SOURCE: Barratt, Andrew and A. D. P. Briggs. Conclusion to A Wicked Irony: The Rhetoric of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, pp. 123-35. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Barratt and Briggs suggest that the ironic stance operating within Lermontov's text has led to numerous misunderstandings regarding interpretation of the novel.]

THE REAL PECHORIN

Several times in the preceding chapters we have asked the question: how much do we know about Pechorin? On each occasion the answer has been guarded. Reliable conclusions have been hard to find. A striking feature of A Hero of Our Time is the gross disparity everywhere in it between the easy manner of narration, the apparent naturalness and objectivity assumed by the narrators, and the meagre amount of dependable truth which they really purvey. We have attempted to demonstrate how, in every chapter, misconceptions can arise. Examples are plentiful: that Maksim Maksimych is simple and humble; that the ‘realistic’ description of Pechorin in ‘Maksim Maksimych’ is intended in good faith; that the blind boy in ‘Taman’ is not really blind; that Grushnitsky is the antithesis of Pechorin; that a scientific experiment is conducted in ‘The Fatalist’, and so on. Some of these ideas are not simply mistaken, they are the very opposite of the truth, the product of rhetorical strategies that Lermontov's fictional narrators only partly control or understand. Such is the nature of the ‘wicked irony’ at work in the novel, an irony which ensures that at every turn in A Hero of Our Time there lurks the danger of misunderstanding; each portion of apparent truth must be twice tested and, if necessary, stood on its head.

For this reason we must be careful what we say about Pechorin in particular. Our study will end with a proposal that knowledge and understanding of this character must always remain indirect and incomplete. Despite the impossibility of proper comprehension, however, definite popular attitudes to Pechorin have been struck and show every sign of continuing. It is interesting to observe how little substance sometimes underlies the general idea of this man. In the first place, he is massively popular with the Russian reading public, particularly with the young and female. Those who are both are especially susceptible. Marie Gilroy refers to a survey which shows that schoolgirls are not only fascinated by Pechorin, they are attracted to him, they like him and they regard him as one of their favourite literary characters.¹ No doubt a similar survey in Britain would say the same about a near-contemporary, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, to whom Pechorin bears some apparent similarity. Both are dynamic, mysterious characters emerging with a new dimension of modernity and credibility from the Gothic region of Romantic literature. Saturnine, cynical, vindictive and above all self-centred, they deliver cruelty and destruction to those around them, especially to women, and death sometimes accompanies their callous behaviour. Beneath the surface, however, these two popular heroes have nothing in common; in fact, they are opposites. Heathcliff is a man of purpose, method and true strength. He outshines the ordinary people around him and achieves virtually heroic status. He wins the reader's admiration and, in view of his own mistreatment in childhood, can even command some sympathy. Above all he is a coherent, consistent and comprehensible personality. If we look carefully into Pechorin, even through the refracting lenses of unreliable narration, we should be able to see that he is none of these things and would like to be all of them. When readers look upon him as a kind of Russian Heathcliff they are yielding too readily to his persuasive word-spinning. They begin to see him as he once saw Vulich; a collapsed personality becomes misrepresented as a purposeful hero. In point of fact, Pechorin has no purpose; despite his many suggestions to the contrary, he follows no plan. He does not outdo or outshine a surrounding group of mediocrities; many of the people around him possess greater strength of character and more courage. Evasive, inconsistent and ultimately incomprehensible, he is in no way an admirable man. In order to portray him in any positive manner, shadow must be taken for substance.

The question of Pechorin's bravery is of particular interest. At first sight it seems obvious that here is a man apparently destined for adventure and well equipped with sufficient courage and resourcefulness to cope with it. Does he not proceed from one dangerous situation to another, frequently courting disaster and escaping by the skin of his teeth? In ‘Taman’ he involves himself with piratical smugglers and is nearly drowned. In ‘Princess Mary’ he risks death by duelling on the edge of a precipice. In ‘The Fatalist’ he attacks and subdues a drunken murderer. In ‘Bela’ he first takes away a young girl and later becomes involved in a desperate chase and shoot-out. Nothing less than death appears to threaten him on each of these occasions, and Pechorin himself, when he is telling the story, will not shrink from reminding us from time to time of the great dangers which he faced. But careful scrutiny of these incidents reveals that they are not quite as dangerous as they appear to be. Precautionary measures are taken to ensure that the worst risks are avoided and that the chances of real misadventure are reduced. In ‘Taman’ Pechorin's most dangerous encounter is with a slip of a girl. Even the duel in ‘Princess Mary’—perhaps Pechorin's most risky adventure—was based on a certain calculation. In this case Pechorin's accurate reading of Grushnitsky's psychology saved his own skin; he was as certain as one could be that Grushnitsky ‘was ashamed to kill an unarmed man’ (p. 136), and would prove incapable of cold-blooded murder. (Nevertheless his reckless decision to stand on the ledge was a dangerous miscalculation, for which he nearly paid the price.) In ‘The Fatalist’ and ‘Bela’ we have seen how matters are not really what they seem; the arrest of Yefimych, the ‘abduction’ of Bela and the chase after Kazbich actually placed the intrepid hero in far less real danger than might meet the eye. Nevertheless on each of these occasions, danger certainly exists, and Pechorin does seem to court it with some relish. Truly, he might have died in the sea off Taman, down the precipice near Kislovodsk, or at the hands of Yefimych or Kazbich. From all of this risk-taking a clear pattern emerges. Pechorin enters or contrives a death-dealing situation and willingly submits himself to its inherent perils. As he does so he simultaneously minimizes the actual, and maximizes the apparent danger to himself. This seems to suggest that, for reasons which lie beyond discovery, he is sufficiently alienated from life to consider departing from it and yet sufficiently weak-willed (or still attracted to life) to hope that it will continue. Not only is that a plausible and consistent interpretation of his strange behaviour, it is remarkably similar to what occurred elsewhere in the novel, in the case of Vulich's early foolhardiness, and apparently in real life with Mikhail Lermontov himself. Janko Lavrin makes an observation which is of much interest in this context:

Unable to come to terms with life or with himself, Lermontov thus fell a prey to a conscious or sub-conscious ‘death-wish’. The very courage he showed under the shower of bullets during the Caucasian skirmishes may have been prompted by his hope that one of them might hit him.²

We have suggested that our first duty, on thinking back over A Hero of Our Time is to strip away falsity and establish this wasted image as the real Pechorin. But that still leaves the ultimate questions unanswered; how and why did he become what he is? We shall return to them shortly, but with smaller hope of finding satisfactory explanations.

A ‘MODERN’ NOVEL

Our second purpose in this conclusion is to take up a matter raised in the introduction by considering in more detail the ‘modernity’ of A Hero of Our Time. We shall seek briefly to characterize the novel's place both within Lermontov's oeuvre and within the history of Russian fiction before making some final comments on the nature of the literary experiment which it represents.

A Hero of Our Time is, in the minds of many, the summit of Lermontov's achievement as a writer and the natural culmination of a creative life devoted to the problem of self-presentation. The early Soviet psychiatrist who concluded a clinical account of the author's personality by assigning him to the ‘group of psychopathic geniuses’³ only confirmed what his contemporaries knew instinctively—that he was a disturbed and desperate man. And the presence within his works of a limited repertoire of obsessive themes and motifs makes it plain that his was very much a case of art as attempted therapy for the artist. Pechorin demands to be seen, therefore, as the last in a line of literary heroes in whom the marks of Lermontov's own troubled psyche are readily visible. The connections between Pechorin and the heroes of Lermontov's other works have often been noted. Individual phrases, even whole speeches in A Hero of Our Time can be traced to similar passages in earlier works. To take just one example, when Pechorin complains that he experiences the boredom of ‘one who reads a poor imitation of a book long since known to him’ (p. 152), he repeats one of Arbenin's lines from The Masquerade. There is ample justification, therefore, for viewing Pechorin, alongside Arbenin, Vadim, the Demon and other characters as part of a collective portrait inspired by the author's efforts to come to terms with his own ‘unfortunate’ nature.

To view A Hero of Our Time in this way is in an important sense, however, to misrepresent its true significance in Lermontov's literary evolution. John Garrard has recently made the case for considering the author's last years as something of a new departure, an all-too-brief period during which he achieved true maturity as a writer. Garrard sees the Lermontov of these years as a man engaged in a thorough-going re-evaluation of ‘notions and attitudes he had cherished earlier’.⁴ In support of this view, he later cites ‘Sashka’ and ‘A Fairy-Tale for Children’ as the outstanding products of this spirit of re-evaluation, works characterized above all by a playfulness which calls into question the ideas and, above all, the techniques of his own earlier writing.⁵ It is a major conclusion of the present study that A Hero of Our Time should be viewed in the same light. Indeed, it may be argued that this novel is the most remarkable offshoot of this revisionist tendency, for it is here that the Romantic hero, in whose likeness so many of Pechorin's predecessors had been cast, is finally displayed in the most equivocal light. At the same time, this is also the place where Lermontov calls into question the very fictional poetics which he had himself quite recently employed in good faith. The parodic element in A Hero of Our Time is something which deserves particular emphasis, therefore, and this is not only because it has until quite recently remained one of the novel's best-kept secrets. More important still is the fact that this parody is also self-parody: the Romantic commonplaces which are now exposed to the ‘wickedness’ of Lermontov's irony had previously figured most prominently, and most seriously, in his poetry, drama and prose. We have already remarked on the presence within the novel of elements drawn from Lermontov's earlier works; what we are suggesting here, however, is that this should be viewed as a technique of ironic self-quotation which has yet to be explored in the detail it deserves. For example, when Pechorin refers to himself as a ‘vampire’ (p. 118), he employs an image which had previously been applied to the hero of Vadim. But, whereas in that youthful exercise in ‘furious’ Romanticism the simile had been used sincerely, in A Hero of Our Time it features as just one more sign of Pechorin's attachment to a false self-image.⁶

The argument so far, although it has touched only upon the smaller matter of Lermontov's oeuvre, also raises major questions regarding the significance of A Hero of Our Time for the history of Russian fiction. This is a large and difficult subject, which is rendered the more difficult still given the acute need for a new scholarly study of this most important branch of Russian culture.⁷ The remarks which follow can pretend to do no more, therefore, than to identify a few of the issues to be explored in greater depth by future literary historians.

Let us begin by examining a line of thought which has been responsible for casting a false perspective on the nature of Lermontov's achievement. The work of Ivanov supplies a ready instance of what we mean. A Hero of Our Time, Ivanov suggests, is to be considered ‘not only one of the finest realistic works of Russian prose fiction, but also an innovatory work, which opened up the path of the psycho-social novel, of which Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy were later to become the acknowledged masters’.⁸ There is nothing remarkable about this opinion; statements could be found in countless other studies by Soviet authors. Thus, Ivanov simply harnesses Lermontov's novel to a scheme of literary development which enshrines realism as the highest form of art and represents every significant work of nineteenth-century literature, from Yevgeny Onegin and Dead Souls to Crime and Punishment and The Golovlyov Family, as a necessary link in the evolution of literature towards the dominance of the realist method. Over recent years, however, a number of Soviet Lermontov scholars have expressed their dissatisfaction with this account of A Hero of Our Time. Instead of viewing Lermontov's novel as a precursor of the great realist works which were to follow, they have suggested that it belongs rather to the Romantic tradition which was still dominant at the time of its composition.⁹ The ensuing debate, which continues unabated to this day, has become tedious and predictable. Critics have proved unable, or unwilling, to define what they mean by those notoriously slippery terms, ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Realism’; matters have not been helped either by their natural reluctance to re-examine the historiography within which they have been obliged to operate.

It should not be thought, however, that Western scholars have succeeded where their Soviet counterparts have failed; in fact, surprisingly few writers outside the Soviet Union have even addressed the question at issue. A recent article by Garrard provides a rare exception to this trend. The author summarizes his main point as follows: ‘Lermontov is of crucial importance to the rise of the Russian novel not only because of the contribution he has made, but also because of the narrative problems he failed to resolve’.¹⁰ In this view, Lermontov's decision to eschew ‘authorial’ narration in A Hero of Our Time is a testament to the rudimentary level of fictional techniques available to Russian writers at the turn of the 1840s, by comparison with which the sophisticated and subtle types of narrative omniscience developed later by Turgenev and Tolstoy stand out as markedly superior. It will be instructive to dwell on one particular detail of this argument. The problem with A Hero of Our Time, Garrard suggests, is that Lermontov needed to convey information to the reader which is logically incompatible with the narrative scheme he has adopted. This leads to the charge that, in Pechorin's Journal, the author was forced to ‘smuggle in’ an omniscient perspective under the guise of subjective narration. ‘Lermontov must allow Pechorin to be conscious of his motivations to the point where he sounds like a demonic, Gothic hero’, he complains, adding a little later that 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’.¹¹

One would not wish to dispute everything in this argument. By drawing attention to Lermontov's failure to rise to the challenge of omniscient narration, Garrard has indicated precisely the point of divergence between A Hero of Our Time and the tradition of ‘high’ realism which was to follow. Yet the charges which he levels against Lermontov's novel display a blindness to its true capacity for irony. Our own reading of the novel inclines towards a different opinion—that Lermontov's narrative practice in A Hero of Our Time is thoroughly consistent and highly sophisticated, adumbrating a tradition of writing which we habitually refer to as more ‘modern’ than the type of realism associated with the names of Turgenev and Tolstoy. This is the tradition which produced such later masterpieces of subjective narration as Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Olesha's Envy. In saying this we are, like other recent writers, making high claims indeed for the innovative nature of Lermontov's achievement.¹²

Paradoxical though this may sound, the distinctive feature of Lermontov's innovation in A Hero of Our Time resides in the combination of several trends which were already common in the prose fiction of his time. The efforts of several generations of scholars have enabled us to identify three major elements in the novel. The first is a penchant for playfulness, an intense self-consciousness which is perhaps the dominant feature of the literature of the age. Present in the fictional works of Pushkin, Gogol, Odoyevsky, Marlinsky, Veltman and a host of lesser luminaries, it is very much an eighteenth-century tradition, the legacy of Fielding and Sterne. Amongst Russian writers of the post-Decembrist period this playfulness was manifested in an awareness both of the artificiality of the fictional enterprise—to present the invented as if it were real—and of the dead hand of convention, which constantly threatened to convert the writing of literature into the repetition of worn-out formulae supplied by such movements as Sentimentalism and Romanticism.

The second feature which A Hero of Our Time shares with other prose works of the day is a determination to eschew the practice of ‘authorial’ narration. It has often been pointed out that Lermontov's novel belongs to a series of works—Pushkin's Tales of Belkin and Gogol's Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka are the best-known examples—in which a limited first-person mode of narration is represented in a collection of short stories. Eykhenbaum has suggested that this can be explained as a reaction against the moralizing, didactic manner favoured by the writers of Russian Sentimentalism.¹³ But this may be only half the story: as Vinogradov indicated many years earlier, this same trend may be viewed as a rejection of a significant element within the fictional poetics of Russian Romanticism as well.¹⁴ (It should be noted in passing that Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin and Gogol's Dead Souls—the two works which are usually associated, along with A Hero of Our Time, with the rise of the Russian novel—belong firmly within this latter tradition of writing.) In Lermontov's case, the contentions of both Eykhenbaum and Vinogradov may be supported. The author's preface to the second edition refers scornfully and unmistakably to the didactic tradition of Sentimentalism. But we should not forget that in his first efforts at novelistic composition—the unfinished works Vadim and Princess Ligovskaya—Lermontov had operated within the framework of a recognizably Romantic ‘authorial’ narration. Once again, therefore, A Hero of Our Time recommends itself as a reaction against a Romanticism which was previously the author's own.

If Lermontov's novel may be identified as a turn against one type of Romantic narrative, it has nevertheless commonly been viewed as the product of another part of the Romantic fictional tradition—the so-called ‘confessional’ novel associated above all with the names of Musset and Constant. It is not simply that Pechorin's Journal (‘Princess Mary’ in particular) borrows its form from Les confessions d'un enfant du siècle and Adolphe; Lermontov also employs this narrative mode for the same broad purpose. No less than the works of the French authors, A Hero of Our Time defies a simple moral reading. What matters is not whether these ‘heroes’ are good or bad; the aim is rather to present a ‘clinical’ self-portrait of a contemporary man.

Our point in conducting this brief review is not simply to suggest that Lermontov's novel is a hybrid work, a place of intersection for several important trends in contemporary fiction. What we wish to stress is that these various elements in A Hero of Our Time are combined in such a way that each is immeasurably enriched. Thus, despite the liberal use of parody in the novel, Lermontov is clearly concerned with something other than the pure metafictional playfulness of the Russian ‘Sterneans’ or of Pushkin's Tales of Belkin. The last-named work represents the quintessence of the parodist's art. Pushkin's aim was to construct a cycle of tales which would reflect the literary tastes of the various social classes from which his narrators are drawn. The result, in the words of Debrezceny, was a ‘parodic anthology of early nineteenth-century prose-writing, both Russian and Western’.¹⁵ Lermontov, although he is clearly not immune to the purely parodic possibilities made available by this kind of narrative (witness ‘Bela’ and ‘Maksim Maksimych’ in particular), always harnesses the parody to the more serious business of portraying the hero, so that it becomes an integral part of the novel's ironic fabric.

It must also be emphasized that, although the form of Lermontov's novel may well have been suggested by the example of such works as the Tales of Belkin and Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, it is fundamentally different from them both. Pushkin's collection is made up of stories quite disconnected in their subject matter; the constituent tales of Gogol's work are all produced by a single narrator. A Hero of Our Time is a new, and unique, combination: it presents a unified subject—the adventures of Pechorin—through a number of discrete narrators. This is a truly revolutionary discovery in the history of fictional forms. As Donald Davie has suggested, ‘Lermontov has anticipated by fifty years or more the experiments of Henry James and Joseph Conrad in stories from several different points of view. It is a most astonishing innovation’.¹⁶ This is to say, then, that A Hero of Our Time commends attention as one of the earliest examples in modern fiction of literary polyphony, a mode of composition which, ever since Bakhtin's monumental study, has been associated above all with the work of Dostoyevsky.¹⁷ One might even suggest that Lermontov's novel represents a ‘purer’ form of polyphony than anything Dostoyevsky himself was later to achieve. By dispensing altogether with a third-person narrator and rendering his story from a variety of perspectives, each of which has only a partial claim to authority, Lermontov attains the condition of openness which is the hallmark of the polyphonic method.¹⁸ The fact that the hero's own narration is just one of the voices in this polyphonic chorus is what makes A Hero of Our Time a contribution of such unique significance to the history of the confessional novel.

One of the most typically provocative paradoxes of Jorge Luis Borges suggests that ‘every writer creates his own precursors’.¹⁹ Borges was writing of Kafka, yet his insight may be applied most usefully to our present subject. In the discussion which follows we shall pursue further the idea that the essential features of Lermontov's ‘modernity’ may best be appreciated in the light of Dostoyevsky's later achievement.

Let us consider first the question of literariness. It has already been suggested that the self-consciousness of A Hero of Our Time is of a different order to that found in the work of Pushkin and others. Whereas Pushkin's play with conventions in the Tales of Belkin is in the main genial and lightly ironic, Lermontov's use of allusion and parody is darker, more serious and ‘Dostoyevskian’ in nature. The distinction is not absolute, however. In two of the Belkin tales—‘The Shot’ and ‘The Stationmaster’—Pushkin writes in the more serious parodic manner to be developed by his successors. The tragic stories of Silvio and Samson Vyrin each illuminate the gulf which separates literature from life, demonstrating the danger which threatens those who choose literature as a model or substitute for life. Silvio—whose significance as a precursor of Pechorin has often been noted—lives out an absurdly inappropriate fantasy of honour and vengeance; Samson Vyrin clings pathetically to a false perception of his daughter's fate. The hero's blindness to reality in each case is due to stereotypes supplied by literature, be it the ‘heroism’ celebrated in Romantic tales (Silvio) or the simplistic morality inspired by popularized biblical texts (Vyrin). It was Dostoyevsky who later defined such ‘bookishness’ as a pathological feature which distinguished the Russian intelligentsia as a whole; the term is to be found in the work which provides the classic case study in this phenomenon—Notes from Underground. When viewed in this light, Lermontov's insistence in the preface to the second edition of A Hero of Our Time that Pechorin represented the ‘vices of our entire generation in their full development’ (p. 8) might even appear to anticipate the Dostoyevskian diagnosis of the ills of educated Russian society. But this is perhaps to take speculation too far. It is quite certain, however, that in Pechorin Lermontov created a character whose unhealthy commitment to inauthentic ‘bookish’ behaviour makes him the direct forebear of the Underground Man.

GAPS AND SILENCES

There is a further sense in which Lermontov's fictional practice in A Hero of Our Time may usefully be described as Dostoyevskian. Like a number of works by the later author—Notes from Underground again, but also Poor Folk and The Double—Lermontov's novel raises a major philosophical question which has informed so much modern fiction. The question is one of epistemology and it may be put like this: having read A Hero of Our Time, what can we say that the author has given us to know about Pechorin?

This problem may be approached from two perspectives. The first is relatively straightforward. In the preface to Pechorin's journal we are told by the traveller-narrator of ‘another thick notebook’ which has fallen into his possession and in which the hero ‘tells the story of his entire life’ (p. 55). Lermontov is never more playful than at this moment. In this brief ‘throwaway’ line he signals an omission which is perhaps the most radical feature of his fictional experiment. The fact is, of course, that Pechorin has no biography, and in his refusal to provide his hero with one Lermontov departs from the model which was to form the basis of the classical European novel throughout the nineteenth century.²⁰ We may be sure that this was a conscious move on Lermontov's part. In Princess Ligovskaya, his first, unfinished, novel about Pechorin, he had adhered faithfully to the biographical tradition, supplying precise details of the hero's early life, his family background and economic circumstances. But in A Hero of Our Time this vital information is suppressed. It is not only that we learn very few details about Pechorin's past; there is also the problem that what little we do find out is often of questionable reliability. This is a point to which we shall return shortly. The only information about the hero's past which has the stamp of relative authenticity is that provided by Vera in ‘Princess Mary’.

There is also another way in which Lermontov offends against the biographical model. As has often been remarked, the stories of A Hero of Our Time are assembled in such a manner that it is most difficult at first to establish their ‘proper’ chronological order.²¹ Even when one does so, the sequence of events reveals rather less than might be expected. Richard Gregg has explored this matter in an interesting recent article, which suggests that careful attention to questions of chronology will permit the reader to appreciate fully the course of Pechorin's decline from the inexperienced adventurer of ‘Taman’ to the cynical nihilist who gives away his journal in ‘Maksim Maksimych’.²² Although this is true, the chronological progression of A Hero of Our Time nevertheless fails to provide the narrative with that explanatory dimension which is its usual function. Whilst the reader can observe that Pechorin's condition gradually becomes more acute, there is nothing to explain why that condition developed in the first place. This is to say, then, that any reading of the novel which sets out to determine the causes, social or otherwise, of Pechorin's malady will offend against its resolutely anti-deterministic spirit. As for the vexed issue of the novel's title, we can only agree with Turner: ‘the title asks us to regard [Pechorin] as a social phenomenon, and yet the text, far from providing any causal explanation of the phenomenon, seems deliberately to conceal his past and recounts only discontinuous episodes from his mature life’.²³

There is a more important lesson to be learnt here, however. If the efforts of Soviet critics to fill in the missing biography of Pechorin must be deemed a mistaken endeavour, the manner in which such discussions have been conducted reveals an important truth none the less—that whenever one talks of the hero and his sick condition, one is obliged to employ a deductive mode of reasoning which will never lead beyond the realm of unconfirmed hypothesis. In order to illustrate this point, let us consider the celebrated passage of Pechorin's ‘confession’ to Mary in ‘Princess Mary’. Beginning with the words ‘Yes, such was my fate since childhood itself!’, this speech offers a generalized account of the hero's early life as that of a sensitive individual gradually hardened by the crass and uncaring attitude of his contemporaries (p. 104). The potential significance of this passage is obvious: this is the only place in the novel where an explanation of Pechorin's condition is offered. But it is also intensely problematic. In the words of Belinsky, the question that has to be decided is this: ‘Was Pechorin speaking from the heart, or was he pretending?’²⁴

Three answers have been proposed to Belinsky's question. The first is that Pechorin's words should be taken at face value as a trustworthy account of the forces which shaped his nature. Ivanov, for example, cites this confession in support of the standard Soviet reading which has it that Pechorin is the victim of his times.²⁵ At the other end of the scale stand those who have expressed extreme scepticism. How much trust can be placed in a speech which has the evident purpose of playing upon the sympathies of the young princess? Vinogradov has pointed out that Pechorin's diction is highly artificial, a recognizably ‘Byronic’ appeal to a woman who would have been raised on a diet of such Romantic fodder.²⁶ Similar considerations have led V. Levin to conclude that not a word of what Pechorin says can be believed.²⁷ This opinion is shared by Garrard. Referring to Pechorin's speech as a ‘parody of a true confession’, he goes on to contrast it with the hero's earlier admissions to Maksim Maksimych in ‘Bela’, which he describes as ‘an honest confession against which the false confession to Princess Mary can be measured’.²⁸ But there is also a third group of critics, who—like Belinsky himself—have adopted a more equivocal stance. One such critic is Grigoryan. Arguing against the scepticism of Levin, he has suggested that Pechorin's confession to Mary, despite everything, arises from a sincere need to open his soul before another.²⁹ Debreczeny made a similar point when he noted that, the insincerity of Pechorin's motives notwithstanding, the story which he tells the princess rings true, and might well be adjudged a ‘genuine admission’.³⁰ It may be added, in support of this opinion, that Pechorin's tale offers a thoroughly convincing account of the way in which an inflated persona may develop out of a natural defence mechanism.

The advantage of the third position resides less in the substance than in the style of the interpretation which it enables. The first two positions prove ultimately untenable because they depend upon a false assumption about the nature of Lermontov's fictional discourse. It is simply impossible to say with certainty that Pechorin's words are true or false because the novel offers no ground upon which to base such a claim. No statement about Pechorin's condition (and this holds equally for the diagnoses offered by others, like Vera in her famous letter) has the privilege of absolute certainty; this is what makes A Hero of Our Time such a disturbing and challenging book. ‘In this novel there is something unresolved, something somehow unspoken’—this is Belinsky again, and his tone of regret captures perfectly the predicament of Lermontov's reader.³¹A Hero of Our Time belongs to that unsettling mode of writing which Wayne C. Booth has termed ‘unstable’ irony. It is one of those works which ‘provide no platform for reconstruction’ and which allow no possibility of arriving at ‘relatively secure moral or philosophical truths’.³² We can say that we ‘know’ Pechorin, therefore, only to the extent that we can frame hypotheses about him. This is not to suggest, however, as one writer has recently claimed, that Lermontov is engaging in that sort of nihilistic ironic practice which seeks to confute altogether any attempt to understand the hero.³³ Our concern throughout this essay has been to suggest that the novel can support a ‘symptomatic’ reading which will account for the details of the text in a thorough and consistent way. But, once that task has been completed, we must concede that our knowledge of Pechorin will remain indirect, and our grasp incomplete. The ‘real’ Pechorin remains at best a ghostly presence, the subject of discourse and the producer of discourse. As we strive to frame a hypothesis which will help us to understand him, we constantly run up against the gaps and silences in the text which ensure that no hypothesis will ever achieve the status of a definite truth. We may not like to move in a narrative world in which the human personality remains so elusive, but such is the consequence of Lermontov's ‘wicked’ irony.

Notes

1. Gilroy: 104.

2. Lavrin: 80.

3. M. Solov'eva, ‘Lermontov s tochki zreniya ucheniya Krechmera’, Klinicheskiy arkhiv genial'nosti i odarennosti, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Leningrad, 1926): 206. Quoted in Udodov: 37.

4. Garrard, 1982: 93.

5. Ibid: 106, 109.

6. See also the lengthy sailor metaphor at the end of ‘Princess Mary’. This is found in many of Lermontov's poems, e.g. ‘A Confession’, ‘Izmail-bey’, ‘The Novice’ and others.

7. See, however, the work of William Mills Todd, which appeared after these words were first written.

8. Ivanov: 282.

9. On this subject, see especially the work of Grigor'yan.

10. Garrard, 1981: 46.

11. Ibid: 48, 50.

12. See the article by Davie in particular.

13. Eykhenbaum, 1961: 237.

14. V. Vinogradov: 52-3.

15. Debreczeny, 1983: 65

16. Davie: 196.

17. Lermontov's novel is linked with the Bakhtinian concept in Fridlender: 45.

18. This point is also made by Lotman, although he does not relate these features to Bakhtin's ideas on polyphony. See Lotman: 31-3.

19. Borges: 236.

20. On this subject, see Holquist: 166-90.

21. For a most useful tabular summary of this problem, see Manuylov: 40-1. It should be noted that there has been some disagreement amongst scholars regarding the order of the first and last stories: do the events described in ‘The Fatalist’ precede or follow the story of Pechorin's relationship with Bela?

22. Gregg, passim.

23. Turner: 76.

24. Belinsky: 240.

25. Ivanov: 284.

26. V. Vinogradov: 104. This is also another case of ironic self-quotation; a similar speech is to be found in the early drama Two Brothers.

27. Levin, passim.

28. Garrard, 1982: 139.

29. Grigor'yan: 273-6.

30. Debreczeny, 1973: 95.

31. Belinsky: 267.

32. Booth: 151.

33. Gilroy: 38, 150, 245 and passim.

Bibliography

The following list contains only those works to which reference is made in the main body of this study. Where an abbreviation has been used in the footnotes, this is indicated in brackets after the appropriate entry. All page references in the text are to the fourth volume of M. Yu. Lermontov, Sobraniye sochineniy v 4-kh tomakh (Moscow, 1958).

Works by Lermontov

Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v 6-i tomakh, ed. N. F. Belchikov, B. P. Gorodetskiy, B. V. Tomashevskiy (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936-7).

Geroy nashego vremeni, ed. B. M. Eykhenbaum, E. E. Naydich (Moscow, 1962).

Sobraniye sochineniy v 4-kh tomakh (Moscow, 1958).

Sobraniye sochineniy v 4-kh tomakh, 2nd edn. (Leningrad, 1981) [SS, 1981].

Other Works

Belinsky, V. G., ‘Geroy nashego vremeni. Sochineniye M. Lermontova’, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, iv (Moscow, 1954): 45-47.

Belinsky, V. G., ‘Geroy nashego vremeni. Sochineniye M. Lermontova’, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, iv (Moscow, 1954): 193-270.

Booth, W. D., A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, 1974).

Borges, J. L., Labyrinths (Harmondsworth, 1970).

Davie, D., ‘Tolstoy, Lermontov, and others’, Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction, ed. D. Davie (Chicago, 1965): 164-99.

Debreczeny, P., ‘Elements of the Lyrical Verse Tale in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time’, American Contributions to the Seventh International Congress of Slavists, ii (Literature and Folklore), ed. Victor Terras (The Hague, 1973): 93-117.

Debreczeny, P., The Other Pushkin. A Study of Alexander Pushkin's Prose Fiction (Stanford, 1983).

Eykhenbaum, B., ‘Geroy nashego vremeni’, Stat'i o Lermontove (Moscow-Leningrad, 1961): 221-85.

Fridlender, G., ‘Lermontov i russkaya povestvovatel'naya proza’, Russkaya literatura, No. 1 (1965): 33-49.

Garrard, J., Mikhail Lermontov (Boston, 1982).

Garrard, J., ‘Old Wine in New Bottles: The Legacy of Lermontov’, Poetic Slavica. Studies in Honour of Zbigniew Folejewski, ed. J. Douglas Clayton, Gunter Schaarschmidt (University of Ottawa, 1981): 41-52.

Gilroy, M., ‘The Ironic Vision in Lermontov's “A Hero of Our Time”’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Strathclyde, 1976.

Gregg, R., ‘The Cooling of Pechorin: The Skull beneath the Skin’, Slavic Review, xliii (1984): 387-98.

Grigor'yan, K., Lermontov i yego roman ‘Geroy nashego vremeni’ (Leningrad, 1975).

Holquist, M., Dostoevsky and the Novel (Princeton, 1977).

Ivanov, S. V., M. Yu. Lermontov. Zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Moscow, 1964).

Lavrin, J., ‘Some notes on Lermontov's Romanticism’, Slavonic and East European Review, xxxvi (1957-8): 69-80.

Lotman, Yu., ‘O probleme znacheniya vo vtorichnykh modelir-uyshchikh sistemakh’, Uchenyye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, vyp.181 (Trudy po znakovym sistemam ii) (Tartu, 1965): 22-37.

Manuylov, V. A., Roman M. Yu. Lermontova ‘Geroy nashego vremeni’. Kommentariy, 2nd edn. (Leningrad, 1975).

Todd, W. M., Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

Turner, C. J. G., Pechorin: An Essay on Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (University of Birmingham, 1978).

Udodov, V., M. Yu. Lermontov. Khudozhestvennaya individual'nost' i tvorcheskiye protsessy (Voronezh, 1973).

Vinogradov, V. V., Stil' prozy Lermontova, (Ann Arbor, 1986) [Reprinted from Literaturnoye nasledstvo, liii-liv (Moscow, 1941): 517-628].