22 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 observa- tions 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 dis- tinguish between those novels which, to a marked extent, use the con- fessional 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.