SOURCE: Liberman, Anatoly. “Lermontov as a Poet.” In Mikhail Lermontov: Major Poetical Works, translated by Anatoly Liberman, pp. 8-22. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

[In the following essay, Liberman provides a brief overview of Lermontov's reputation as a poet, praising him for his introduction of impressionism into Russian literature.]

Lermontov was confronted with the most difficult poetic task—to overcome the Pushkin canon.

(Eikhenbaum)

To be so dependent on Pushkin, so totally, so completely, so slavishly; and to shake off this dependence—this is where Lermontov's genius manifested itself.

(Anna Akhmatova, as reported by Lidia Chukovskaya)

The enormous literature on Lermontov falls roughly into six groups.

1) Biography. In 1841 Lermontov's readers knew nothing at all about his life. Even several decades later, the political scandal associated with his name sealed many mouths. His letters were destroyed, and his friends kept their recollections to themselves. At the same time his enemies spoke often and readily. Thanks to the toil of scholars, we now know Lermontov's biography rather well (including a lot of details that he would rather not have divulged). However, Lermontov's last duel is partly wrapped in mystery, and the dates of his works often remain unclear. The life of no other Russian author has given such impetus to the detective genre as it flourishes in Lermontov studies. An investigator can read hundreds of pages, race from town to town, peruse voluminous archives, and so on, to learn only that the name of the lady in whose house Lermontov stayed two days is beyond recovery but that both of her daughters seem to have died unmarried.

2) Textology. This is a traditional and indispensable area. It plays a very important role in Lermontov's case, for he was indifferent to the fate of his manuscripts, and his poems usually lack a definitive text. Most of The Demon scholarship, for instance, consists in attempts to find such a text.

3) Ideological interpretation. Probably three-quarters of everything written on Lermontov falls under this rubric. Studies of Lermontov's religious views, moral attitudes, and political creed belong here. Every epoch and trend discovered in Lermontov what it needed, emphasizing in turn his mysticism, his atheism, his Slavophile bias, his dedication to Belinsky's cause and his influence on Belinsky, his melancholy, his militant spirit, his moral degradation, his tenderness and purity, or whatever. As a rule, Lermontov and his lyric hero have been treated as one person.

4) Comparative literature. Lermontov was a cultured man: He read poets in three European languages, apart from Russian, and his works are full of borrowings. Some of his predecessors played an outstanding role in his development. For years it was common to search for Lermontov's “sources.” In the Soviet Union this practice came to an end with the official position that foreign influences on Russian authors are always questionable; also, Lermontov had been proclaimed a classic and as such was allowed a certain degree of independence. In recent years, sources of and parallels to Lermontov's work have again attracted some attention, and the Lermontovskaya Èntsiklopediya (1981) treats this subject with all the seriousness it deserves.

5) Lermontov's artistic method. Literary historians are seldom interested in literature itself. In Lermontov's case, they have always preferred to discuss his attitude toward his God, his monarch, and his female friends, rather than analyze his poetics. After reading hundreds of critical essays, one gathers the impression that Lermontov's principal merit is that he was very melancholy or very brave or very profound, that he sympathized with the mountaineers, loved liberty, and described the Caucasus. There are almost no works that question whether Lermontov was a great poet and whether his fame is deserved. Lermontov's contemporaries also treated his production in a strictly utilitarian way (for instance called it antipatriotic, immoral, etc.), and Belinsky, Lermontov's greatest supporter, was as utilitarian as any of them, only his approach was “progressive.” The Lermontovskaya Èntsiklopediya is an important step forward.

6) Popularization. Lermontov is regularly studied in Soviet schools, colleges, and universities, and this fact has called forth numerous commentaries, bibliographies for teachers, children's editions, and the like. Here the most popular genre is a semischolarly book of the Great Lives type. A spate of monographs exists called Lermontov, but few of them are original.¹

In the Commentary I drew on the observations of various people, regardless of their main sphere of interest, but this article will be devoted entirely to one subject: Lermontov's poetics. Section B is the result of my own research, and the few scholars who are my direct allies have been cited in full. My view of Lermontov's style is the translator's view and differs considerably from what students of Russian literature find in manuals and textbooks.

A. THE WORLD OF LERMONTOV'S LYRIC HERO

Lermontov's lyric hero, “'mid men a wanderer and stranger” and a plaything of fate, is strongly attached to this life and craves the love of women and the friendship of men. But the women of his choice seldom want him. Overweening and smug, or simply indifferent, if not callous, they pass him by. He is haunted by the fear that he will finish his days on a scaffold and is sure that his death will shake the world; then the woman he has loved will be exposed to the mob's wrath—but let her not curse his memory. Although uncertain of himself, he can arouse love, but he is unable to reciprocate the woman's feeling and brings about her sorrow or death. His friends are few. The worthiest of them die young, others forget him the moment he is out of sight. The feast of life is forever going on, and he pretends to be part of it, but he knows that he is a stranger at this feast—an unbidden, bored guest.

All is rootless and volatile around him. Attachments, passions, and people are like clouds in the sky: the wind drives them on, but no one can guess whether or from whence. Nothing in the world leaves a trace. Nor does he; his many travels are useless, because he has no destination. Far, very far away, his true homeland lies in all its beauty. Perhaps long ago he was there; he seems to remember that land, but to return to it he must die. If it were possible to combine life and death: to die and not become dust! Other opposites meet: all things are amusing and sad at the same time; when in love, we are cold, though our blood is afire; the very mineral spring in the Caucasus is boiling ice; but the union of life and death will never come about, for dead men either cannot respond to other people's love, or fail to find the oblivion without which Paradise is worse than hell.

Earthly existence is full of noises: each object gives forth a rasping sound of its own. “The music of heavenly grace” is stronger, but this music can at times be drowned out by the cacophony of life. Everyone the hero meets wears a mask. It is hard to live among puppets, but this masquerade is a blessing in disguise. What would happen if we started exposing our sores to view? The hero is at peace with himself only when his soul merges with nature and becomes part of the universe. Then, tears flow from his eyes, and these tears are like the gentlest, the sweetest strains of music.

Lermontov's hero is doomed to be a poet and a prophet. Although he is solitary and sad, he is ready to tell the world his message; but the rabble will not listen, and his only reward is a wreath of thorns. Sometimes his pent-up passions, his thirst for activity will break through, and then leopards are not stronger than he.

This is not a sketch of Lermontov's own character, but of the inner world of his hero. The most noticeable feature of this hero is that he has almost no points of contact with the world of men. In his dealings with men, repulsion largely prevails over attraction, and he is pushed to the outskirts of life. He retains the sharpness of his vision but is made to look at everything from a distance. Consequently, he always sees the whole better than details. It is my goal to show that, given the estrangement of Lermontov's lyric hero from his fellow men, Lermontov's poetic technique was the best possible.

B. LERMONTOV'S POETIC TECHNIQUE

At a technical level, half of the history of poetry is the history of the epithet, and nothing is more revealing in Lermontov's authorship than his use of the epithet. His texts are full of qualifying adjectives; in some poems there is one before each noun, but they are seldom informative. The sea in Lermontov's works is always blue, waves are also blue and constantly chase one another; sand is golden (and only golden), Chechens are angry, and horses raven black. Since in most cases Lermontov does not imitate folklore, these words lack the dignity of “fixed” epithets and sound repetitive and trivial. “Eternal” crops up in nearly half of his lyrics. Very many things are called mysterious (tale, saga, sadness, ideas, conversation, etc.), and what is not “mysterious” tends to be besplódny (‘arid, barren, futile’: science, struggle, soil, fields, Russia herself). Some epithets are downright puzzling. A dead girl's shoulders (No. 52) [Poem numbers refer to the sequence of works in Mikhail Lermontov: Major Poetical Works,refer to tare swarthy and pale at the same time. She has a fair-colored braid, but her head is white as snow. Teheran in “The Debate” (No. 80) dreams on a variegated divan before an emerald fountain, and an emerald fountain lulls the youth to sleep in the 1832 “Wish” (No. 20). Both times “an emerald fountain” must have been chosen for the sake of its verbal appeal. In the original of “Three Palms” most epithets are redundant: hard humps (about camels), swarthy arms (about women), and the like. In “The Terek's Gifts” (discussed a few lines above) we come across such dubious embellishments as “a noble trickle of burning blood” (on the dead Cabardinian's head) and “a crimson trickle of blood” (on the dead Cossack girl). The more one reads Lermontov's lyrics, the clearer it becomes that the poet was often indifferent to the exact meaning of his epithets. They are either too hackneyed to add anything, or too vague. But, indifferent to the epithet, he was extremely sensitive to other elements (see below), so the picture would emerge unexpectedly good. As pointed out in Section A, Lermontov had no other choice than to observe life from the outside, and therefore he saw the whole rather than the many details. He did not care whether each of his strokes was justified, as long as he made the finished canvas tell a convincing tale. If a term is needed, we can say that Lermontov was an impressionist.

From time to time scholars have realized this all-important circumstance, but either because the term impressionist has been applied to Tyutchev, Fet, and Ánnenesky but not to Lermontov,² or because it is unusual to find an impressionist so early—in an epoch usually typified by the question, “Romantic or Realist?”—the observations to this effect by several critics have hardly been understood, let alone developed.

In 1924 Eikhenbaum published his innovative book on Lermontov. In later days (until at least 1959, the year of Eikhenbaum's death), it was customary to treat this book with condescension; allegedly, it is full of Formalistic excesses (besides, Eikhenbaum had a low opinion of Belinsky's verbiage), which the distinguished author overcame in his subsequent works. In reality, strangled by a host of mediocre and self-seeking opponents, Eikhenbaum overcame his originality, his insights, and his intuition. Among other things, he said in 1924:

Lermontov writes in formulas that seem to hypnotize the author himself: he no longer feels semantic shades and details in them, they exist for him as abstract speech blocks, as alloys of words and not as concatenations. He is interested in the general emotional effect, as if he presupposed a quick reader who would not stop at details of meaning and syntax but would seek only the impression of the whole. The semantic base of words and word groups begins to dim, but then their declamatory coloring (that of sound and emotion) begins to shine with unprecedented brilliance. This shift in the very nature of the poetic language, the change of the dominant from the effects inherent in sing-song declamational verse, is the main peculiarity, strength, and essence of Lermontov's poetics. Herein lies the cause of his fascination with lyric formulas and his attitude toward them as permanent clichés. And this is the source of some of Lermontov's expressions and phrases, which are hard to notice—so strong is the emotional hypnosis of his speech.³

Soon after Eikhenbaum P. M. Bitsílli discovered the unusual quality of Lermontov's vision. If Eikhenbaum's book was dismissed as youthful folly, Bitsilli's article published in an emigrant edition remained quite unknown in the Soviet Union (even the 1981 Lermontovskaya Èntsiklopediya, which refers to non-Soviet sources in Russian, seems to have missed it). In Western works, too, references to it are incidental and rare. In my general evaluation of Lermontov, as is reflected in the Commentary, I am especially indebted to Bitsilli, whose analysis is deep, subtle, and to the point. Bitsilli's statements quoted below are a compression of several passages from his article.

In the world open to our feelings he seems lost, as if he could not see and hear well. When he tries to write like everybody else, the result is such: beautiful granite, high breast, white arms, black eyes, heavy storm, tall plane tree, mighty Kazbék; and this is not only in his childish works: the last three examples are from his masterpieces of the mature epoch. But he is at home in the world of echoes, glimmers, shadows, and wraiths created by imagination in the half-light of dawn, in the mist; in his symbolism very important are such expressions as “shadows of traces,” “shadows of feelings,” “shadows of clouds,” “an echo of Paradise”; and the words “mist,” “clouds,” and so forth turn up all the time. To attract his attention, concrete objects must be grand, dazzling, … but then he sees things that nobody seems to have seen before him: he sees waves “singing a lullaby to the shadow of the cliff,” he sees “clouds, wrapped in the mist, embrace and, intertwined like a heap of snakes, dream carefree on their rock” and finds connections between properties and things that nobody had ever found before him. … What in anyone else would be an expression of weakness, awkwardness, lack of talent, in Lermontov … testifies to his strength, genius, the exclusiveness of his poetic nature. … Lermontov is like a person looking at the Earth literally from some “interplanetary” point of view. … He is able, as it were, to occupy a position exterior to himself. … Among us he is like a far-sighted man among myopics: he sees distant objects better than what is near. … When it comes to things that surround us, that are close and visible to others, he is blind. … When he is at a distance from this world, which is too narrow for him, when he flies over it, he sees it all in perspective; changing epochs, historical and cosmic, open up to him … ; he sees the way to “the unknown land,” … he waits for death in order to watch “a new world” that he has anticipated in his imagination. He treasures things around him, insofar as they are an image and likeness of the other world.⁴

With time Lermontov's artistic method was studied less and less by literary historians. “Formalism” was wiped out and the greatest concern of a whole army of scholars became to show what a brave man Lermontov had been, how he had hated the Tsar and how the Tsar had hated him. As in all Soviet humanistic studies, the main focus was shifted to matters historiographic and pseudo-sociological. An important exception was a long and interesting article by Pumpyansky (who wrote an illuminating essay on Tyutchev in 1928). In places, the article is somewhat rambling, but its idea is worthy of every consideration. According to Pumpyansky, two themes dominate Lermontov's authorship: that of unfulfilled social activity (one might perhaps say “of thirst for action and of social frustration”) and that of naródnost' (relatedness to the people; see note on No. 73).

Two different styles and two different patterns of his poetic speech correspond to these two main themes. Of course, there is no clear-cut chronological border; beginning with 1837, the second style becomes more noticeable, but some of the best works of the first style, e.g., “In Memory of Odoevsky,” were written just in the very last years. Quite provisionally and with reservations we will define this first style as a style of inexact wording, a style that certainly does not go back to Pushkin; the second style we will call exact, but its relative proximity to Pushkin's stylistic norm is in no way a return to Pushkin, it is a phenomenon peculiar to Lermontov.⁵

Examining the structure of “Mother of God, I Shall Pray in Humility” (No. 37), he went on,

Everything is insufficient and therefore requires immediate continuation, a hook-up, a helping hand, for separate notions to be able to move all together. The unit of style is not the line of verse, and within the line not the word, as with Pushkin, but the movement of speech (though, naturally, this juxtaposition is not absolute; different styles can in general be only relatively different). … We can see quite a new, autonomous phenomenon, autonomous in the etymological sense of the word, i.e., conforming to its own Lermontovian law. After B. M. Eikhenbaum's 1924 work it is well known that this law came as a result of a special trend in Russian poetry as far back as the Twenties and is represented by Kozlóv, Podolínsky, and very many others; but this only confirms the fact that this style was historically determined.⁶

It is of course the style of inexact wording, the style in which movement alone defines the poetic effect that can be called impressionistic.⁷

To make our approach to Lermontov's poetic method more convincing, we can use a parallel from the sphere of comic art. Why is Gogol so irresistibly funny? His situations are either trivial (cf. the insignificant anecdotes that gave rise to The Inspector General and Dead Souls), or sad. The main source of merriment is his style. The stupid dialogue of his personages, the grotesque descriptions, and so on,⁸ make everything he wrote funny. Critics have been wondering for years what attracts readers to the seemingly shallow Oscar Wilde. To be sure, Oscar Wilde was not at all shallow, but his magnetism does not depend on his intellectual depth; its secret should be sought in the beauty of his language. Gogol's immortality has nothing to do with his attitude toward bureaucracy; similarly, Lermontov's appeal to many generations of people is not fed by his melancholy or his hatred of Pushkin's murderers. Many cursed bureaucracy and the palace clique, and even more people were solitary and unhappy and put their feelings into versified lines. Nobody remembers them today. Lermontov, as well as Gogol, as well as any author, survives only because he is a great master. Such a conclusion would be self-evident in the history of painting or music, but it usually shocks literary historians.

Impressionism was a perfect medium for a poet with Lermontov's psyche and fate. The difference between him and the French impressionists, for example, Monet and Pissarro, is that the Frenchmen were aware of their method and their rupture with tradition; therefore, they took pride in their innovations. Lermontov's aesthetics, i.e., a system of conscious views on literature, cannot be reconstructed (the few attempts known to me were not worth making), but he must have looked upon himself mainly as Pushkin's follower. He learned from Pushkin and Byron and respected his predecessors. But in spite of his admiration of and indebtedness to Pushkin, he was the very opposite of Pushkin (as Eikhenbaum and Pumpyansky quite correctly pointed out). Pushkin and Lermontov exist side by side in human memory and university syllabi, and, when they are juxtaposed, critics usually contrast them with regard to their temperament. The polarities are expressed in terms of day versus night, sun versus moon, peace versus rebellion, relentless thought versus inner feeling, etc. But the two are not different thinkers, philosophers, or lovers; they are different poets, and the opposition between them rests on their different approach to language.

Pushkin's epithet is varied and amazingly rich in overtones, but it is never ambiguous or imprecise. When Pushkin says in a lyric that a room is suffused with an amber light, he means exactly what he says, but when Lermontov writes that the eyes of his beloved are full of azure light (No. 55:28), this pronouncement is not a statement of fact. First, “full of azure light” is simply a figure of speech, another way of saying “blue”; secondly, azure is one of Lermontov's favorite words, and he endows everybody he loves with azure eyes. Lermontov is a whole stage closer to the Symbolists than Pushkin. He does not yet speak of the “shadows of uncreated creatures” like Bryusov (though remember his “shadows of traces” and “shadows of feelings”!), but, as we have seen, almost everything he describes becomes misty and mysterious. The outlines of the objects he studies are often vague. Russian Symbolists worshiped Pushkin, but, consciously or unconsciously, they owed much more to Lermontov. Blok is the best but not the only example of the link between Lermontov and the Symbolists. Andrey Bely cites admiringly the “azure light” in The First Encounter (‘Pervoe Svidanie’), and, indeed, in the amber light of Pushkin's poetics he would have felt too exposed and uncomfortable.

Lermontov's impressionism is also evident from his choice of subject-matter and treatment of “plots.” He likes landscape and all kinds of descriptions. “The Debate” (No. 80) is outwardly a long piece about the conquest of the Caucasus, but the political issue and even the philosophical theme (man versus nature) is little more than a frame: the poem seems to have been written for the sake of the strikingly memorable descriptive passages. Another example is “My Native Land” (No. 73). Again, it starts like a political lyric but after the first six lines becomes a beautiful—though slightly sentimental—landscape. Even “Borodino” (No. 30) abounds in descriptions and is not quite what it pretends to be, i.e., a ballad of a great battle. A glance at Lermontov's poem addressed to Countess Rostopchina (No. 76) shows how naturally landscape takes over in his works. “The Cliff” (No. 79) is a masterpiece that could have been put to music by Debussy, and the dedication to Vorontsova-Dashkova (No. 69), one of the most elegant poems written in Russian, is a perfect impressionistic portrait (note that it was inspired by a picture that is in no way impressionistic). More than half of Lermontov's lyrics can be analyzed along similar lines.

If we admit that Lermontov was an impressionist, we will be able partly to explain the main riddle of his maturation. The riddle is known to everybody who has read the complete Lermontov. Between 1828 and 1837 he wrote thousands of lines (counting only lyrics, but there were also dramas, long narrative poems, and novels). In this juvenilia one runs against several gems, such as “The Angel,” “The Mermaid”, and “The Sail” (Nos. 12, 26, 28), and a half-dozen touching love lyrics, but most of it is stodgy and dull. Then suddenly something happened: he exploded in “The Poet's Death” (No. 31) and after that never produced a bad poem. Moreover, what he wrote was becoming better and better. Nothing is easier than to show that almost every line in Lermontov's mature works derives from some place in or even occurs in his early works, but in doing so we only make the riddle more insoluble: if everything is the same, then why are the early poems bad and the later ones good? I can think of few cases in which art cries louder to be explained in terms of art. Lermontov's miracle is his discovery and conscious use of his own poetic style, “the style of inexact wording.” If he had written only “The Poet's Death” (No. 31), “Meditation” (No. 46), and so forth, he would have been another author like Ryléev, Khomyakóv, or even Odóevsky, though obviously more talented. Lermontov, the great Russian lyric poet (for the moment I am leaving out of discussion his narrative poems, especially The Demon), is first and foremost a master of “inexact wording.” When he had realized his main strength and become aware of his limitations, that is, learned to avoid doing what he could not do well, he stopped composing bad poetry. Nearly all his best lyrics written before 1837 are impressionistic, and that is why they are good.

There is nothing unique in Lermontov's experience. Hans Christian Andersen produced mediocre novels for years and would never have written a book worth reading if he had not discovered that he could tell a fairy tale. Corot was fond of painting “realistic” portraits of women (which made him famous), and even Levitán tried his hand at portraiture. If both had persisted in their folly, the nineteenth century would have lost two of its greatest landscape painters. Lermontov, in spite of his Romantic apprenticeship, did not know what to do with a love story, and this is another proof of his impressionistic sympathies. By 1837 at the latest Lermontov had realized that he must leave the love genre to others. His avoidance of love lyrics was an important victory at a time when everyone wrote them. Impressionism in poetry is an effective vehicle for the most tender lyrics because it is not encumbered with the ballast of details. One of the peaks of Lermontov's lyricism is his poem “In Memory of A. I. Odoevsky” (No. 53). On the face of it, the poem is about a dead friend, but this is almost an illusion. Only the beginning is really about Odoevsky; all the rest is about someone with azure eyes who had a warm and kind heart but was not spared by God or men, who died surrounded by callous fools and whose grave is in a beautiful corner of the earth. Part of it is the same as “The Poet's Death” (No. 31), part is close to the later “All Alone Along the Road I Am Walking” (No. 85), half is transposed from other poems. “In Memory of A. I. Odoevsky” is so good just because it is not a biography of any concrete man. Scholars are apt to apologize for Lermontov's habit of transferring lines and entire passages from poem to poem, but the essence of Lermontov's method was writing in lyric formulas, as Eikhenbaum called them, in huge blocks, and it is no wonder that those formulas (of any length) were transferable.

In a historical perspective, two important questions arise: (1) What makes Lermontov a great author if so many of his lines are traceable to somebody else? (2) How did he survive as a poet when behind him was Pushkin, who eclipsed all his contemporaries, and before him were such giants as Blok, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam? Actually, this is one question split into two. The answer can be given only if we realize the full extent of Lermontov's originality. As mentioned above, he was not a follower of Pushkin: he was a new page in Russian poetry. Anyone who tried “to follow” Pushkin suffered an immediate and dismal defeat, for there was nothing left for such a poet to do after Pushkin (compare Schubert's complaint, “Beethoven has done it all!”). Lermontov says everything in his own way. Even when he repeats somebody's words, it matters little, because the familiar phrase becomes part of a different system and is almost impossible to recognize. It has taken critics more than a hundred years to notice that part of line 33 of No. 32 (“A Branch from Palestine”) is a direct quotation from Pushkin's Bronze Horseman (prozrachny sumrak). Lermontov's lyric poetry is a perfect unity of content and form: his impressionism was ideally suited to his message. Those who imitated him neither felt nor realized this fact: they parroted his formulas without sharing the peculiarities of his vision and invariably looked banal, approximately as a well-meaning professor of botany could if he set out to faithfully copy Monet. In Bitsilli's words, “what in anyone else would be an expression of weakness, awkwardness, lack of talent, in Lermontov testifies to his strength, genius, the exclusiveness of his poetic nature.”

Recognizing Lermontov's method is only the first step toward understanding him, because impressionism is too general a term. So far I have spoken of Lermontov's choice of words, specifically of epithets. Equally important are his technical predilections manifested in his syntax and metrics. I will barely touch on this subject, for neither a poet's syntax nor his metrics (let alone rhythm) can be studied in translation. The most important statements have been made by Eikhenbaum and Pumpyansky, both of whom have pointed out that the main unit of Lermontov's style is not the line of verse, and within the verse not the word, but the movement of speech.

Lermontov was very sensitive to the metrical arrangement of his lyrics, as could be expected from a poet who depended to such an extent on the movement of speech. Even in his earliest works he often experimented with unusual meters, but at that time the four-foot iamb remained his main medium. The situation changed after 1837, and one of the most important features of his mature style is great metrical variety. Almost every piece contains some novelty.

Yuly Aikhenval'd once remarked that Lermontov had a perfect ear. This is only partly true. To many things he was surprisingly deaf. Thus, he often did not hear jarring sound combinations in his lines, something like ‘vnimál v nemóm blagogovénii’ (No. 47:28 of the Russian text); such examples are rather numerous. He was indifferent to rhyme. It is good in his long narrative poems (in which his impressionism all but disappears) and unimaginative in his lyrics, but he took infinite care to organize a convincing and mellifluous whole. He was fond of parallel and symmetrical constructions, of mathematically exact antitheses, and pointed aphorisms at the end and resorted to the subtlest effects. Thus, at the beginning of “Tamara” (No. 82) the castle blackens on a black rock and at the very end something whitens from its window; at the beginning of “The Mermaid” (No. 26) the water maiden swims along a light-blue river, and in the finale the river is dark blue (I was unable to render the difference between golubaya and sinyaya in translation). He used to the full the force of anacrusis, the beauty of trochee and dactyl, the power of an unusual strophe (as in No. 53), the charm of multiple alliterations and recurring vowels. All these things he “heard.” His ear was selective, and his goal directed his choices.

One of the traditional questions of Lermontov scholarship is whether he was a Romantic or a Realist. His development was not unlike Pushkin's (from “The Gypsies” to Evgeny Onegin) or Byron (from Childe Harold to Don Juan). Lermontov began with Romantic lyrics and ended up with A Hero of Our Time and the confession to Karamzina (No. 75); but Mtsyri (No. 91) and “Tamara” (No. 82) are equally late, and he kept working on his most romantic poem The Demon (No. 92) until 1839. At one time it was usual in Soviet criticism to praise Lermontov for his shift to realism, because realism was supposed to be a higher stage of literary evolution than Romanticism (Romanticism, “critical” realism, “socialist” realism). At present it is more customary to recognize the importance of Lermontov's Romanticism, though no conclusion has been reached as to how to classify A Hero of Our Time. The debate is scholastic (like all classificatory debates) and is fed by the indeterminacy of the main terms. The worst of them is realism, which is made to cover the phantasmagorical images of Gogol, Dickens's freaks, and Dostoevsky's devil, along with the dullest creations of fifth-rate authors, provided they are lifelike; but Romanticism is an equally vague term, and long ago Pushkin wondered what it meant.

For our evaluation of Lermontov's way we can easily do without definitions, but we have to distinguish between Romanticism as an approach to literature and art (philosophy) and Romanticism as a system of devices (style). Romanticism in its philosophical aspect is a victory of beauty and grandeur over ugliness and filth. It is a longing for the ideal and a superhuman attempt to find it. Romanticism normally accompanies transitional epochs and looks for a golden age—sometimes in the future, sometimes in the past. All religions and social utopias, as long as they offer a picture of Paradise, are children of the Romantic spirit.

Lermontov remained a militant Romantic all his life. As a literary movement, and more precisely, as a nineteenth-century movement, Romanticism had its favorite subjects, imagery, and devices. The devices included specific epithets and similes, recurring references, and so on. All of this is too well known to need recapitulation. This stylistic framework played its role and underwent utter degradation at the hands of epigones. Soon after the triumphs of the great masters it became common property, divorced from the spirit that had given it birth. Few literary movements knew such a speedy and catastrophic rupture between the original content and the hopelessly vulgarized form. No one with any aesthetic sense could have remained faithful to the conventional Romantic style after it had deteriorated into a set of clichés, totally predictable and mechanically reproduced. Romanticism, like many a trend before and after, was killed by the accessibility of its form. Pushkin was aware of it (hence his Lensky). Lermontov was aware of it, too. He was sorry that the style he loved had become ludicrous and renounced pseudo-Romantic phraseology but not Romanticism. His lifelong loyalty to the method that gave the world Byron and Delacroix is not fortuitous, for nineteenth-century Romanticism, with its taste for generalized descriptions in literature and contrasting masses of color in painting, is closer to Symbolism and impressionism than realism in its classic form ever was, and thus served as a good school and a proper source of inspiration for the poet who became the first impressionist in the history of Russian letters.

Notes

1. Far and away the best of them is L. (Ya) Ginzburg's study, Tvorchesky put' Lermontova, Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1940. V. I. Korovin's book Tvorchesky put' Lermontova, Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1973, can be recommended in parts. V. Arkhipov's thick volume (M. Yu. Lermontov, Moscow: Moskovsky rabochy, 1965) is obnoxious. Others usually repeat one another. Special monographs are often useful, but this is no place to list them. In recent years the best article on Lermontov I have read was devoted to a structural analysis of proper names in The Masquerade: A. B. Pen'kovsky, “Antroponimicheskie zametki 1-2. O dvukx imenakh geroini ‘Maskarada’” [Anthroponymical notes on the heroine of The Masquerade's two names], Voprosy literatury (K stashestidesyatiletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya M. Yu. Lermontova), fasc. 10. Vladimir: Vladimirsky Gosudarstvenny Pedagogichesky Institut imeni P. I. Lebedeva-Polyanskogo, 1975, pp. 76-96.

2. Actually, V. M. Fisher does call Lermontov an impressionist (Poètika Lermontova, an article published in the excellent miscellany Venok Lermontovu. St. Petersburg-Moscow: Dumnov, 1914, p. 211), but he refers only to Lermontov's technique in describing landscapes. The only detailed discussion of Fisher's work in English and of Fisher's influence on Eikhenbaum can be found in John Garrard, Mikhail Lermontov. Boston: Twayne Publishers (1982), 76-78.

3. B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lermontov. Opyt istoriko-literaturnoy otsenki. Slavische Propyläen. Texte in Neu- und Nachdrucken. Bd. 35 [a photo reprint of the 1924 edition]. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1967, pp. 97-98. All the passages from the Russian critical works are given in my translation. At present, Eikhenbaum's book exists in English. See B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lermontov. A Study in Literary-Historical Evaluation Translated by Ray Parrott and Harry Weber. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981.

4. P. Bitsilli, Mesto Lermontova v istorii russkoy poèzii. In his: Etyudy o russkoy poèzii. Praha: Plamya, 1926, pp. 225-75 (see pp. 260-62, 266-67). (After the revolution Bitsilli worked in Bulgaria and enjoyed great popularity among emigrant scholars. He wrote excellent works on Pushkin, Chekhov, and the development of the Russian literary language. In his method, he was close to the Prague Circle. Several of his works exist in English.

5. L. Pumpyansky, “Stikhovaya rech Lermontova.” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 43-44. Moscow: AN SSSR, 1941, p. 390.

6. Ibid., p. 393.

7. Bitsilli's and Pumpyansky's ideas have not been developed in later scholarship, though Lermontov's style and especially his epithets have interested a number of scholars.

8. See A. D. Sinyavsky, V teni Gogolya. London: Overseas Publications Interchange: Collins, 1975.