Mikhail Lermontov World Literature Analysis
Lermontov is often called Russia’s only true Romantic poet. Several major themes run through his work: the tragic nature of love, demonism (the idea that one is fated to destroy what one loves), disillusionment, vengeance, a passion for freedom, and the longing for a return to original innocence.
He also displayed a sharp psychological insight into the workings of passion in human relationships. This insight is visible in early works and in the mature work A Hero of Our Time. It is further developed in another play, Maskarad (wr. 1834-1835, pb. 1842, pr. 1917; Masquerade, 1973), a reworking of William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604, pb. 1622), which examines the effect of jealousy on a marriage.
On a broader canvas, Lermontov’s preoccupations extended to analyzing the tragedy of his generation in the 1830’s, in the sad aftermath of the Decembrist revolt. The strengths and talents of this lost generation were denied expression and fulfillment by a regime so repressive that personal correspondence was inspected and artists and intellectuals were exiled for having “dangerous thoughts.”
This political atmosphere gave a new twist to the common Russian literary character, the superfluous man, typified by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Superfluous men were men set apart by their superior talents from a mediocre society, doomed to waste their lives through lack of opportunity to fulfill themselves and also through lack of inner purpose. In A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov suggests that superfluity is not only an isolated personal malady but a tragedy of his time, an inevitable epidemic fostered by an unhealthy regime.
Lermontov’s work was influenced by other writers, especially the German playwright Friedrich Schiller and the poets Pushkin and Byron. When it came to creating his characters, however, Lermontov knew only one hero whom he repeatedly projected into his works—himself.
During his early writing career, Lermontov’s preferred vehicle of self-expression was drama. He wrote his first play when he was sixteen. The play is a Schiller-influenced melodramatic demand for personal and social freedom, expressed in the authorial voice of an angry young man. Defiance and frustration in the face of repression is a theme that would run through Lermontov’s work throughout his life, reaching a peak in his narrative poems, such as Demon (1841; The Demon, 1875).
The autobiographical element is also discernible in the melodrama A Strange One, a self-portrait of Lermontov during his years in Moscow, and in his lyric poems. In “Parus” (1841; “The Sail,” 1976) the sailboat becomes symbolic of the poet’s lonely soul, driven not by joy but by its quest for storms, “as if a storm could bring it peace.” Lermontov was notorious for his tendency to seek out conflict with others, perhaps in an attempt to quell his sense of isolation. These Byronic traits—isolation and desire for conflict—link many of Lermontov’s heroes, including the demon in The Demon and Pechorin, the protagonist of A Hero of Our Time.
Even when apart from the superficial evils of society, however, Lermontov was continually haunted by a powerful image of internal evil—the image of the demon. As a youth he wrote that he was, like the demon of the poem, chosen for evil. The attraction of evil for Lermontov lay not only in its negative power but also in the intensity of the experience of damnation. Like his heroes, he identified the intensity of life with the intensity of torment. He sought it out as proof of his uniqueness and heroic status. Always with Lermontov, however, there is a polarization of opposites. On one hand there is the demon,...
(This entire section contains 2264 words.)
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absorbed in evil. On the other hand, there is the angel, or angelic woman, whose goodness he craves. The demon is balanced with an angel. This craving for what is good is always frustrated, however, since the demon figure always destroys whomever he loves. Tamara inThe Demon and Bela and Vera in A Hero of Our Time are innocent women who fall in love with the demon figure, only to be destroyed by him. Such contradictions were externalizations of Lermontov’s own divided personality, romantic by nature and yet cold and skeptical in his mind. Lermontov never reconciled the psychic divisions that gave his work such tortured energy. Instead, he idealized them in the tragedy of The Demon, and he finally analyzed them coolly in A Hero of Our Time as a malady that had to be faced and accepted.
“The Novice”
First published: “Mtsyri,” 1840 (collected in Narrative Poems by Alexander Pushkin and by Mikhail Lermontov, 1983)
Type of work: Poem
A novice monk, captured in the mountains as a boy by the Russians, lives confined in a monastery until he escapes.
Lermontov found the subject matter for this narrative poem while visiting a monastery in the former Georgian capital Mtskheti on his way to exile in the Caucasus. A monk told Lermontov how as a boy he was captured by Russians in his native mountains. They wanted to take him to their own country, but he fell ill and was left with the monks of the monastery. The monks nursed him back to health and let him stay there. He became a novice, but the memory of his free life in a mountain village haunted him day and night. He found his prisonlike existence so intolerable that he escaped. Trying to reach his village, he wandered in the forest until he lost his way. He was found, starved and exhausted, by the monks, who brought him back to his cell. The futility of his flight made him decide to stay in the monastery, where he remained ever since.
Lermontov made significant changes to this story. He concentrated all his poetic power on the novice’s flight, as well as on the magnificent scenery in which it took place, leaving out the resignation with which the recaptured fugitive stayed on in the monastery. The poem thus embodied a spirited bid for freedom at a time when the very word “freedom” was banned in Russia. The novice’s adventures in the virgin forest also distracted the censor from the symbolic significance of the poem.
One night, the novice meets a hungry panther, which he kills with his stick after a desperate struggle. This fight is among the finest passages Lermontov wrote, both in terms of the vividly sensual descriptions and the flowing music of the verse. After three days and nights, the sound of the familiar church bell tells the novice that instead of gaining freedom he has moved in a circle. Exhausted, he falls to the ground and only regains consciousness after he has been brought back, near death, to his cell by the monks, who have been looking for him.
The noble impulse that ends in frustration and suffering is an often-repeated theme in Lermontov’s works, but also typical of Lermontov is his hero’s resolute defiance. The novice, though defeated, remains proud and unrepentant to the end. Talking to his father-confessor, he tells him that his only regret is that his flight to freedom was abortive.
The poem contains no overt political allusions, but many readers must have identified the novice’s prison with the political prison of Russia.
Readers of the poem in its original Russian will discover riches easily lost in translation, such as the brisk narrative rhyme scheme and the poem’s musical rhythm, assisted by such devices as parallel grammatical constructions, alliteration, and assonance.
The Demon
First published: Demon, 1841 (collected in The Demon, and Other Poems, 1965)
Type of work: Poem
The Demon, a fallen angel, falls in love with a mortal woman but destroys her with his immortal’s kiss.
The Demon, originally circulated in manuscript in 1839, is Lermontov’s best-known tale in verse. Like “The Novice,” the poem is a piece of defiance and frustration, but on a grander scale. Once again there is a restless soul trapped in a prison, but instead of a monastery, the prison is the cosmos. The Demon sees in Tamara the same mirage of happiness that the novice sees in the mountains. Like the novice, the Demon fails to assuage his loneliness or escape his fate.
The Demon is symbolic of rebellion and isolation. Many critics see him as more closely connected with Lermontov’s own nature than any of his other creations. He constantly reworked the poem from 1829 to the end of his life in 1841. Lermontov’s Demon is a former rebel angel, expelled from paradise and doomed to roam eternally through the universe. A vindictive, sad exile, he sows evil wherever he appears. In the end, evil bores him. One day, flying over the Caucasus, the Demon sees the beautiful maiden Tamara, and falls in love with her.
The Demon feels his love for Tamara might reconcile him to God and the universe. He tempts her, and her guardian angel tries to intervene. The guardian angel soon gives up, and Tamara surrenders to the Demon’s wooing. No sooner does he touch her lips with his immortal’s kiss than she dies—an example of the Lermontovian theme of the lover-destroyer. Her soul is carried away by a good angel, while the Demon is doomed to dwell in loneliness till the end of time.
The chief problem in The Demon is its lack of dramatic tension. In contrast to the Demon, whose energy and persistence hold the reader’s attention, Tamara remains passive. One wonders too at the passivity of the angel sent to protect her. Lermontov also passes up opportunities for conflict within his hero: The Demon, in love with Tamara and supposedly inspired to a new life of goodness, has no compunction about having her bridegroom killed so that he can possess her totally. A struggle with his newly awakened conscience would have added depth to the story.
In spite of these weaknesses, the poem’s glories are many: the musicality of the verse and the incandescent images. The description of the Caucasian landscape is matchless. The scene in which Tamara dances on the roof of her father’s castle while far away her bridegroom is being treacherously killed on his way to the wedding has the ironic emotional intensity of which Lermontov was master.
A Hero of Our Time
First published: Geroy nashego vremeni, 1839, serial; 1840, book (English translation, 1854)
Type of work: Novel
The book is a portrait of the life and character of a man who, Lermontov suggests, is typical of his age.
A Hero of Our Time is one of Russia’s greatest novels. All the characters, with the possible exception of Vera, are drawn with consummate art. In Pechorin, the novel’s hero, Lermontov gave the first psychological portrait of the literary archetype, the superfluous man. Lermontov analyzes Pechorin as a victim of the conditions he was doomed to live in, hence the ironic label, “hero of our time.” As a representative of the lost generation of the 1830’s, Pechorin’s creative genius finds no legitimate channel of expression and thus turns in on itself and grows destructive. In analyzing Pechorin, Lermontov analyzed the sickness of the age.
The first two of the five narratives, “Bela” and “Maxim Maximych,” show Pechorin through the eyes of others. “Princess Mary” is in the form of Pechorin’s diary, and “Taman” and “The Fatalist” record some of his adventures in the Crimea and the Caucasus.
In “Bela,” the bored Pechorin, stationed at a fort, becomes infatuated with the Tartar girl Bela, daughter of a local chieftain. He kidnaps her with the help of her own brother, whom Pechorin rewards with a horse stolen from the girl’s Tartar suitor Kazbich. Bela, frightened at first, falls in love with Pechorin, whereupon he loses interest in her. One day, she goes for a walk outside the walls of the fort and is mortally wounded by Kazbich. The story is told by Captain Maxim Maximych, who has befriended Pechorin. The Captain is a kindly man who develops a fatherly affection and concern for Bela. He provides a counterpoint to the coldly manipulative Pechorin, who is largely responsible for Bela’s death yet unmoved by it.
In “Maxim Maximych,” Maxim is overjoyed at the prospect of seeing his old friend Pechorin once more. Pechorin shows little enthusiasm for the encounter, and when he does finally turn up, his manner is cool. Pechorin has for so long cultivated a mask of indifference that he can no longer discriminate between mask and self.
“Princess Mary” is a psychological analysis of Pechorin in the form of a diary. In the spa town of Pyatigorsk, Pechorin starts, from boredom, a love intrigue with Princess Mary, a young beauty courted by the poseur Grushnitsky. Once he is sure of Mary’s love, he loses interest. Complications arise when Vera, his old love, enters the scene. Pechorin wreaks destruction on all around him: He kills Grushnitsky in a duel, reopens an old wound for Vera, and breaks Mary’s heart.
In a passage recalling “The Sail,” Pechorin asks himself why he refused to tread on the road of gentle pleasures and peace of mind. He compares himself to a seaman born and bred on the deck of a pirate ship, who is so accustomed to storms and battles that on land he feels bored. The novel succeeds because Pechorin’s actions—couched in an engaging black humor—are shown with unerring psychological truth. In Pechorin’s own words, he is a vampire, his ego feeding off the suffering and joys of others. Unable to believe in any purpose, he is doomed to be an analytical observer or mischief-maker.