SOURCE: "Literature and Serfdom: Gogol, Lermontov and Goncharov," in Russia Discovered: Nineteenth-Century Fiction from Pushkin to Chekhov, Barnes and Noble Books 1976, pp. 37-70.

[Mikhail Lermontov] managed in his brief and unhappy existence to earn himself a place as Pushkin's successor among Russian poets and to write one great novel, A Hero of Our Time. …

Lermontov was hardly an attractive personality: Turgenev remembered that 'His swarthy face and large, motionless dark eyes exuded a sort of sombre and evil strength, a sort of pensive scornfulness and passion'. His most famous narrative poetry is characteristically 'Romantic', making free use of the supernatural and expressing a deep love of nature. He died at an age when most young writers have barely started to escape from youthful imitation and self-indulgence; this makes it all the more remarkable that A Hero of Our Time should be the book it is—not only very exciting in its incidents, but original in its form, realistic in its psychology, and utterly unsentimental. Its handling of the native peoples of the Caucasus is stylized, but entirely convincing. Its hero, Pechorin, stands up superbly well to comparison with such French precursors as Constant's Adolphe (1816) and Stendhal's Julien Sorel (Scarlet and Black, 1831). His obvious Russian predecessor is Onegin. The River Onega is a cold one in Northern Russia; the River Pechora flows still farther north. But if Pechorin has dandyism and restlessness in common with Pushkin's unheroic hero, his calculating decisiveness and sheer courage are beyond Onegin's range. Both odious and attractive, he crackles with energy: physical energy, intellectual energy—and even, in a paradoxical fashion, with moral energy, since he is acutely aware of the harm he does to others.

Lermontov certainly used his own character and experience to the full in creating Pechorin. But we must not imagine that he approves of him. After the book came out in 1840, some critics saw it as autobiographical. For the second edition next year Lermontov wrote a preface in which he rebuked those who took the novel 'literally'—thus hinting that it contained meanings which the censorship might not have let him express openly—and he made two claims which echo through subsequent Russian 'realism'.

He saw Pechorin as a 'type', representative of many young men, but not timidly copying the humdrum surface of their lives:

It is a portrait of the vices of our whole generation in their ultimate development. You will say that no man can be so bad, and I will ask you why, after accepting all the villains of tragedy and romance, you refuse to believe in Pechorin?.… Perhaps he comes too close to the bone?

Secondly, he emphasized the moral value of truth-telling, and, in selecting an analogy with medicine, suggested a role for the novelist combining 'scientific' detachment with 'artistic' sensitivity and with indispensable social function:

You may say that morality will not benefit from this book. I'm sorry, but people have been fed on sweets too long and it has ruined their digestion. Bitter medicines and harsh truths are needed now, though please don't imagine that the present author was ever vain enough to dream of correcting human vices.… Let it suffice that the malady has been diagnosed—heaven alone knows how to cure it.

A Hero of Our Time is not explicitly a 'political' book. But when we compare it with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights—which came out soon after and was also the sole fictional masterpiece of a precocious author, offering a comparable combination of 'romantic' story with 'realistic' detail—we are aware of elements of topicality, of satire, of apparently casual generalization, which make the Russian novel seem part of a debate while the English one is a self-sufficient statement. In Nicholas's Russia, to criticize a generation was, after all, to criticize the state which wished and claimed to control all significant life.

In technique, however, the two books are suggestively similar. In each case the literary device of multiple narrative voices sustains a tantalizing combination of deep, 'subjective', commitment to the 'Romantic' hero and of cold 'realistic' objectivity about him.

The six sections of A Hero of Our Time are nothing like the 'chapters' of a novel of its period. As Donald Davie has pointed out, the book is amazingly 'modern', anticipating effects which James and Conrad began to exploit in English fiction half a century later.

From the vantage point of the second section, in which the T who begins the narrative (but is not to be confused with Lermontov himself) actually meets Pechorin, all the other episodes might be seen as 'flashback'. In 'Bela', the first episode, the narrator, who is travelling about the Caucasus making notes for a travel book, meets a fifty-year-old army captain named Maxim Maximych, and draws from him reminiscences of the kind often included in travel books. These in a 'natural' way lead into the tale of Maxim Maximych's friendship five years before with a rich young officer, Pechorin, who was sent to serve at his fort.

The old man's narrative exposes both his wondering affection for his dazzling junior and his inability fully to understand this creature, jaded with the love of women of fashion and disillusioned with reading and study. Maxim Maximych knows nothing about Byronism and other fashionable fads. When Pechorin arranges the abduction of Bela, the beautiful daughter of a local chieftain, and brings her into the fort as his mistress, Maxim Maximych sees not a typically 'Byronic' quest by a bored sophisticate for happiness in the arms of an unspoilt girl but a profound sexual passion between two young people whom he loves and admires. After describing how Bela, at first sullen, finally yields to Pechorin's expert hand, he confesses, 'I was upset that no woman had ever loved me like that.' Bela is captured from Pechorin by a native admirer, who stabs her in the back when chased to a halt; her painful death two days later is described with most unromantic thoroughness.

Coming fresh to 'Bela' the reader will be as interested in the Circassian tribesmen as in Pechorin and probably more interested in Maxim Maximych, the archetypal frontier soldier who is also, in Mirsky's words, 'the simple, humble and casual hero of duty, kindness and common sense.' But the landscape dominates everything else. Lermontov's descriptions of snowy peaks, starry skies, deep ravines and glistening torrents are splashed with bright colours and swept by fresh air. While Turgenev's justly famous evocations of landscape often have the inert effect of fine, framed paintings, because landscape is what the characters, like the readers, look at, Lermontov's landscapes (and the same is true of Tolstoy's) are there to be moved through—they are experienced as the characters and the reader proceed together, and bad weather is described as zestfully as fair weather.

The second episode, 'Maxim Maximych', relates the travel-book-writer's unexpected second meeting with the old soldier in a small frontier town. They learn that Pechorin has arrived, and the veteran is overjoyed. The travel-book-writer's eye, that of a city-bred intellectual, sizes up the 'hero's' figure which gives a contradictory impression; his physique is strong but his fingers are astonishingly slender, his smile is childlike but his eyes don't laugh when he laughs and shine with the 'cold, dazzling brilliance of smooth steel'. The presentation is cautiously objective—the narrator admits that he might have assessed the man differently if he hadn't known something about him already, and his eye is clinical, but not unsympathetic. What swings our sympathies against Pechorin is his cold reception of Maxim Maximych. The old soldier has, for perhaps the first time in his life, neglected his official duty, rushing to see his friend. He arrives gasping for air, pouring with sweat:

Strands of wet gray hair sticking out from his cap clung to his brow. He was about to throw his arms round Pechorin, but Pechorin rather coldly held out his hand, though he gave him a friendly smile.

With a few swift strokes—the wet gray hair is especially telling—Lermontov is able to make us feel the old man's boyish enthusiasm, the young man's elderly reserve, and to make the encounter hurt us. Pechorin is on his way to Persia. He refuses to stop and chew over memories with the old man, and we and the narrator are left with the grief and humiliation of Maxim Maximych turning into anger against the stuck-up dandy whose memory had been so important to him.

Since Maxim Maximych is far and away the most lovable character in the book, and has so far taken the centre of the stage from the 'hero', this scene makes it impossible for us to love, or wholly to forgive, Pechorin, let alone judge him on his own terms. Yet paradoxically, since the old man has been, as it were, 'in love with' Pechorin, it shows us how profoundly the hero affects people, how attractive he can be.

The rest of the book is made up of 'papers' of Pechorin's which the old man passed on to the travel-book-writer. The latter explains that Pechorin died on his way home from Persia, so he can now print them without inhibition. They are extracts from Pechorin's journal and formally they compose a triptych—two 'short stories' flanking a longer one.

Both Tolstoy and Chekhov admired 'Taman', the first short story, immensely. It describes an adventure of Pechorin's on his way to the Caucasus and so is biographically the earliest episode in the novel. The 'hero' puts up for a couple of nights in a hut in a Black Sea port and is nearly murdered by smugglers because he knows too much. The tale confirms Pechorin's lust and recklessness, but since he tells it, we are also made aware of more attractive elements in him—his love of nature and his self-questioning. Ironically, the behaviour of the smuggler Yanko towards a blind boy shows a callousness as great as Pechorin himself could reveal, and the smuggler's girl plays with his feelings as he himself plays with those of other girls, and all but destroys him. Pechorin is shown up as gullible, vulnerable, and also as perhaps the agent of a 'fate' which he sees as beyond his control.

The longest section of the book, 'Princess Mary', is presented as a 'diary' kept by Pechorin at the watering place, Piatigorsk, where he stayed before proceeding to join Maxim Maximych and abduct Bela. Here we see Pechorin in relation to 'society'—to an empty, mediocre world of gamblers and well-to-do nonentities. The more interesting people there bring out, by comparison, Pechorin's superiority. Grushnitsky, a cadet posing in a private's greatcoat as an officer demoted for duelling and as a man of 'romantic destiny'—his ambition, Pechorin notes, 'is to become the hero of a novel'—is a shallow fake, beside whom Pechorin's own depth is obvious. Dr Werner, a sceptical materialist who, with his wit and intelligence, has fallen foul of society, thinks he understands Pechorin completely—but his ultimate failure to do so is a measure of Pechorin's complexity. Then there are two women: Princess Mary, sojourning with her mother, and Vera, a married woman, the only person who ever understood Pechorin, whose arrival reawakens her attraction for him, but who is mortally ill.

Pechorin first behaves insultingly towards Mary, then makes her fall in love with him. He sleeps with Vera and destroys the relative amicability of her marriage. He arouses the hatred of Grushnitsky and kills him, in a fiercely exciting duel on a ledge over a ravine, during which he displays appalling coolness. Pechorin then finds that Vera has left and rides his horse to death in pursuit of her. The authorities pack him off at once to Maxim Maximych's fort. He parts with cruel candour from the lovesick Mary—'Princess … you know I was making fun of you.'

But why Pechorin does all this is not so easy to report. At times he he acts with total ruthlessness, at others he has to force himself to act coldly. At one point it seems that Mary's falling in love with him is almost as much an accident as Vera's arrival, which makes it necessary for him to cultivate the Princess, as he can meet Vera unobtrusively at her mother's house. At another, he seems to be calculating every move with a view to asserting his power over the woman and destroying Grushnitsky's pretences to her. When he fights his duel, he is glad that things work out so that he has every excuse to kill Grushnitsky, yet he himself runs a terrible risk, and still gives his opponent a last chance to save himself from certain death if only he will retract the slander which provoked the duel.

All Lermontov's main characters are complex. Princess Mary herself is marvellously well presented as both commonplace and spirited, both 'fair game' for a clever seducer and a human being who deserves our compassion. Even Grushnitsky is much more than a cardboard 'type'. But these characters are made vivid 'from the outside'. What is both fascinating and baffling about Pechorin is that, even when he tells us so much about himself, and even though we 'see' him clearly, his essential character still eludes definition. We cannot be sure whether his confession, which awakens Mary's sympathy, when he tells her of an unhappy childhood and of how the world's misunderstandings of him have made him a 'moral cripple', is a sincere expression of a will to virtue thwarted. If it is, how do we square it with his Machiavellian exclamation in the privacy of his diary—'I love enemies, though not in the Christian way.' We can make sense of him only if we accept that (like Heathciff, and like certain characters in Dostoevsky) he is a man in whom generous responses and vicious impulses coexist (and this is his cardinal quality) with unresting intelligence.

It is an intelligence which has cut through all the shames of society and has recoiled upon itself to cut away the will to shape any consistent course, to obey any routine, to be stable in anything. More positively, it is an intelligence which permits Pechorin to be as candid in admitting his own cruelties and inconsistencies as he is in exposing the faults of others. It is a wonderful medium through which we can explore the failures and pretences of human nature, and we must, after all, value any searching insights it can offer us. But it has no objectives. It precludes objectives. Like his creator, Pechorin stops short at diagnosis and does not aspire to cure.

Even 'freedom' has come to define itself for him negatively. He could not marry, he says: 'My heart would turn to stone, its warmth gone forever.… I'll hazard my life, even my honour, twenty times, but I will not sell my freedom. Freedom is by implication merely the state of being-not-tied. And the final episode of the novel confirms that Pechorin's problem is bound up with his inability to make valuable use of the more positive kinds of freedom which he is not completely sure that he has.

The self-accusations which recur in his diary, along with the occasions when he reports himself as consciously mastering his own feelings, show that he considers himself 'free'. Yet the evening before he goes out to kill Grushnitsky, he declares himself an 'axe in the hands of fate. Like an engine of execution, I've descended on the heads of the condemned, often without malice, but always without pity.'

The last story in the book, 'The Fatalist', comes from Pechorin's time at Maxim Maximych's fort. An officer named Vuličh puts a pistol to his head to prove that what happens to men is 'predestined' and pulls the trigger. IT misfires, and Vuličh wins his bet. But Pechorin, who has bet against him, has seen on his face that 'strange mark of inevitable doom' which soldiers claim appears a few hours before a man dies. And later that night, Vuličh is murdered by a drunken Cossack. To put his own fate to the test, Pechorin risks his life to capture the killer. But nothing, of course, is 'proved'. 'I prefer to doubt everything,' Pechorin concludes. As for Maxim Maximych who has the book's last word, the whole subject of predestination means nothing to him. It is Pechorin's misfortune that his intellect is so developed that he belongs, even more than the rest of his godless and cynical generation, to a world in which the stars have been deprived of their role as arbiters of mankind and in which religious faith is disappearing. His generation, he says, 'drift through the world, without beliefs, pride, pleasure of fear, except that automatic fear that grips us when we think of the certainty of death. We can no longer make great sacrifices for the good of mankind, or even for our own happiness, because we know they are unattainable.'

Pechorin is, truly, a 'moral cripple' because he has no faith in any pattern in or above life which might give shape and hope to his own existence. All that he can conceive is a blind and arbitrary 'fate'. Yet he cannot and does not consistently act as if he were merely 'fate's instrument'. As John Mersereau puts it, … 'His occasional recourse to a belief in the power of fate is an act of self-deception, a convenient way to blame an exterior power for the tragic results of the exercise of his will.'

So he is a 'hero of his time' in a wider sense than we might suppose. He is an intellectual frontiersman acting with joyless irresponsibility in a world which has no God. He anticipates Turgenev's Bazarov and Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, but his actions, unlike those of such later so-called 'nihilists', believers in nothing, have no direction whatsoever except that dictated by the impulse of the moment. Pechorin is utterly uncommitted. To draw this comparison, however, is to show his relevance to the Russia of 1840, when there was no 'political' activity except talk, when seduction and frontier fighting and duelling were the only outlets for frustration and when only a few young Hegelian idealists had any positive alternative to offer to a stultified Orthodox Christianity which was subservient to a mindless state.