldliness, is dismissed, but Lennontov's irony is rooted in deep compassion with the artist (not in a mocking sense of superiority, as some Russian commentators, by implica- cation, suggest16). Arbenin, the hero of The Strange Man, commits suicide after telling the girl who has " betrayed " him by choosing to marry another, that he was no Werther. Indeed, what drives him to suicide is neither the Wertherian inability to be creative as an artist nor the Wertherian agony of being denied a union with the woman he loves, but his horror at the inhumanity of the society into which he is born and from which he cannot escape. Pechorin's case is not that of the artistic temperament incapable of creating—it is the man in Pechorin who is weary unto death. The fragment Shtoss breaks off at the point when the hero is clearly doomed to physical annihilation by the agonies of the struggle for the possession of the ideal of perfeot beauty ; art must not be a means of escape : " None can usurp this height . . ./ But those for whom the miseries of this world / Are miseries, and will not let them rest." Unlike Gide, who not only kept but also published the journal of his own experiences in writing The Counterfeiters—" the journal of what it is 11 It is well known that Tolstoy and Chekhov saw in Taman a story of supreme artistio merit. The parallel between A Hero of Our Time and Dr Zhivago is, in this respect, striking and tantalizing. " Vol. V, p. 328. 14 I do not know whether Lennontov was consciously creating a situation resembling, and violently contrasting with, the situation in his The Tambov Treasurer1 a Wife (1837), a tale in verse (in the stanzaic form of Evgeny Onegin), where a young officer wins a desirable provincial beauty at cards—from her husband. In the tale m verse the manner is gay and frivolous, the mood emphatioallyprosaio—it is left to the reader to note and ponder the stark horror of this comedy. The tale in prose is deeply lyrical, and the humorous Gogolian devices only enhance the tragic mood. "E.g., I. Andronikov, M. Yu. Lermontov, Collected Works, "Pravda", Moscow, 1963, Vol. 4, p. 464. 32 like to express himself in the guise of fidouard ", Lermontov probably did not keep, and certainly did not publish any kind of record of the process of writing his only completed novel. Was it because his novel is not expressionistic, in the sense in which Gide's is, or rather because he was not interested in " what it was like to express himself " ? Perhaps some of the observations made in this essay will add substance to the view that Lermon- tov's novel was not expressionistic, in the sense in which Blackmur uses the term in his The Lion and the Honeycomb, and that Lermontov was not Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article/IV/1/22/589867 by guest on 28 September 2021 interested in " what it was like " to create a hero who was an artist and who, both as man and artist, embodied a phase in his creator's progress through life. Unlike his hero, whose Journal Lermontov publishes as a mere fragment selected from a mass of notes, Lermontov was ready " willingly to conclude bis confession ", not because he had gained " the full perception " of a meaningful pattern in his own destiny and the history of mankind, but because he knew that he needed all his strength to seek this perception, by means which no longer could be " confessional ". Perhaps, at the close of his short life, Lermontov had ceased to ask " why, in such spiritless times, to be poet at all ? " and was searching for the means of making himself into a man who would be fit to create art that could change the times. The worlds of Lermontov and Tolstoy intersect not only on the battlefield of Borodino, in Caucasian Cossack settlements and in the bed- rooms of adulterous women. Perhaps Russia lost in 1841 a young artist who was destined to become one of her great moralists.

I. ARTATT Birmingham