SOURCE: "Old Wine in New Bottles: The Legacy of Lermontov," in Poetica Slavica: Studies in Honour of Zbigniew Folejewski, edited by J. Douglas Clayton and Gunter Schaarschmidt, University of Ottowa Press, 1981, pp. 41-52.

We have no equivalent for Russian literature of Ian Watt's book The Rise of the Novel, which attempts to shed light on the extrinsic causes, both ideological and socioeconomic, for the appearance and popularity of the novel in eighteenth-century England. Nor does there exist as yet a study that would do justice to the pre-history and early beginnings of the Russian novel from an intrinsic, more narrowly formal perspective—one that might pinpoint the most significant harbingers of what Mirsky refers to as "The Golden Age of the Russian novel" during the reign of Alexander II (1855-81).

Perhaps the main reason why so few attempts have been made to grapple with this problem of literary evolution is the general tendency to accept the traditional argument that as "founder of Russian literature" (in Belìnsky's well-known phrase) Pushkin laid the foundations of the novel in Russia with his Evgenii Onegin. No one would deny that Pushkin's works are the lifeblood of all literate Russians: he is their Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare rolled into one. In John Bayley's pregnant phrase Pushkin "frees his fellow countrymen from the weight of their history, even from the burden of themselves…"

Evgenii Onegin in particular is part of the cultural baggage of all Russian readers and writers, and it would be difficult to exaggerate its overall impact. Pushkin subtitled it mischievously "a novel in verse" in order to exasperate Shishkov and his followers. But we should not be deceived by the oxymoron. It is a mistake to view Onegin as a novel since by any definition of the genre one cares to adopt a novel must be written in prose. Onegin certainly does contain a number of features familiar to us from our reading of novels; however, much the same could be said of The Canterbury Tales.

Any serious study of the rise of the Russian novel would have to pay its respects to Onegin, but we are still left with a gap of a quarter century or more before the appearance of the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. To credit Pushkin with bringing about the rise of the Russian novel is to suggest that the ground lay fallow while the seeds sown by Onegin germinated for a full generation.

Less extravagant, though still open to serious question, is the claim that Pushkin shares the honour with Gogol. So, for example, Henry Gifford argues: "Half the achievements to come in the great age of the Russian novel may be traced back to Pushkin. For the other half, strained and urgent and declamatory, Gogol was the prime mover" [The Novel in Russia from Pushkin to Pasternak]. Significantly, Gifford makes no effort to demonstrate this thesis. Furthermore, elsewhere in his book he gives a rather different assessment, which he does not stop to examine, but which in my view is closer to the facts: "A Hero of Our Time made the necessary link between Onegin and the Russian prose novel in its maturity." Even here Lermontov receives only a backhanded compliment, the implication being that he served merely as a conduit or fertilizer.

The noted Pushkinist Boris Tomashevsky was surely correct in his assessment that the influence of Onegin on Lermontov's novel was neither extensive nor decisive. In the first place, as he says, "a novel in verse cannot totally determine the style and mode (manery) of the prose novel." Secondly, the "philosophical problematics" of A Hero of Our Time do not depend on Onegin. Lermontov, unlike Pushkin, viewed Byron as a "philosopher-poet." He did not come to Byron through a Pushkinian filter, but directly via French literature, which dominated European prose fiction in the 1830's.

Lermontov also parts company with Pushkin in his fascination with German literature (Schiller, Goethe) and philosophy (Schelling), again typical of the contemporary French cultural scene. Boris Eikhenbaum has pointed out that Venevitinov and the liubomudry are far more important than Pushkin for an understanding of Lermontov's works, which draw upon "Russian Schellingism" (russkoe shellingianstvo) for their central idea, the dialectic of opposites and the problematics of good and evil in man. The links between these concerns and the "accursed questions" explored by Dostoevsky need no special pleading.

Pushkin treats German philosophy ironically in the person of Lensky, but Lermontov takes it seriously, thereby setting the stage for the mature Russian novel.

I do not suggest that Lermontov is the missing link, nor that such a link exists: i. e., a single author or work responsible for establishing the novel in Russia. I do argue that Pushkin's role, and more especially Evgenii Onegin's, has been exaggerated, and conversely that insufficient attention has been devoted to the critical part played by Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. Certainly Lermontov's importance has not been ignored, but all too often he gets squashed between Pushkin and Gogol. Lermontov studies as a whole, it seems to me, are skewed off balance with the result that far too much time is spent tracking down possible domestic and foreign sources for his works and far too little time is given over to an exploration of what Eikhenbaum called many years ago Lermontov's "art of fusion" (iskusstvo splava), his ability to combine a variety of available elements into a new and original form.

It is arguably true that Lermontov had a more lasting impact on the shape and contours of the Russian novel than either Pushkin or Gogol. A Hero of Our Time possesses three of the most central characteristics of the Russian novel: 1) psychological analysis; 2) concern with ideas; 3) sociopolitical and ethical awareness. None of these features is the exclusive property of the novel in Russia, but the intensity with which they are engaged does help define the Russian novel and differentiate it from the novel elsewhere.

As early as 1856 Chernyshevsky, in an oft-quoted review, noted that Tolstoi's interest in the "forms and laws of the psychic process, the dialectic of the soul" linked him more closely to Lermontov than to any previous writer. More recently, R. G. Christian, writing about War and Peace, suggests that Lermontov's novel "may have provided, in the character of Pechorin, some of the features of the young Prince Andrei and of Dolokhov, as well as impressing and influencing Tolstoy by its extensive use of psychological introspection and interior monologue, and its ironical attitude to poseurs."

Lermontov's metaphysical concerns and the importance attached to ideas by his characters certainly looks ahead to the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoi, and particularly Dostoevsky. The underlying theme that runs like a thread through all five sections of A Hero of Our Time—the opposition between predestination and freedom—is echoed and expanded in the "Pro and Contra" section of The Brothers Karamazov. The critical difference is that Lermontov remains adamantly defiant, whereas Dostoevsky resolves the opposition by acceptance of Christian humility.

The "hero" and "time" of Lermontov's title place his work in the mainstream of Russian prose fiction in the nineteenth century. I would agree with Rufus Mathewson that Russian literature as a whole was "hero-centred, if not heroic in the conventional sense" and that Onegin and Pechorin "established a pedigree for the literary protagonist in the early decades of the nineteenth century which persisted to the point of becoming a stereotype."

A measure of Lermontov's achievement may be gained if we recall the embryonic state of prose fiction in general and the novel in particular at the time he was writing. Pushkin had been killed early in 1837, leaving behind The Tales of Belkin, The Captain's Daughter, "The Queen of Spades," and several unfinished projects. Gogol had published collections of stories, but his novel did not appear until 1842, the year after Lermontov was himself killed in a duel. Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Turgenev, and Tolstoi were still waiting in the wings.

The early efforts of Pushkin and Gogol are notable for two characteristics. First, they are in the short form or are collections of stories given some semblance of unity by the framing narrator, e. g., Rudy Panko or Belkin. Secondly, they are usually told in the first person, often by an intruding narrator, sometimes a participant in the action. Pushkin performed an invaluable service in Evgenii Onegin by acquiring contemporary Russian reality as a viable setting against which to examine the interrelationship of the individual and society. However, he did so in verse, rather than in prose, because he adopted as his vehicle the long narrative poem popularized by Byron. Even more important, Pushkin took the bantering, ironic narrative voice from Byron's Don Juan. As Nabokov says in the introduction to his four-volume edition of Onegin, the narrator plays such a vital part in the poem that he becomes a third male character after Onegin i Lenskii, a "Stylized Pushkin, Onegin's friend." Furthermore, Pushkin's Muse becomes a third female character after Tatiana and Olga. Onegin is an inimitable tour deforce that closed down its own form, just as Milton's Paradise Lost had done in English literature a hundred and fifty years earlier.

Gogol, who sought to emulate Pushkin in everything, claiming after the fact with little or no corroborating evidence that Pushkin had provided him with the plots for his major works and took a special interest in his career, even gave his prose novel the subtitle poema (Russian for narrative poem) in an obvious attempt to reverse Pushkin's "novel in verse." Gogol's lyrical digressions sometimes skate close to the line separating pathos from bathos, but never cross it. And yet he dominates Dead Souls just as Pushkin does Onegin. In its own way Gogol's narrative persona is as unique as Pushkin's. Neither one provided a model for an appropriate authorial stance in the long prose form.

Lermontov shared with Pushkin the difficulty of switching from lyric poetry to prose fiction. The lyric poet is used to writing in the first person and addressing the beloved or a friend. John Stuart Mill claimed that poetry is "overheard" but what of prose fiction? Mikhail Bakhtin advanced the idea that the novelist is engaged in a dialogue with the reader. Whether one agrees or not, it is surely true that the narrative stance of a novel differs from that of a poem. What may pass in a poem would seem antiquated or precious in the standard nineteenth-century novel, which has to be addressed to an audience, and relies for its effect on persuading the audience to suspend disbelief.

A Hero of Our Time is a young man's book but also a very ambitious book. It is no denigration of Lermontov to point out that he did not solve all the narrative problems he tackled. His skillful coalescing into a unified whole of various types of story or tale popular in Russia during the 1830's (travel notes, high society tale, personal confession, and exotic tale) and his use of multiple narrators represent a considerable advance in sophistication. Also innovative was Lermontov's manipulation of real and narrative chronology, or as the Formalists put it, "fabula" and "siuzhet."

Let us remember that even after Lermontov's death the new generation of prose writers themselves began with first person narratives and/or the short form or collections of tales. Dostoevsky's first work was Poor Folk, a novella in letters. His first work following his exile was Notes from the House of the Dead, to be followed by Notes from the Underground. Dostoevsky even thought of narrating in the first person as a confession the novel that became Crime and Punishment. Turgenev too started out with the short form and later collected his tales as A Sportsman's Sketches. Tolstoi began with the autobiographical Childhood and war stories based in part on his experiences in the Crimean War. It took Tolstoi a considerable time to learn his craft well enough to tackle the long form and to escape the use of the first person narrator. It seems that the foreign fiction he read in The Contemporary (Sovremennik) in the late forties and early fifties consisted largely of novels narrated in the first person: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Lamartine's Confessions, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Andersen's Story of My Life, Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, and Dickens' David Copperfield. There was not a great deal of prose fiction in Russian literature for Tolstoi to learn from. In fact, he wrote in his diary that Pushkin's prose was "out of date."

Lermontov is of crucial importance in the rise of the Russian novel not only because of the contributions he made, but also because of the narrative problems he failed to resolve. The critical development that led the way to the "Golden Age of the Russian novel" involved a change in point of view from first person to the third person narrator, and more particularly to what Dorrit Cohn suggests we call "narrated monologue."

"Narrated monologue" has become so widespread as the standard method of story-telling in the novel that it is hard to imagine a time when it was not practised. But such was the case in the early decades of Russian fiction. As we have seen, first-person narrators and the short form were typical until the second half of the nineteenth century. The first-person narrator is especially appropriate in the short form, where the writer can fully delineate only one character, and aim for one effect. A good illustration in American literature would be the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

My argument is, therefore, that the "how" was perhaps even more important than the "who" or "what" in the rise of the Russian novel. It is true that there have been novels related in the first person, but no literature can long survive on them as an exclusive diet. There is nothing surprising in the early development of the Russian novel, which parallels the early development of the English novel in the eighteenth century, where the first-person narratives of Defoe, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, give way to the third-person omniscient narrator in Tom Jones. Given the psychological, philosophical, ethical and sociopolitical concerns of the Russian novel in the reign of Alexander II, it was inevitable that a sophisticated and flexible narrative method, embedding first person in the text where needed, would be required.

A Hero of Our Time is a transitional work in that it moves Russian fiction from the short to the long form and from first-person narrative to multiple viewpoints. Lermontov has three narrators, not just one, but he does not take the final step toward narrated monologue. He might have done so had he lived longer.

To illustrate the uses and limitations of Lermontov's narrative method, I will compare and contrast similar scenes and situations taken from A Hero of Our Time and Tolstoi's Anna Karenina. In placing passages from these two novels side by side I am not trying to prove that Tolstoi was influenced in any direct way by Lermontov, although certain portions of "Princess Mary" do read like a rough sketch or outline of the Kitty-Vronsky-Anna triangle. These echoes are instructive for a comparison of narrative method. I will give three brief examples. In answer to his own question as to why is he pursuing Princess Mary when he has no wish to seduce her or desire to marry her, Pechorin muses:

… there is boundless delight in the possession of a young, barely unfolded soul! It is like a flower whose best fragrance emanates to meet the first ray of the sun. It should be plucked that very minute and after inhaling one's fill of it, one should throw it away on the road: perchance, someone will pick it up!

Very late in her pregnancy, Anna ceases to be the same desirable woman that Vronsky had pursued earlier. The narrator tells us:

Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out, and when she spoke of the actress a spiteful expression had distorted her face. He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had picked, in which he found it difficult to discover the beauty which made him pick and destroy it.

Of course, the comparison of a woman to a faded flower has long since become a cliche. What is instructive here is that Lermontov must allow Pechorin to be conscious of his motivations to the point where he sounds like a demonic, Gothic, hero. Pechorin declares that his main pleasure is to "subjugate to my will all that surrounds me," in order to gratify his pride, and declares that happiness is "Sated pride." On the other hand, Tolstoi's method of narration allows him to reveal motivations and thoughts in his hero, of which Vronsky is not fully aware. Tolstoi has Vronsky begin this train of thought by thinking that "his best happiness was already behind".

In A Hero of Our Time, after Pechorin has vented his spleen in a private conversation with Princess Mary, the following dialogue takes place:

"You are a dangerous man!" she said to me. "I would sooner find myself in a wood under a murderer's knife than be the victim of your sharp tongue … I ask you seriously, when it occurs to you to talk badly about me, better take a knife and cut my throat: I don't think you will find it very difficult."

"Do I look like a murderer?"

"You are worse …"

In Anna Karenina, Vronsky is also likened to a murderer, but not by the woman victim; instead it is the narrator who intrudes to make the comparison shortly after Vronsky and Anna have consummated their love for the first time:

Looking at him, she felt her degradation physically and she could not utter another word. He felt what a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has deprived of life.

Tolstoy's narrator continues in this Victorian vein for several more lines, but the point is already clear. This is a salutary reminder to us that third person narration can mask authorial interference in the story, and be less objective than Lermontov's dramatized dialogue.

My third example is more complex. It involves similar scenes in which physical and emotional well-being are related. Lermontov has grasped the physiological truth that how a man feels about his relationships with others often influences and is influenced by how he is feeling about his body. So Pechorin, upon bidding Vera farewell after a tryst, moves from "My heart painfully contracted as after the first parting. Oh, how that feeling gladdened me!" immediately to "My face is pale but still fresh-complexioned, my limbs are supple and svelte, my thick hair curls, my eyes sparkle, my blood is ebullient." The interchange between Pechorin's physicality and his emotions is sketched in rather tired language.

The day after Anna tells Vronsky she is pregnant, he is hurrying in a carriage to see her, and his anticipation at seeing her "all combined into one general impression of a joyous sense of life." Tolstoi continues to examine Vronsky's feelings:

He had often before had this joyous sense of physical well-being, but never before had he been so fond of himself, of his own body, as at that moment. It gave him pleasure to feel the slight pain in his strong leg, it was pleasant to feel the muscular sensation of movement in his chest as he breathed. The same bright and cold August day which made Anna feel so hopeless seemed exhilarating and invigorating to him and refreshed his face and neck, which were still glowing after the drenching he had given them under the tap. The scent of brilliantine on his moustache seemed to him particularly pleasant in the fresh air.

He spurs the driver on to go "Faster, faster!" with the same urge to extend his physical sensations that Pechorin demonstrates after his tryst with Vera, galloping off to lather intentionally both himself and his horse.

Tolstoi handles the scene in a dynamic way, using concrete details. Whereas Pechorin described his legs as "supple limbs," Vronsky "dropped his legs, crossed one leg over the other, and taking it in his hand, felt the springy muscle of the calf." In Tolstoi supple limbs become legs in motion, with a sense of bone and muscle so palpable that one can almost feel them. The elements of both scenes are superficially similar—each one contains a man leaving or going to his mistress; each man is happy while the mistress is unhappy; each man's happiness is reflected in a canvassing of his own body with self-satisfaction which culminates in a desire to exert himself and his horses (or in the case of Pechorin, his horse) to go even faster. Each passage even contains a glance at the passing scenery. Pechorin swallows the "redolent air" and gazes at the mountains, concluding with supreme egotism, "There is no feminine gaze that I would not forget at the sight of mountains covered with curly vegetation." Tolstoi's narrator, in an indirect but far more telling comment, gives us Vronsky's impression: "Everything was beautiful, like a pretty landscape painting which has been only recently finished and varnished."

Vronsky's self-absorption and rather vulgar taste in art are conveyed in a subtle manner by Tolstoi's use of "narrated monologue," whereas Lermontov is obliged to have Pechorin declare his feelings and thoughts directly in a way that sometimes seems strained and melodramatic. The character has to be omniscient rather than the narrator. Anything the hero does not know and does not write down is lost to the reader. There can seldom be any difference in cognition between Pechorin and the reader. On the other hand, Vronsky does not realize that Anna feels "hopeless" on this bright sunny day. His self-satisfaction with his own body contrasts to Anna's despair at the changes taking place in her body due to her pregnancy. Pechorin is presented to the reader as a finished and completed personality, and the scenes of his relationships to others are often presented as a series of frozen tableaux vivants Tolstoi, on the other hand, with his interest in the "dialectic of the soul" adopts a different approach. He wants to trace the evolution of thoughts and emotions over time. The difference between the two novels is akin to the difference between viewing slides and watching a motion picture.

We should bear in mind that the two authors had different aims. Not for a moment do I suggest that Lermontov should have written his novel in a different way. By selecting a first-person narrator (Pechorin's "journal") Lermontov makes his hero more challenging and enigmatic. Furthermore, as Wayne C. Booth has remarked, this type of inside view "can be of immeasurable value in forcing us to see the human worth of a character whose actions, objectively considered, we would deplore" [The Rhetoric of Fiction]. In addition, Lermontov obviously intended to impress upon the reader the absolute honesty of Pechorin's confession, written in a diary for only his own eyes and not for publication. By using three narrators and by manipulating the chronological sequence of events in the novel Lermontov is able to achieve a considerable dramatic effect and intensity.

Tolstoi does not employ multiple narrators, but he is able to achieve the same result more subtly by employing the "narrated monologue" strategy instead of the discovered manuscript or first-person confession. He also uses interior monologue and stream of consciousness (the embedded first person narrative to which I alluded earlier). Tolstoi's narrator moves inside one character after another to provide a variety of views on the action and other characters. Consider, for example, the view given of Anna at the ball early in the novel through the eyes and emotions of Kitty (not Vronsky), or the view of Anna and Vronsky at their country estate through the gentle but disapproving eyes of Dolly. Thus Tolstoi is able to give a full delineation of many characters. In A Hero of Our Time, we know quite a bit about Pechorin, a little about Maksim Maksimych, and not much about anybody else.

The reader would like to know a great deal more about some characters in A Hero of Our Time, particularly Vera. (It is a pity the travelling officer did not come across her diary!) In the one piece of dialogue in which we hear her voice for more than a few lines, she says to Pechorin:

"You know that I am your slave; I never was able to resist you … and for this I shall be punished. You will cease to love me. I wish, at least, to save my reputation … not for my own sake: you know that very well! Oh, I beseech you, do not torment me as before with empty doubts and feigned coldness. I shall die soon, perhaps. I feel myself getting weaker every day … and, in spite of that, I cannot think of a future life, I think only of you … You mean do not understand the delights of a glance, of a handshake … while I, I swear to you, I when listening to your voice, I experience such deep, strange bliss that the most ardent kisses could not replace it".

Here as so often in A Hero of Our Time the reader is presented with a static assertion. Vera's accusations and fears are a collation of the sentiments expressed by Anna over hundreds of pages as her relationship with Vronsky gradually sours.

One of Lermontov's problems is that he cannot introduce a moral voice into the narrative in order to give the reader some unobtrusive guidance. Maksim Maksimych hardly qualifies and the traveling officer is not much help. The reader is left alone with Pechorin. It is not surprising that many readers have had a hard time teasing out of the text Pechorin's self-deception and the inconsistency of his reliance on predestination or fate to justify the exercise of his free will. Pechorin is forced to engage in dialogues with himself to answer questions a reader might have about his motivations: "I often wonder, why I do so stubbornly try to gain the love of a little maiden whom I do not wish to seduce, and whom I shall never marry?" On Vronsky's trifling with the affections of Kitty the narrator states:

He did not realize that his behavior towards Kitty had a name of its own, that it was the seduction of a girl without the intention of marrying her, and that this kind of seduction is the sort of reprehensible thing common among brilliant young men like himself.

Here the reader enjoys the pleasure of learning something about Vronsky's behavior that he is not aware of himself, where Pechorin tells himself and us at great length how wicked and malicious he is.

Obviously, the comparisons that I have made tend to work to Lermontov's disadvantage, but let us remember that Lermontov was in his early to mid twenties when he wrote A Hero of Our Time whereas Anna Karenina is the work of a mature writer in his late fifties. Had Tolstoi died at the same age as Lermontov he would probably have deserved little more than a footnote in histories of Russian literature. Furthermore, as the second of the examples adduced above illustrates, there are dangers in third-person narration which Tolstoi was not always successful in avoiding. Some of the weakest pages in Anna Karenina occur when his narrator identifies too closely with Levin. However, it is clear that Tolstoi's narrative method allows a great deal more flexibility than does Lermontov's. Lermontov's novel remains a remarkable achievement, and a necessary step in the evolution of the mature Russian novel, which could not come into its "Golden Age" until writers had exploited all narrative techniques and methods.