SOURCE: Goldfarb, David A. “Lermontov and the Omniscience of Narrators.” Philosophy and Literature 20, no. 1 (April 1996): 61-73.

[In the following essay, Goldfarb examines Lermontov's innovative use of narrative style in A Hero of Our Time.]

God and fictional narrators are the only beings who are sometimes considered omniscient. God, who is sometimes regarded as not fictional, is frequently also regarded as omnipotent. Narrators, who normally seem to have no sphere of action save for conveying information to readers, particularly when they speak omnisciently in the third person, are not considered to have “power” in any way, because they are supposed to function outside the story. God always speaks in the first person, and is regarded as an all-powerful agent.

But what happens when the narrator gets in on the action? First-person narrators can enter the plot, speaking in the voice of personal narrative, and sometimes “know” as much or more than some third-person narrators who are supposedly “omniscient.” The positivistic “third-person omniscient” narrator of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, for instance, knows only what he sees, and though his omnipresence allows him to see quite a bit, he has virtually no access to the minds of the characters, as do the psychologically omniscient third-person narrators of Tolstoy or Henry James. If knowledge were thus limited in the context of a novel to observables, a first-person narrator who gets around enough could appear much like an omniscient narrator, while also appearing to present a particular point of view. Conversely, the third-person narrator's seeming objectivity is similarly illusory. Any narrator “chooses” what information to relay, and when and how to relay it. In a sense, third-person omniscient narrators fictionally determine what counts as “the story,” creating the fictional world with their godlike voice. Some overbearing narrators, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky's anonymous first-person narrator in What Is To Be Done, adopt not only an omniscient and objective standpoint with regard to the actions and thoughts of the characters, but even presume to tell readers how to interpret the events in the novel. Therefore, all narrators have varying amounts of both knowledge and power, and in some cases they may approach, within variously circumscribed spheres of knowledge and agency, omniscience and omnipotence.

In this essay, I would like to explore the range of constraints and effects of the narrator's fictional power and knowledge. As a test case, I have chosen Mikhail Lermontov's novel, A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni). Writing between 1837 and 1840, Lermontov was one of the first Russian writers to experiment with the form of the novel, influenced primarily by contemporary English, French, and German examples, as well as the classical epic, making this work, like many of the early Russian novels of the 1820s and 1830s, a jumble of narrative styles interestingly layered on each other. It is a particularly fecund work for studies of narrative subjectivity, because characters shift from narrator to narratee across a variety of genres, all in one text.

A Hero of Our Time is composed of five major chapters: “Bela,” “Maksim Maksimich,” “Taman,” “Princess Mary,” and “The Fatalist,” the last three of which comprise the journal of the main character, the officer Grigory Pechorin. The “journal” chapters are preceded by a brief section, set in 1838 or 1839, sometime after Pechorin's death, called the “Introduction to Pechorin's Journal.” In “Bela” an unnamed traveler gathering stories in the Caucasus during the year 1837 meets an older officer, Maksim Maksimich, who tells a yarn about the Byronic adventures of Pechorin in the spring of 1833 involving his abduction of a Circassian woman after whom the chapter is named. The second chapter is an interlude, which takes place in 1837, where Maksim and the first narrator actually meet Pechorin, whom Maksim has not seen for about five years, and Pechorin gives his diaries to the first narrator. “Taman” recounts, in the form of a diary, a strange incident in which Pechorin, around 1830, meets smugglers while stranded in the Crimea and is nearly drowned by a young girl. “Princess Mary,” the longest tale, takes place in May 1832—a love story modeled after Aleksander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, culminating in a duel in which Pechorin prevails over a certain Grushnitskij, his friend earlier in the story. Following the duel, he is dispatched to Chechnya, where he is stationed under Maksim's command beginning in the Autumn of 1832. The regular diary ends during this chapter, the morning before the duel, then Pechorin resumes the tale in a new form of continuous narrative, recalling past events some months after the fact, after he has met Maksim. The final chapter records events that occurred during the winter preceding the events in “Bela,” while Pechorin is on a two-week assignment away from the fort where Maksim is his superior officer.

A Hero of Our Time begins and ends with the problem of free will and determinism. In “Bela” the problem is cast in terms of narration, when the first narrator contests Maksim's premature conclusion of his tale with the dictum that, “What began in an unusual way must end likewise” (p. 35),¹ suggesting that the plot of a story is a function of its genre. In “Fatalism” the problem of determinism seems to have been broadened in scope to life itself staged as a debate concerning Muslim and Christian beliefs about predestination, but if we read carefully, we might notice that the problem is still posed in terms of language. The issue is not so much whether events are cosmically fated to happen, but whether contingent statements about the future have a truth value—a question philosophers would recognize as the venerable “problem of future contingents,” articulated as the issue of the “sea battle” in Aristotle's De Interpretatione IX, and later presented most clearly in a theological context by William of Ockham.²

For Aristotle, the question is this: If I look out over the Aegean and see the Athenean ships assembled at this moment, and I say “There will be a sea battle tomorrow,” that statement, by virtue of its declarative form must have a truth value. In this case, Aristotle states, “it is not necessary for a sea-battle to take place tomorrow nor for one not to take place—though it is necessary for one to take place or not to take place” (De interp. 19a30-34). If one considers any coherent proposition and its negation, either the assertion or the negation must be true, but not both. The logical truism expressed here is one form of the “Law of the Excluded Middle,” that every proposition is either true or false. As Peter Van Inwagen argues in his seminal work, An Essay on Free Will, the issue is whether this “Law” applies to statements about contingent events in the future.³ If statements about the future are “neither true nor false” or if they do not express propositions,⁴ then, it might be argued, we avoid the conclusion of fatalism. Van Inwagen ultimately affirms Aristotle's claim, that statements about contingent events in the future express propositions that must be either true or false, but argues that the Law does not in itself provide a compelling argument against a belief in the free will of agents.

The problem of future contingents is vital for Ockham, because if contingent statements about the future have a truth value—if they are not in fact contingent—and statements made by an omniscient God are of this type, it seems that God's omniscience is incompatible with God's omnipotence. If God already knows what will happen in the future, and God's knowledge is perfect, how can God be said to have the power to change events in the future? In a Newtonian-scale world where knowledge and power are rather limited, more knowledge produces more power in the familiar Foucauldian formula, but as we approach the limits of omniscience and omnipotence by proposing the possibility of the foreknowledge of future events, we observe relativistic effects; whereby, knowledge no longer produces power, but is in fact incompatible with it.

Once we see how scrupulous Lermontov is in limiting the logical scope of his problem, we gain access to what I see as the real issue of the power of narration in Lermontov's quest for form in this collection of nested travel stories. The narrator of “Fatalism,” Pechorin, writing in his diary as reported by the first narrator who calls his work “an innocent forgery” (p. 63),⁵ has a similar problem to that of Ockham's God. Pechorin, twice framed as a narrator and character in his own story, makes a contingent statement about the future that seems at first false then true, regarding the death of another character, Vulich. As (fictional) author, is he not empowered to determine the outcome of claims made by his (fictional) characters? Pechorin, whose narrative voice is not terribly distinguished from that of the first narrator, seems like a kind of omniscient first-person narrator, illustrating what I believe is the theme of the work in its very form.

The power of a storyteller, a liar, is if nothing else the power to determine the outcome of the story. Before considering the details, let us review Lermontov's narrative structure. There are three narrators. The “first narrator” is a journalistic traveler riding from Tiflis to Vladikavkaz with Maksim Maksimich, the second narrator. On the way they meet Maksim's acquaintance and sometime subordinate, Pechorin, the author of a diary, which he gives to the first narrator, through whom all information is relayed to the reader. What is interesting is that each narrator is narrating in the first person, but in a nested structure. Maksim tells his tale to the first narrator, who relates the story to the reader in the outermost frame. The first narrator “admits” to having changed names in Pechorin's diary, including that of the “author” by appending his own name to the text in an act of “forgery.” Though the first narrator relates the other stories, each story is presented as if it were the teller's own story, in which the subject and the object of the tale, the narrator and the narratee, are the same person. When we remind ourselves of the structure, however, we become aware that the voice of Maksim's Pechorin might be different from Pechorin's voice in his own diary.

Boris Eikhenbaum claims that Pechorin is the constant element that ties the various stories and genres of this work together:

The sequence of events (the hero's general background) required of a unitary novel is lacking; the unity of the hero is not linked to the unity of the intrigue, to the constance of the remaining characters, to the uniformity of the narrative form, and, at the same time, the tales are welded together firmly by the hero's unvarying presence and participation.⁶

But, if the form is not unitary, how can the identity and subjectivity of Pechorin as a narrative construct remain the same? If A Hero of Our Time is a travel narrative in which the quest is a quest for form, one question we will have to ask is whether there is a hero of the form. If the genre of a work determines the plot on some level, does this not proscribe the hero's range of actions? Is not the hero of a diary a fundamentally different kind of subject than the hero of a skaz, reflecting vastly different interests on the part of the narrator? Perhaps the only unifying force in the novel could be the first narrator, whose presence is felt more or less directly as the reader moves up or down through levels of narration.

Maksim Maksimich in “Bela” is the most skaz-like narrator of the work, moving the story forward by clever turns, and literally inserting himself into the story of Pechorin's adventure when it serves the plot. Maksim comes off as the most lively of the three narrators. In reference to another work, Eikhenbaum defines the skaz as a first-person style of folk-narrative in which the manner of narration and “personal tone” of the narrator are considerably more important than the plot and content of the story.⁷ Maksim pushes beyond the typical limits of narrative exaggeration and embellishment in the skaz, however, when his actions serve a logical function in the plot. As Pechorin's senior officer, Maksim might be seen by his audience as telling the tale of his own failure to control his underlings and maintain alliances with the local people. In this regard he has literal political authority in the context of the tale. Maksim furthermore becomes complicit in the ruse. The deal is that Pechorin will procure Circassian Kazbich's horse, karagyoz, for the young Azamat in exchange for Azamat's sister, Bela. Maksim makes this possible, first by giving his man free rein despite possible political consequences, then by inviting Kazbich into his tent for tea, distracting him, so that Azamat can steal his horse. Maksim has the authority on every level here in the character of superior officer, logical facilitator, and narrator of the skaz. Maksim controls characters, facilitates the plot, and determines the tone. What greater authority could a narrator want?

The rub comes when his listener in the text, the first narrator, challenges the outcome of events half-way, complaining that such an unusual story could not have a happy ending: “What begins in an unusual way must end likewise.” A story by its very genre must follow a certain kind of “master narrative,” or it's just not a story, at least in the mind of this reader-narrator who is listening to Maksim's narrative. It is important to note, then, that the idea about narrative that Lermontov is suggesting has more to do with the reader's expectations than with the story itself. After all, who is Lermontov, with all his shifts in genre, to offer prescriptions on the unity of narrative form? What Lermontov makes explicit here in this metafictional interruption of Maksim's tale is the implicit negotiation made between narrators and readers, or perhaps implied readers, in the interests of convincing the reader of the truth of the text and keeping the reader's attention. I will call the principle articulated in Lermontov's dictum on beginnings and endings, the principle of “narrative necessity,” and it is what is always at odds with the power of the omniscient—and omnipotent—narrator.

At the point of the challenge, the first narrator is being extremely disingenuous. After all, he is—at this particular moment—narrating himself around Maksim's story. His charge against Maksim might be seen as a charge against himself, since he is the outermost narrator, and it is within his power to edit Maksim's story. Yet the first narrator expresses disappointment in Maksim's failure to provide a “tragic denouement” (27)⁸ at the right point in the story. At the moment of the first narrator's challenge to Maksim, the first narrator's interests are paramount in determining the direction of the plot. The first narrator is not even going to tell the story to us, the readers outside the text, if it does not fit his master narrative—if it does not “end in an interesting way.”

The first narrator claims, however, to be a reporter of everything he sees on his travels. Choosing the trope of travel notes, he seems to give up the power to make up the story, and in so doing defines his narrative subjectivity. The first narrator is limited by his self-definition as a travel writer, as he teases the reader about the end of the “Bela” story, but delays the ending, subordinating the plot to the chronotope of the road that defines travel narrative (31) as opposed to povest'.⁹ At this moment, we see the difference between the first narrator and Lermontov himself, since it would certainly have been in Lermontov's power to make a more “interesting” story without any complaints from his own narrator, but it is not within that narrator's power, as a character. What the first narrator gets in return for this concession is the confidence of the reader and the illusion of verisimilitude. In fact, he is going to tell us every interesting thing that he encounters on the road, or perhaps he can spice things up. The first narrator gives the impression that he exchanges power for knowledge.

“The Fatalist” seems almost like an appendage to the text, a sort of epilogue. The question of fatalism is posed as a “metaphysical” one, in terms of the Islamic and Christian beliefs about predestination. Maksim expresses the problem twice in virtually identical terms: in reference to Vulich at the end of the tale (194), and in “Bela,” when Maksim refers to Pechorin as one of those “people to whom it is assigned, at their birth, to have all sorts of extraordinary things happen to them” (11).¹⁰ Note that “assigned” here translates the full range of napisano, or “written,” personifying God or whatever it is that determines the fates of mortals as a kind of master narrator, as/signing futures in the book of destiny.

When questions of fate are actually resolved in the work, however, the issue is not really one of cosmic assignation of fate at birth, but rather of the truth or falsehood of propositions about the future. Pechorin makes a wager that predestination is false, and Vulich, an inveterate gambler, bets against him, using himself as the test. Pechorin makes a simple assertion to Vulich regarding his fate: “Tonight you will die” (p. 185).¹¹ Note that Lermontov is careful to limit the bounds of this claim to a simple, verifiable fact, stated in the most parsimonious form, incidentally affirming Ockham's other famous principle, known as “Ockham's razor.” Vulich responds with the acknowledgement of the contingency of this declaration about events in the future: “Maybe yes, maybe no” (p. 185).¹² Not having available pistols with rotating cylinders yet, he plays a game of Russian roulette by picking a pistol off the wall and shooting it at his head without checking whether it is loaded. The pistol is in fact loaded but misfires, proving, it seems for the moment, that Vulich was not fated to die on this particular evening, disconfirming Pechorin's assertion. At issue in the wager is nothing more than this. Nothing in this test would prove anything about predestination or the will of God or the intentions of the cosmos. At best it might show that, as predicted, improbable things do indeed occur—rarely. Vulich does die later the same night in an encounter with a drunken Cossack. Though Pechorin believes that he read Vulich's fate in the expression on his face (p. 185) and Maksim believes that Vulich's death was delayed by the generally poor quality of the type of pistol he was using (p. 194), all the dying man says is On prav! (4:471)—the simplest possible assertion he could make regarding Pechorin's claim—“He was right!” (p. 191).

Or was he? And when was he? Aristotle and Ockham would ask whether Pechorin's future contingent statement was true or false at the time he made it. Lermontov's issue is precisely Ockham's issue. One of Ockham's premises is that a statement cannot be at one time true then later false. It is either one or the other. Either Peter is predestinate or Peter is reprobate, but not both, to use his example (Ockham, p. 78). Either Vulich is going to die tonight or not, “maybe yes, maybe no,” but not both. The narrative is constructed to make it seem that the statement is first false then true, but this is incoherent on Ockham's premise that truth is an immutable property of assertoric statements.

If we take knowledge to be justified true belief, we might say that Pechorin's assertion expressed a belief which came true, but we would be going out on a limb to call Pechorin's “reading” of Vulich's face as justification for the belief. At the time the statement was made it seems not to have been either true or false, because it really does seem to have been contingent. Vulich did not know whether the gun was loaded. Had he known, who could have predicted that it would have misfired?

Maksim's suggestion implies that Vulich could have known something about the pistol, and could have introduced an element of control over the bet, as Maksim remarks that Circassian rifles can misfire if the trigger is not pressed hard enough.¹³ Since Vulich himself is an “Oriental,” Maksim's statement implies that he might have had some special knowledge of Circassian rifles, and could have caused it to misfire by pressing the trigger lightly. On the other hand, when Vulich fires, the text indicates that “the pistol snapped” (p. 186). The pistol's “snapping” without firing the shot seems to suggest that Vulich was still taking a substantial risk, even if he may have been pushing the odds slightly in his favor by pressing the trigger too softly.

What I think is really suggested by Maksim's explanation is that in the Oriental space in which nature and chance prevail over artifice and reason, Orientals are thought by Westerners to have mystical powers to influence chance or to be more “in touch with nature.” Nonetheless, this Western belief about the Orient would hardly justify a belief on Pechorin's part that the outcome of the wager was anything but random. It was a good ex post facto explanation for Maksim, but would he have taken such a bet, knowing that the gun was loaded? Who would have guessed that the apparently lucky man would encounter the drunken Cossack on the road? There is really nothing to be known at the time Pechorin makes his declaration.

What kind of narrator is Pechorin? On the one hand, Pechorin is qualified as the first-person narrator of his own diary, so he should not be considered omniscient at first sight. He is not recording events in this particular story, however, in the mode of a diary, but recalling them after a two-week stint in a Cossack settlement at some point between his arrival in the fort of N. in the autumn of 1832 and the “Bela” story in the spring of 1833. Vladimir Nabokov, in the introduction to his translation of the work, places “The Fatalist” in December, and this seems a good guess, since the characters are dressed for winter, but the precise date is not so clear from the text. We know that Pechorin left for the fort of N. on June 19, 1832 and arrived in autumn. A month and a half later he takes up writing in his diary again, and the appearance of Maksim at the end of the story indicates that it had to have happened while he was in the fort. The December guess depends on the assumption that Pechorin arrived in September, say, took up writing in his diary in November, finishing the tale of the duel in “Princess Mary,” spent two weeks among the Cossacks, then returned immediately to write about it, by which time it would be December. Actually, the sequence is not supported by the text. He might have finished “Princess Mary” and written “The Fatalist” all on the same night, putting the two-week stint anytime from his arrival to then, or he might have added it at any time before he left the fort permanently for Georgia, three months after the Bela incident.

The precise date is trivial, but the fact that it is ambiguous is interesting, because it signals to the reader that the chronotope of the diary—the calendar—has given way to a new chronotope.¹⁴ Pechorin is now narrating in the style of a third-person omniscient narrator. Vulich meets his death as he “had been walking alone in a dark street” (p. 190)¹⁵ shortly before four in the morning, then Pechorin proceeds to tell what happened to him there in detail. How could he know the details if he was not there and Vulich was otherwise alone? The dying man, as far as we know, said only two words, On prav! but narrator Pechorin reports what was said and how Vulich was killed, as if he had seen it himself.

Eikhenbaum regards this bit of narration as completely unmotivated, claiming that only the dead man could have known what happened at the scene of the crime.¹⁶ This is not quite right, because the murderer was also there, and Pechorin could have learned what had happened after the murderer was apprehended. What is interesting is that he could not have known this information at the point at which he reports it, but the style of the story seems to dictate that he reveal this information in the sequence in which the events occur, rather than in the sequence in which he learned them. Unlike the first narrator, Pechorin is not dependent on the chronotope of the road, whereby he would have to delay reporting events until they happened, and he abandons the chronotope of the diary, wherein information is also reported as it becomes known, day by day. When Pechorin resumes writing in his diary, he adopts a new form, more like the povest', which the first narrator so diligently eschews, or perhaps the novel, and may thus order information and events to suit the story, and in fact to make his feat of capturing the murderer by guile, narrowly escaping being shot himself, seem all the more daring. At this point, Pechorin is a novelistic narrator trapped in the volume called a diary. By reordering information, he becomes both a novelistic protagonist and a first-person omniscient narrator.

This daring Pechorin seems quite a different character from the desperate Pechorin who acquires Bela by illicit means then is beset with grief at her death, which he has indirectly caused. As a first-person omniscient narrator, Pechorin is in charge. It is only his assertion, after all, that indicates that the “he” indicated by the dying Vulich in his last words was “Pechorin,” and that what was “right” was Pechorin's assertion, “Tonight you will die.” Perhaps someone else was right about something else. Pechorin can take this bit of found text, however, and make himself the center of the tale. He is a self-constructed hero, and “The Fatalist” might be judged not as an appendage to the work but its climax, when we read A Hero of Our Time as a travel narrative in which the quest object is form itself. The first narrator conceals this fact in plain view when he remarks in the introduction to Pechorin's journal that the heroism of his hero consists in the fact that he is telling his story (pp. 63-64), and declines to comment on his moral qualities. The autonarrated Pechorin is the new narrator-hero of the climactic form.

It is thus entirely appropriate that in this climax of narration, the theme should be the semantic question associated with fatalism. We are still reading from the diary in this story, and the narrator's subjectivity is necessarily folded upon itself. Pechorin's position of self-construction is that of omnipotence. Who is his audience? Writing such tales as past events, he seems to have a clear idea that others will read his adventures, and he indeed passes them on to the first narrator with permission to publish them, while the earlier parts of the diary which record events as they occur day-by-day, following the chronotope of the calendar, appear as unedited personal records, perhaps serving the interests of the first narrator in creating a feeling of verisimilitude about the diary.

The problem of fatalism and fate here is really a problem of narrative subjectivity. As of Ockham's God, we might ask: Is the novelistic autobiographer's omnipotence to construct the self compatible with the autobiographical narrator's guise of omniscience of the self? If Pechorin is writing for others, then the genre has changed from personal diary to autobiography presuming what Phillipe LeJeune has called the “autobiographical pact,” that the author is the referent and vouches for the information contained in the work, or as Jean Starobinski has elegantly phrased it, “No matter how doubtful the facts related, the text will at least present an ‘authentic’ image of the man who ‘held the pen.’”¹⁷ Whatever the autobiographer says, it is interesting to us because he says it. LeJeune distinguishes between the autobiographical novel and actual autobiography, with the fundamental criterion that the hero of real autobiography is linked to the human author via the author's name on the title page. That is, the referent of the “I” in the narration of autobiography is the name on the title page, and by virtue of convention, a kind of social contract, the referent of the name on the title page is the bodily author (pp. 11, 13-14). Pechorin's diary, however, is imbedded one narrative level inside A Hero of Our Time, so it becomes kind of a fictional autobiography, in which a “real” Pechorin, known “in the flesh” to the first narrator and Maksim, is the referent of the “Pechorin” who is the pseudo-author, narrator and protagonist of his own diary. Pechorin's journal is a fiction to us, but real to the first narrator, so LeJeune's pact is made directly between Pechorin and his reader-in-the-text, but indirectly between Pechorin and us readers, outside the text. At the precise point of the transition from diary to autobiography in “Princess Mary,” Pechorin signals this shift by making this agreement explicitly: “How clearly and sharply the past has crystallized in my memory! Time has not erased one line, one shade!” (p. 160).¹⁸ Real events, however, are not clear or sharp or crystalline except as reported in novels.

The power of the autobiographical narrator is limited by the constraint that his claims must be plausible, or we will not accede to the narrative desire that the work be read as autobiography. The problem of the autobiographical pact is compounded when the autobiographical narrator is novelized, or speaks in the voice of first-person omniscience. The diaristic narrator and the travel narrator do not know what is going to happen until it happens, but the novelistic narrator may superimpose knowledge from the narrative future onto the narrative present, stretching the reader's limits of plausibility, enhancing his own image as a protagonist. The third-person omniscient narrator gives up power over events by remaining outside in exchange for the illusion of “knowledge.” Pechorin, as a first-person omniscient narrator, wants it all.

Notes

1. All otherwise unmarked page numbers in the text refer either to Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, trans. Vladimir Nabokov with Dmitri Nabokov (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988), or to Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time), vol. 4 of Sobranie sochinenij, edited by B. M. Eikhenbaum (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Institut Russkoi Literatury, 1959), pp. 275-474, 649-57. “Ottogo, chto eto ne v poriadke veshchej: chto nachalos' neobyknovennym obrazom, to dolzhno tak zhe i konchit'tsia” (4:310).

2. Jonathan Barnes, ed., Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). William Ockham, Predestination, God's Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents, trans. Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969).

3. Peter Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 52-53.

4. I am adopting Van Inwagen's convention here that “propositions” are logical possibilities expressed by “sentences.” There can be propositions that cannot be expressed by sentences in any known language and there can be sentences in the form of meaningful assertions that fail to express propositions.

5. “nevinnyj podlog” (4:339).

6. B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lermontov: A Study in Literary-historical Evaluation, trans. Ray Parrott and Harry Weber (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), p. 164.

7. B. M. Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol's ‘Overcoat’ is Made,” trans. John Fred Beebe and Elizabeth W. Trahan, in Gogol's “Overcoat”: An Anthology of Critical Essays, ed. Elizabeth Trahan, pp. 21-36 (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), p. 21.

8. “ia ozhidal tragicheskoj razviazki” (4:302-3).

9. Povest' in Russian is often translated as “novella,” as opposed to roman, which refers to the full-blown novel. There is some debate, however, as to whether povest' might be defined more restrictively as a short novel narrated in the first-person, like the récit or as a short first-person roman à thèse.

10. “etakie liudi, u kotorych na rodu napisano, chto s nimi dozhny sluchat'sia raznye neobyknovennye veshchi” (4:285).

11. “Vy nynche umrete” (4:465).

12. “Mozhet byt' da—mozhet byt' i net …” (4:465).

13. Sonia Ketchian made this observation to me in response to an earlier version of this essay read at the 1995 conference of the New England Slavic Association.

14. M. M. Bakhtin uses the term “chronotope” to refer to the relation of time to space in the novel. The road serves as the primary chronotope of the first narrator's narration.

15. “Vulich shel odni po temnoj ulitse” (4:471).

16. Eikhenbaum, Lermontov …, pp. 168-69.

17. Phillipe LeJeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 3-30. Jean Starobinski, “The Style of Autobiography,” trans. Seymour Chatman, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney, pp. 73-83 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 75.

18. “Kak vsë proshedshee iasto i rezko otlilos' v moej pamiati! Ni odnoj cherty, ni odnogo ottenka ne sterlo vremia” (4:439).