SOURCE: Garrard, John. “Narrative Poems.” In Mikhail Lermontov, pp. 93-123. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

[In the following essay, Garrard examines Lermontov's narrative poems, tracing the poet's gradual transition from Romanticism to Realism and his developing ability to handle problems of narrative stance over the course of his writing career.]

Traditionally, Lermontov's two most famous narrative poems have been The Novice and The Demon.¹ Both belong to the most Byronic portion of the Lermontov canon and offer quintessential examples of the Byronic hero. Precisely these qualities made the works so popular throughout the nineteenth century, but twentieth-century readers have generally valued them less highly. In much the same way, the popularity of Byron's most “Byronic” works (Lara, The Corsair) has declined, while his ironical and satiric poems, especially Don Juan and Beppo, have gained in public favor.

Although The Novice and The Demon were completed only toward the end of Lermontov's life, they had been begun near the outset of his brief career. They therefore pose a problem for those who argue that there is a linear development from Romanticism to Realism (however defined) in Lermontov's works. They are out of phase chronologically because they look back to his early Byronic period and yet were finished at a time when he was writing his novel, A Hero of Our Time, which contains a critique of the Byronic type. Where then does one place these works in Lermontov's development in view of the fact that he tinkered with various drafts of them (particularly The Demon) throughout the 1830s? I shall discuss them first, because they represent nothing new: they merely close down the Romantic, Byronic poem as a creative mode. I believe Lermontov sensed this, but wanted to complete them by way of purging himself of certain notions and attitudes he had cherished earlier.

THE NOVICE

The Novice was written in 1839, but draws heavily on two earlier unpublished poems, Ispoved [The Confession, 1831] and Boyarin Orsha [The Boyar Orsha, 1835-36]. The Demon, first outlined in 1829, went through seven revisions in the following decade. Lermontov's exile to the Caucasus in 1837 helped crystallize the original concepts behind both works, and he found in the scenic grandeur of the Caucasus the ideal setting for each.

The basic narrative of The Novice derives from a story told to Lermontov in 1837 at the Mtskheti Monastery in Tbilisi by an old monk who had spent his entire life at the monastery after being brought there as a foundling. Lermontov chose to make his hero, the novice, more defiant. Instead of passively living out his life in the monastery, he dies at the conclusion after a frustrated but passionately exciting attempt to escape to his native region in the Caucasus mountains.

He asks the monk to bury him in the monastery garden within sight of his beloved mountains:

And with that thought I shall fall asleep
And will not curse anyone.

The novice's dying hope that a brother or friend will wipe the sweat from his brow is rather touching. The French scholar Eugène Duchesne has suggested that this calm, though not truly resigned, attitude reflected a mellowing in Lermontov's own views toward the end of the 1830s.²

The Novice demonstrates Lermontov's weakness in handling narrative stance, something he acquired from Byron. This poem consists of an extended monologue spoken to the old monk, so that no dialogue occurs between the characters. The old monk remains silent and, to us, nearly invisible. At the opening of two sections, the novice asks the old monk directly: “Do you want to know what I saw while I was free?” (section 6), and “Do you want to know what I did while I was free?” (section 8). There is no reply; we must assume that the old man simply gives wordless assent. This accentuates the monologic quality of Lermontov's narrative poems. We have noted this same weakness in his attempts at writing drama. Lermontov, a Romantic and a lyricist, is concerned only with the speaker's feelings, not the reactions of the listener.

A further narrative shortcoming is that Lermontov sets the scene for the novice's confession in two opening sections, spoken by a nameless narrator. This narrator is not particularized in any way, and he disappears for good after making this introduction. But what he tells us is important: the novice had been brought as a frightened native boy to the monastery by a Russian general. A kindly monk takes care of him and gains his trust, so that he seems to grow up normally. He even takes vows and prepares to enter the priesthood. Then one fall day he suddenly disappears, to be found three days later exhausted and near death. He is brought back to the monastery and the old monk arrives to administer the last rites, whereupon the novice proudly delivers the confession which forms the remainder of the poem. It is part apologia, part complaint, part paean to the beauties of the Caucasus.

The novice is most distressed at dying so young, before he had had a chance to experience life's joys and sorrows. Even his childhood had been stolen from him, for he had never heard “those holy words: father and mother.” He describes himself in the monastery as “in soul a child, by fate a monk,” and says in section 14 that he escaped in an attempt to return home, to recapture the childhood he had been denied:

… Only one aim,
To reach my native land,
Did I have in my soul.

He recalls his home in section 6, though in vague, if rhapsodic language. The novice does remember a real home, a real place, but what he is searching for now is less a physical place than an idealized Golden Age. Thus the poem describes a symbolic search, an attempt to escape the trials of earthly existence. The novice's lack of success supports this symbolic interpretation. Lermontov's view of life was pessimistic; many of his other works embody his belief that life was merely “a vale of tears.” Only the love of women and the scenic beauties of nature might offer momentary joy, but this soon passes, too.

The Novice contains an extended treatment of themes broached in two famous early lyrics, “The Sail” and “The Angel.” The novice's character recalls the rebellious nature of the personified sail which “seeks the storm, / As though calm could be found in storms.” The novice speaks of his “raging” and “tormented” breast in sections 4 and 9, and in section 8 he cries out:

… Oh, like a brother
I would be glad to embrace the storm!
I would follow the clouds with my eyes,
And reach for the stars.

A few lines later he speaks of “That friendship, brief but alive, / Between a turbulent heart and a storm.”

The highlights of his wanderings are (1) the sight of a lovely Georgian girl descending to fill her jug with water from a clear stream, and the sounds of her beautiful song; (2) his fight with a leopard which he kills with a wooden club; (3) a delirious dream in which he imagines he is lying happily at the bottom of a cool, deep stream, listening to a song sung in a silvery voice by a beautiful golden fish with tender green eyes.

In typically Romantic fashion, Lermontov emphasized the divine quality of music. Two of the three episodes mentioned above involve a beautiful song, which symbolizes, as in “The Angel,” a link between earthly existence and the Paradise from which we have fallen (in Christian terms), or else some neo-Platonic ideal reality behind the vulgar, physical reality surrounding us.

The novice observes the Georgian girl without meeting her. The hero's overwhelming concern is to get back home; during his wanderings he chiefly enjoys his freedom and the beauties of nature. He achieves such a unity with the natural world that in his fight with the leopard he becomes an animal, while the leopard takes on human features.

Like many other Lermontovian heroes, the novice believes fate is against him. He struggles to achieve his goal, but there is an element of fatalism within him: “But in vain did I quarrel with fate, / It mocked me!” A little later, in section 20, he declares that he deserves his fate: even a horse can make its way back home, but he could not. Then he compares himself at length with a flower grown in a dark dungeon: when first brought out into the bright sun the flower rejoices, but all too soon it fades and dies, unaccustomed to the light.

The Novice contains some remarkably fine lines in the hero's impassioned descriptions of the exotic scenery that he had seen close at hand for the first time in his adult life. But these descriptions resemble set pieces, linked together only tangentially by the person of the hero and his aimless wandering. He talks to no one. The novice simply talks and the reader, like the poor old monk, is obliged to listen to his constant complaints.

THE DEMON

Like the novice, Lermontov's Demon finds he cannot go home again either, and also fails to escape his fate. The Demon sees in a beautiful Georgian princess the same mirage of happiness that the novice does in the magnificent Caucasus mountains. Flying above the earth, the Demon glimpses the lovely Tamara, who arouses him from his cosmic boredom and disgust with everything human. In order to attain everlasting joy with her, the Demon has her bridegroom killed by bandits on the way to the wedding, and then lays siege to her heart and soul. Even Tamara's entry into a convent does not save her: she finally surrenders, but dies with the Demon's first kiss:

The deadly poison of his kiss
Instantly penetrated her breast.
A tormented, terrible cry
Broke into the silence of the night.
In it there was everything: love, suffering,
A reproach with a final prayer
And a hopeless farewell—
Farewell to young life.

When Tamara is buried in the family chapel on a lofty peak, the Demon claims her soul, but an angel descends from the heavens, rejects the Demon's claim, and bears her aloft. Once more the Demon is condemned to his eternal fate:

And again he remained, haughty,
Alone, as before, in the universe
Without hope or love!

The above is a straightforward plot synopsis of the final reworking of The Demon. It exists in eight recognized versions, however. Lermontov began The Demon in 1829, when he was only fourteen, and continued to revise and expand upon his original idea for nearly a decade. The first five versions are the so-called early, pre-Caucasus ones, in which the action is set vaguely during the Spanish Inquisition, the heroine is a nun, and the narration is both abstract and autobiographical. These early versions date respectively from 1829 (I), early 1830 (II), 1831 (III and IV), and 1832-33 (V). Version III bears an epigraph from Byron's Cain, which clearly had a decisive influence on Lermontov's concept; and a dedication to “Madonna,” i.e., to Varenka Lopukhina, with whom the work continued to be associated in Lermontov's mind. He imagined her as the heroine and himself (at sixteen) as the Demon: “Like a demon, cold and stern / I took pleasure in doing evil in the world. …”

Lermontov's first exile to the Caucasus provided several ideas for his poem. He changed the setting to the Caucasus and made the time more contemporary. Both these changes were salutary. The setting of the early versions had been nebulous and not very believable. In the Caucasus, however, Lermontov felt at home. He rarely describes nature in the North, but in the South his imagination is fired by its majestic peaks, deep gorges, and rushing streams, as well as its proud and beautiful inhabitants. His descriptions of this magnificent scenery energize the poem.

Setting the poem in a more contemporary time also eliminated a problem. Lermontov had no feeling for history; he was interested in the display of feelings. A contemporaneous time for his poem allowed him to avoid problems of specific historical context gracefully.

He introduced these changes in 1838, adding a new dedication to the Caucasus. He produced a sketch (the Erevan manuscript) which, with a few minor additions and variations, became version VI. This is the so-called “Lopukhin Version,” the only one of the three mature versions to survive in an authorized copy. Dated 8 September 1838 and sent as a gift to Varenka, it is the first version to include the justly famous song beginning “On an ethereal ocean.” It also contains for the first time the Dedication, placed at the end of the poem, which opens:

I have finished—and feel in my breast an involuntary doubt!
Will the long familiar note engage you once again,
The pensive singing of unfamiliar lines,
You, forgetful yet unforgotten friend?

There are unusually lovely assonances in the original Russian:

Ya konchil—i v grudi nevolnoe somnenie
Zaymyot li vnov tebya davno znakomyzvuk,
Stikhov nevedomykh zadumchivoe penie,
Tebya, zabyvchivy, no nezabvennydrug?

The Caucasus, then, had provided Lermontov with solutions to problems of setting and time inherent in the early drafts. Lermontov continued to revise version VI, but for prosaic, not poetical, reasons, and now made a serious attempt to have the poem published.³ In version VI the heroine is named for the first time. She is not a nun originally, but only enters the convent after the death of her bridegroom in order to escape the temptations of the Demon. Hereafter the poem is divided into two parts, with the second part taking place in the convent.

Lermontov now makes a major change in Tamara's fate, obviously for the purpose of getting the poem past the censors. He “saves” Tamara: her soul, beginning with version VII, ascends to heaven. We know version VII was completed and dated 4 December 1838, but it has not survived. Unlike version VI, it did not circulate widely in manuscript.

In early 1839 Lermontov returned to The Demon for the last time. The Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna expressed an interest in reading it, and Lermontov prepared a manuscript for her, version VIII. The Empress noted in her diary that she read it on 9 February. On 10 February the manuscript was returned to Lermontov with word that Her Majesty had deigned to like the work. Encouraged by this piece of good fortune, Lermontov submitted it to the censors a month later. For a while things seemed to go well, but in the end all his changes were to no avail. The poem's religious theme made the poem suspect not only to state censorship, but even more to church censorship. At this point apparently Lermontov himself accepted the situation and decided, quite wisely, that there was no point in trying to publish such a controversial work.

In The Demon Lermontov grappled with a theme that had been treated by many Romantic poets since the discovery, or rather reinterpretation, of Milton's Paradise Lost. The Christian Satan and the pagan Prometheus were the two seminal mythic figures of the Romantic period, symbolizing rejection of a cruel world created by an unjust god. The direct and indirect sources of Lermontov's poem are so numerous that there is little point in identifying them one by one. Duchesne argues for the precedence of personal characteristics over literary borrowings in the figure of the Demon:

Thus the poet mixed together in this figure of the Demon traits which literary tradition furnished him and those which a patient analysis had revealed to him deep in his own soul: the latter play a much more important part. This explains the insignificance of the character of Tamara.⁴

The last sentence points up the basic fact that once again a long and ambitious work of Lermontov's consists for the most part of a monologue by the hero. Other characters—more specifically, the heroine—receive little attention.

Moreover, even if we discount the modern temperament's distaste for Romantic posturing, Lermontov has not really done justice to his theme. Lermontov suffers from the fact that his demonic theme was later treated with consummate artistry by Dostoevsky. To read Lermontov's works now is to feel that an important and complex topic is being handled in an intellectually impoverished context. Dostoevsky's demons are much more persuasive than Lermontov's because they are endowed with more powerful rhetorical skill. Dostoevsky's demonic figures must defend their positions, while Lermontov's do not because he is too obviously in sympathy with them.

To be sure, Soviet Russian scholars have written a great deal about the “philosophical” content of The Demon. For me that is too grand a term. Lermontov's Demon is a passionate disciple of Milton's Satan and Byron's Cain; he is not interested in ideas or questions of theodicy in the same way that Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov is a generation later.

Lermontov's Demon behaves remarkably like a Hussar officer. He is chasing after a woman, while at the same time he longs for the serene pleasures of Paradise, when he knew “neither malice, nor doubt” (1:1). He is not as consistently defiant as Satan or Lucifer. He has even become bored with doing evil: “Ruling the worthless earth / He sowed evil without pleasure” (1:2) In fact, the Demon has reached a stage of cosmic boredom. He despises or hates everything and everybody; the gorgeous scenery of the Caucasus arouses only “cold” envy within him.

Sometimes the descriptions of the Demon descend to banality as Lermontov tries to maintain a melodramatic tone:

… but the proud spirit
Cast a supercilious eye over his God's creation,
And on his lofty forehead nothing was reflected.

(1:3)

But if the reader accepts this extravagant claim, he is disillusioned when the Demon first sees Tamara, in section 5, as she descends to the Aragva River for water. Tamara's father is Prince Gudal, whose castle high on a rock is bustling with preparations for her wedding to the Prince of the mythical kingdom of Sinodal. Tamara dances and sings with her handmaidens, and the narrator swears that no more beautiful girl ever lived. He also seems to regret that she, “playful child of freedom,” must marry and therefore become a “sad slave.” But when the Demon sees Tamara:

The desert of his mute soul
Was filled with heavenly music,
And again he perceived the blessings
Of love, goodness and beauty!

(1:9)

The strongly held beliefs of the “proud spirit” vanish instantaneously. Such lightning changes of mood, insufficiently motivated, belong to melodrama rather than to tragedy.

This passage linking the vision of a beautiful Georgian maiden with “heavenly music” recalls a similar episode in The Novice. The novice catches sight of the maiden descending to fill her jug with water as she sings a song. The song intensifies the novice's enjoyment of his surroundings, and his sense of freedom. It serves also as a prelude to the happiness he believes he will find when he returns home. But the notion of “home,” as we have seen, is associated with an ideal existence to which the novice strains to escape. In The Demon, on the other hand, we have, as it were, a literal desire on the hero's part to escape to Paradise.

Now the Demon recalls earlier times, presumably in heaven, when he could feel both joy and sorrow. (The music awakened in his soul is also literally “heavenly,” since the Demon once heard such music in heaven.) He can no longer forget those times, and he does not wish to: “Forget?—God would not grant forgetfulness: / And in any case he would not have accepted it” (1:9). Curiously enough, however, the Demon's immediate reaction to such blissful feelings is to arrange for the murder of Tamara's bridegroom, again without sufficient motivation. The reader is puzzled by the abrupt alternation of the Demon's new, good feelings with his evil action. Lermontov misses the opportunity for an agonizing soliloquy by his hero. This is very surprising in a writer who has now gained, through A Hero of Our Time, a reputation for psychological insight. Perhaps Lermontov simply felt bound by the style and generic expectations of the Byronic narrative poem. Only in prose fiction could he fully explore the contradictory motivations of his characters.

At the beginning of Part II Tamara has decided to enter a convent in order to enlist God's assistance in escaping the Demon's advances. Despite her father's disappointment, Tamara refuses to consider any other suitors, explaining that the Demon, the spirit of cunning, torments her with “an irresistible dream.”

The remainder of Part II describes Tamara's unavailing efforts to resist the Demon's overtures. Unlike the novice and many other Lermontovian figures, she has entered the cloister willingly, to flee from temptation. The denouement is delayed by lush descriptions of the convent, the Caucasus's luxuriant valleys and snow-capped mountains, and Tamara's turbulent emotions. Before long Tamara, despite herself, yearns to see the Demon: “She might want to pray to the saints— / But her heart prayed to him.” (2:6). The Demon, too, finds himself moved; he feels love, and even more the “anguish of love,” for the first time. He enters the convent determined to love selflessly and to start a new life. But in Tamara's cell he finds an angel sent to defend her honor. Challenged by the angel, the Demon undergoes an alarming change of heart:

And again in his soul there awoke
The poison of ancient hatred.
“She is mine!” he said threateningly,
“Leave her alone, she is mine!”

(2:9)

The phrase “And again” (I vnov) is one Lermontov uses a great deal in describing sudden changes in the emotions or attitude of his characters. It is a weak device, and reminds one of similar key words like “suddenly” favored by Leo Tolstoy, another writer who had difficulty in depicting his characters gaining awareness or reaching a new plateau of cognition. The frequent use of the phrase “and again” may be linked with Lermontov's belief that happiness is fleeting, that sooner rather than later life will return to its familiar routine. Life is cyclical, but the evil cycles are more tenacious than the good.

When Tamara declares that she can never love him, the Demon embarks on a confession of the type that Lermontov's rejected heroes usually deliver. To be sure, the verse is technically on a high level and the speech is a splendid piece of rhetoric. The reader, however, is likely to sympathize with Tamara's brisk reply: “What need have I to know of your sorrows, / Why do you complain to me?” (2:10). But a moment later she has weakened, asking the demon to swear he really will change his wicked ways as he has promised. The Demon is happy to swear by everything imaginable for the next twenty lines. Then he paints a splendid picture of their life together, promising that she will reign over the earth, and that he will give her jewels and gifts beyond number. Tamara says nothing, but she must surely be impressed.

As the Demon bends over to kiss her, poison pours from his burning lips into her heart, and she dies with but a single cry. As Tamara's soul is carried up to heaven by an angel, the Demon confronts them and demands Tamara's return to him. Tamara is frightened, for he is now revealed to her as the spirit of darkness. This time the angel defends her, telling the Demon that God in His wisdom has spared her soul because she has endured enough pain and sorrow already:

She has suffered and loved—
And paradise is open to love.

The Demon is left to curse his fate and his foolish dreams.

The Demon became one of Lermontov's best-known works. It was particularly popular around the turn of the century, when the Symbolist period witnessed a great revival of interest in Romanticism. Indeed, Russian Symbolism, like French Symbolism, to which it owes so much, could be viewed as a kind of neo-Romanticism. Still, Lermontov's poem had more impact on the other arts than it did on poetry. We have noted that Anton Rubinstein wrote an opera based on The Demon, and it enjoyed some popularity then. The important Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel, who went mad in 1905 and died five years later, was fascinated by the image of the Demon and executed a series of paintings based on Lermontov's work, in a fruitless search for an absolute, total freedom of expression.

Lermontov's good friend and admirer, Shan-Girey, did not care for The Demon. He compared it to an opera in which the music was charming, but the libretto absolute rubbish (Vosp., 45). This is not an unfair comment, for the librettos of many famous operas, if read without music, seem rather silly. This holds also if one reads The Demon without hearing the music of its poetry in the original Russian.

Even the poetry, the chief glory of the poem, sometimes seems melodic filigree. After all, the work consists for the most part of a very long monologue. There is no plot to speak of. Presumably the Demon can have Tamara whenever he wishes since she is a mere mortal without heavenly support until she dies. Why does the angel refuse to help at first, or why is he unable to help? Because God has not reached a decision in her case? These unanswered questions remain unanswerable. Lermontov provides no philosophical keys to the poem, since it basically lacks philosophy. It contains some of the most beautiful lines in the history of Russian verse, but significantly it had no poetic imitators. When it was finally first published in Russia in 1860, it must have seemed like a museum piece. But the Demon, transmogrified into Pechorin, the central character of A Hero of Our Time, did have an enormous impact on Russian literature.

SASHKA

As early as 1831, at the outset of his career when The Demon was still in embryo, Lermontov reminded himself in a note to “write a long satirical poem on the adventures of the Demon” (4:344). This is the first indication of Lermontov's interest in the comic or ironical side of Byron's legacy. But apart from a few sketches of 1831-32, he began writing “long satirical poems” only when he moved to St. Petersburg.

In his unfinished poem Sashka (the hero's name), written in 1834-36, Lermontov attempted to move from the vulgar farce of his “Hussar poems” to the higher level of irony. As usual, he borrowed lines and stanzas from earlier works, but essentially Sashka was a new departure. Furthermore, all through it we find tongue-in-cheek references to Lermontov's seriously intended Romantic poems. Such parody indicates his growing maturity and self-awareness, though he did not abandon his earlier style and themes even in the late 1830s, well after Sashka was written.

Though subtitled “A Moral Poem,” it soon becomes clear that Sashka is no such thing. Rather it describes a wealthy, young, aristocratic man-about-town, who spends his time partying, drinking, and chasing women. The whole concept of the poem, including its frequent digressions and its bantering tone, has much in common with Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, except that the setting is Moscow, not St. Petersburg. Just as Pushkin's narrator recalls his friendship with Onegin, Lermontov's narrator declares he was a friend of his hero, who had recently died abroad.

Following the example of Eugene Onegin, Lermontov devotes several opening stanzas to the conceit that he (or the narrator) and his Muse are traveling across Moscow together in the snow seeking the house to which Sashka will himself soon come:

Let us walk through the snow, my muse, only be quiet
And raise your skirt as high as you can.

(stanza 11)

The poem now enters upon (for fully a third of its length) a description of the hero and an account of his visit to this house, which we discover is a bawdy house. There Sashka finds two young women. He spends a rapturous hour with one of them, but the details are passed over in coy silence by the usually loquacious narrator. As the couple lie in bed, the beautiful young harlot, Tirza—daughter of a Polish Jew—persuades Sashka to take her, incognito, to the theater or a ball dressed up as a high-society lady.

At this point the narrator declares that, since his hero is asleep, he cannot go forward with the plot and will instead recount the story of Sashka's origins, childhood, and youth.

After some time, in stanza 121, the narrator finally returns to the scene at the whorehouse. It is now supposedly the “morning after.” Sashka awakes, dresses, and departs, thinking happily about the fun he will have tricking snobbish society by introducing Tirza as a young lady of fashion, for she has two great disabilities in the eyes of Russian society: she is a prostitute and she is Jewish. The poem then ends with the mocking assurance: “There's an end to everything— / Napoleon, storms, and wars.”

The narrative voice in Sashka is playful, coy, bantering, and sometimes even serious. The serious tone intrudes, however, only when the narrator discusses his own feelings, not Sashka's. Quite often Lermontov undercuts apparently serious lines in a manner that comes close to parody of his own earlier Byronic works. For example, in describing his hero, the narrator says:

Oh, if he could, clad in lightning,
With one blow, destroy the whole world!
(But happily for you, dear reader,
He was not endowed with such power.)

(73)

In the following stanza the narrator mocks the contemporary fashion for psychological analysis:

I will not undertake, like a psychologist,
To turn Sashka's character inside out
And display it like a pie with truffles.

(74)

Lermontov even makes fun of his own pain at the sudden and—as he viewed it—treacherous marriage of Varenka Lopukhina in 1835. After describing Tirza, the narrator turns to the other girl, plump but attractive, whose name is Varyusha (a nickname for Varvara): “And so, to avoid evil, we will / Rechristen our Varyusha and call her Parasha” (24).

Lermontov's inconsistency in narrative point of view and his failure to maintain or even establish an acceptable relationship with both his hero and his reader are the great weaknesses of the poem. I speak here not of the way Lermontov undercuts his melodramatic statements or his emotional hyperbole, but rather of his failure to distinguish his narrator from his hero, of his failure to “escape the self.” Lermontov indulges in the same étalage du moi as in the earlier poems, where the narrator is an overwhelming presence. Even the hero fades into the background. When the narrator describes Sashka's feelings as a lonely, abused child, his tone is artificial and awkward; we feel we are learning more about the narrator then the hero.

The digressions on the narrator's own feelings and history assume a life of their own, and are often not connected at all with the plot. For instance, a stanza making fun of panegyric odes leads to a personal aside in which the narrator announces how and where he wishes to be buried. Then he changes his mind and decides he wants no trace of himself to remain: let his ashes be scattered to the wind, let his soul fuse with that of the universe. He declares that in this life he has drunk poison drop by drop, but nobody paid any attention:

And from that time my tongue tasted
The same poison, and in search of a just revenge
I began to denigrate the crowd under the cover of flattery. …

(84)

Apparently conscious that he has overstepped the mark, Lermontov abruptly returns to his hero. Unfortunately, this moment of lucidity passes all too soon, and before long the narrator is regaling us once again with witty asides and personal reflections.

The poem simply breaks off after 149 stanzas. We never learn whether Tirza passes successfully as a high-society lady. It is true, the fragment was a recognized subgenre during the Romantic period, but at 149 stanzas Sashka is rather long for a fragment. In any case, Lermontov adumbrates a plot of sorts, and it is logical to assume that he meant to pursue the work. But he did not do so.

THE TAMBOV TREASURER'S WIFE

It may be less than fair to criticize Sashka, a work Lermontov did not regard as finished and made no attempt to publish. We discover similar problems of structure, characterization, and narrative stance in another poem which he did publish in 1838: Tambovskaya kaznacheysha [The Tambov Treasurer's Wife].

The poem is an attempt to sanitize for public consumption the sort of amorous adventures he had described during his Hussar period. It is set in the Russian provinces, and the shenanigans it describes recall those in Pushkin's Count Nulin. Lermontov also uses the Onegin stanza, though he notes he will be accused of being old fashioned.

The poem consists of 53 stanzas, about the number in one canto of Onegin. The verse is of high caliber. Undoubtedly, Lermontov was deliberately matching his skills against Pushkin's and comes off well in the comparison, which is high praise indeed. In areas beyond technique and versification, however, Lermontov's poem falters.

The opening six stanzas, in the best tradition of Pushkin and Gogol, mockingly praise the charming elegance of what is clearly a typically grubby Russian provincial town. The arrival of a new regiment of lancers to garrison the town causes great excitement, just as in a host of other Russian works, for example, Gogol's splendid short story “Kolyaska” [“The Carriage”] of 1836, or Chekhov's play Tri sestry [Three Sisters] of 1901.

The example of both Pushkin and Gogol is visible also in Lermontov's careful selection of detail, the many fine touches in the opening stanzas. The original Russian has a snap that is lost in translation, as when Lermontov contrasts delicate young ladies at their windows to the tired, dust-blown cavalry riding into town:

I lyubopytno probegayut
Glaza opukhshie devits
Ryady surovykh, pylnykh lits.

(5)

the English translation cannot hope to match the original:

And curious glances are cast
By the sleepy eyes of maidens
Upon the rows of stern, dusty faces.

Lermontov utilizes Pushkin's own technique of rounding off a stanza powerfully when he describes the lancers' rearguard:

Tolpa malchishek gorodskikh
Nemytykh, shumnykh i bosykh.

(6)

The translation of this last rhyming couplet demonstrates the tonal alteration after the preceding lines:

A mob of lads from the town,
Unwashed, noisy, and barefoot.

All the government officials in Tambov are as corrupt as those in any “town of N” described by Gogol. For instance, Tambov's treasurer Bobkovsky is a thorough rascal. He is old and bald-headed, and naturally married to a much younger woman, Avdotya Nikolaevna (or Dunya). His chief passion, however, is gambling at cards. Stealing from the treasury and cheating at the gaming table leave him little time for the attractive and lonely Dunya, who could potentially be a fascinating character if only she received more attention from the narrator than from her husband, In the event, though he catalogues her charms at great length, she remains a shadowy figure.

Eykhenbaum has noted that in his dedication the narrator refers to the work as a skazka (“tale” or “fairy tale”). But he fails to observe that the narrator also calls it a roman (“novel” or “romance,” stanza 13) and a rasskaz (“story,” stanza 45). The point is that all three generic terms characterize types of prose fiction, rather than types of verse. The confusion is not Lermontov's alone, but is a part of the general trend toward prose fiction during the 1830s in Russia.

Lermontov sets the scene for the hero, Captain Garin, to besiege Avdotya Nikolaevna's virtue by billeting the officers in the Hotel Moscow, which stands opposite the Bobkovsky mansion. Once again, the narrator declares himself a friend of the hero and insists that the events he will describe actually took place five years ago.

After this effort to gain the reader's confidence, the narrator gives a lengthy account of Garin's life and habits, interrupted by occasional asides and witticisms. Lermontov's reader does not know whether to admire or despise Garin. Garin is a roughneck, who gets by with a combination of luck, the help of friends, and a large measure of ruthlessness. We learn, for example, the “As a joke once after a quarrel, / He put a bullet between the eyes of a friend” (16). In the end we lack the inside view of Garin that might provide some understanding of the man.

Dunya is an obvious target for a man like Garin. She is young and neglected, and her own sister describes the satisfactions of a liaison with a cavalry officer. The narrator passes coyly over this account of the charm of cavalry moustaches, but Dunya is curious.

Lermontov now sets the scene for a staple of farce. Garin invades the mansion and importunes Dunya on his knees. Naturally Bobkovsky discovers them, and Garin departs hurriedly, to prepare for the challenge to a duel that he knows must inevitably follow.

Much to his surprise, however, Bobkovsky sends him an invitation to a whist party instead of a challenge, for unclear reasons. The reader might expect that since Bobkovsky is as experienced at cards as Garin is in seducing neglected wives, he plans to fleece and humiliate the officer rather than meet him on the dueling ground, where a military man would naturally have the advantage. But in fact neither man succeeds at his own forte.

Garin arrives at the whist party, to be treated politely by Bobkovsky, as though nothing had happened. When guests and host sit down to cards, Bobkovsky soon loses everything he possesses, an outcome which strains our credulity since we had earlier been told of Bobkovsky's gambling prowess. Even more astonishingly, Bobkovsky stakes his wife on a last bid to recover his fortune. Garin accepts the challenge, and wins.

Suddenly the emotional tone changes as the narrator turns his attention to Dunya:

What she felt then—
I will not try to explain to you;
Her face expressed
So many torments that perhaps,
Had you been able to read her expression,
You could not have helped crying.

(50)

But she says nothing; she rises from her chair and walks to the gambling table where her husband is sitting:

She looked at her husband
And hurled into his face
Her wedding ring—

(51)

And swooned …

(52)

The triumphant Garin gathers her up in his arms and strides out of the house. The stanzaic enjambement and the omission of the verb in the Russian original make the scene more intensely vivid:

Ona na muzha posmotrela
I brosila emu v litso
Svoyo venchalnoe koltso—

(51)

I v obmorok …

(52)

This is high melodrama—and yet there is something wrong.

The problem, I would suggest, is that in assembling his material Lermontov has not combined its various elements into a consistent whole. At the end the tone changes from bantering to serious. A tale of “flat,” farcical characters, with whom the reader need not sympathize, suddenly becomes a melodrama, which demands our sympathies for its participants. In terms of Pushkin's works, it is a switch from Count Nulin to one of the Belkin tales, “The Shot.” To be sure, in Pushkin's Onegin the mood changes, but that is a much longer work, and the colors darken gradually over both fictional time and the time it takes to read it. But Lermontov does not establish the right tone for his work and fails to define an appropriate narrative stance. These general questions of narrative stance, along with the escape from the “I,” are the two obstacles Lermontov had to overcome to mature as a writer.

SONG OF THE MERCHANT KALASHNIKOV

I now turn to two late narrative poems which demonstrate Lermontov's growing mastery of the problems of narrative stance and the Byronic hero whose solution had eluded him previously.

One poem—Pesnya pro tsarya Ivana Vasilievicha, molodogo oprichnika i undalogo kuptsa Kalashnikova [Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the young oprichnik and the Bold Merchant Kalashnikov]—was completed and published in Lermontov's lifetime. The other, Skazka dlya detey [A Fairytale for Children], remained unfinished and did not appear in print until a year after his death. In character and tone the two works are quite different. The first is a stylized folk tale set during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, while the second is an elegant and ironical work on St. Petersburg high society.

Nothing illustrates more clearly the compressed nature of Lermontov's development and the wide variety of styles with which he experimented simultaneously than the fact that his Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov was published in 1838, the same year as The Tambov Treasurer's Wife. Kalashnikov is unique among Lermontov's narrative poems in its classical simplicity, Homeric objectivity, and selection of detail. The reader of Russian derives great pleasure from the poem's rhythmical lines, reminiscent of folk meters.

Kalashnikov stands out among Lermontov's narrative poems for its consistent narrative viewpoint. It is not a monologue by a hero complaining about his fate. The distinction between hero and narrator is not blurred. In fact, the narrator is a stylized “singer” in the old Russian folk tradition who does not address the “reader” at all: his audience are his fellow singers and the boyar Matvey Romodanovsky and his lady. This could not be used as a general solution to the questions of narrative technique, especially in prose fiction, but for Kalashnikov it is totally successful.

In the best epic tradition, the singer plunges directly into the story, in medias res. At the court of Ivan the Terrible the Tsar notes that one of his favorite guards (oprichniki) is downcast. Asked the reason by the Tsar, the oprichnik Kiribeevich responds that he has fallen in love with a beautiful girl from a merchant family, Alyona Dmitrievna, but she will have nothing to do with him. The Tsar, sympathetic, gives him jewelry and other gifts, advising him to get a matchmaker and seek the girl's hand in marriage, but not to worry if he is rejected: “If you win her love, then celebrate your wedding. / If not, then don't be angry!” The original Russian of these two lines with the dactylic endings is typical of the lilting rhythm pervading the entire poem:

Kak polyúbishsya—prázdnuy svádebku,
Ne polyúbishsya—ne progneváysya!

At this point the singer intrudes to say that Kiribeevich has misled the Tsar by omitting the pertinent fact that Alyona Dmitrievna is already married, and to the real hero of the tale, Stepan Paramonovich Kalashnikov, a successful and hard-working merchant in the silk trade.

He is introduced in Part II, as the scene shifts to the Kalshnikov home. Kalashnikov waits impatiently for this wife to return from church; when she does, she is in tears, and her clothes are torn. At first Kalsahnikov is angry, but his wife explains that Kiribeevich accosted her on her way back from church. He had refused to let her pass, offered her gifts, laid hands upon her, and kissed her.

The singer passes over Kalashnikov's reaction, sparing us the gnashing of teeth, tearing of hair, and swearing of vengeance. Instead Kalashnikov summons his two younger brothers to tell them what has happened, but very briefly. Then, in a matter-of-fact manner, he declares he will fight Kiribeevich the next day in the boxing matches scheduled to be held on the ice of the Moscow River in the presence of the Tsar. Kalshnikov will try to kill the man who has dishonored his wife, but if he is killed then his brothers are to challenge Kiribeevich themselves one after the other and fight to the death for the family honor. The brothers accept this as their duty unquestioningly.

The singer sets the scene on the following day with an elaborate description of Moscow and a personification of the dawn. Here Lermontov's lyricism is quite appropriate, neither random nor capricious. It is called forth by the specific needs of the story line, as the singer frames the action with a description of beautiful, indifferent nature. Lermontov avoids the Romantic “pathetic fallacy.”

The boxing match between Kalashnikov and the oprichnik is narrated with remarkable economy, not only for Lermontov but also for the Russian folklore tradition, in which such crucial battles are commonly narrated in epic detail and at great length. The actual combat between the two men is equally brief. Kiribeevich strikes first, hitting Kalashnikov in the chest. The bold merchant, gathering all his strength, retaliates with a mighty blow to the side of the head. Kiribeevich is killed instantly.

The Tsar is angered at the unexpected death of his oprichnik, a famous fighter, and he demands to know why Kalashnikov has killed Kiribeevich. The merchant respectfully replies that he will only explain to God, but he admits freely that he killed his opponent deliberately. Neither the singer nor Kalashnikov protests when the Tsar sentences him to death. Indeed, the Tsar displays his mercy by promising to take care of Kalashnikov's family and to have the ax sharpened so as to give him a quick and easy death.

Lermontov's most un-Byronic and undemonic hero is grateful to the Tsar, and the two men part with mutual respect. Theirs is a society in which certain things are done and others are not; in which authority is accepted; in which honor and duty govern one's behavior, not the “rights” of the individual or the passions. Elsewhere, as we have seen, Lermontov manipulated his material, from whatever source, in typically Romantic fashion. Here he has accepted the atmosphere of the genre he is imitating, acknowledging its artistic integrity. For once, we need not filter a work of Lermontov's through his personality.

By no means does the singer praise the oprichnik or the Tsar. A few brief, oblique comments by Kalashnikov and his wife indicate that the oprichnik is notorious for his behavior. The singer's audience is meant to suffer with the brave merchant. His fate is called “cruel and shameful,” and yet everything is seen in epic perspective. The singer ends the third and final section of his story just as he has the previous two—with a cheerful refrain addressed to his fellow gusla players urging them to do honor to their audience—the boyar and his fair lady, as well as to all Christian folk in the land.

In his youth Lermontov regretted not having had a Russian nurse who might have introduced him to Russian folk tales, which he felt were worth all of French literature. Kalashnikov shows Lermontov must have made good the omission in the intervening years, because the poem gives clear evidence of his close familiarity with Russian folklore. We do not know how he came by this knowledge. We do know that national folklore material was eagerly collected and imitated during the Romantic period, and not only in Russia. Poets and historians saw folklore as a means of establishing cultural roots apart from both the ancient Classical heritage and also French literature, which had dominated European letters since the seventeenth century.

Kalashnikov captures both the tone of the byliny and their characteristic singing rhythm. It is written in lines of eleven or twelve syllables carrying three or four strong stresses per line, but there is no regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. The lines are not rhymed, but do end in dactyls. Thus the poem's lines contrast strongly with the iambs and trochees and rhymed lines that had already become the standard for Russian poetry at the time Lermontov was writing.

The following lines will illustrate the rhythm and tone of the poem, together with its stylized folk epithets and formulae, which in fact Lermontov uses more frequently than is the rule in Russian folk tales:

I uslyshav to, Alyona Dmitrevna
Zadrozhav vsya, moya golubushka,
Zatryaslas, kak listochek osinovy,
Gorko-gorko ona vosplakalas,
V nogi muzhu povalilasya.
“Gosudár ty moy, krasno solnyshko,
Il ubey menya ili vyslushay!
Tvoi rechi—budto ostrynozh;
Ot nikh serdtse razryvaetsya.
Ne boyusya smerti lyutyya,
Ne boyusya ya lyudskoy molvy,
A boyus tvoey nemilosti.”

The following literal translation cannot match the rhythm of the original or render the connotations of the words and phrases taken from the Russian folklore tradition:

And having heard this, Alyona Dmitrevna,
Trembling all over, my poor dear,
Began to shake like an aspen leaf,
Bitter, bitter tears she shed,
And threw herself at her husband's feet.
“My lord, my beautiful sun,
Either kill me or hear me out!
Your words are like a sharp knife;
My heart is breaking because of them.
I do not fear cruel death,
I do not fear people's gossip,
But I fear your displeasure.”

Kalashnikov is a remarkably successful stylization of the so-called “historical songs,” a folk genre popular since the time of Ivan the Terrible. Lermontov has taken some liberties with his material, fusing, as he does, different bylina (heroic epic) traditions and cycles of historical songs. It is not clear whether Lermontov realized he was mingling disparate elements, but in any case high literature has always manipulated popular literature for its own purposes.

Kalashnikov melds two basic folk cycles.⁵ The first opens with the Tsar at a feast surrounded by his courtiers. One is sad; responding to the tsar's questions, he says he has fallen in love. The Tsar gives him gifts and wishes him good fortune. The remainder of such tales typically describes the man's quest for the beloved. Within the tradition, though, the oprichnik Kiribeevich should be the hero instead of the villain.

The entry of Kalashnikov and his wife introduces the second type of tale in which the husband seeks revenge for the dishonoring of his wife. Often the outraged husband kills his wife; in other variants the husband returns home to find his wife faithful but forced into a wedding with another man. (cf. The Odyssey).

Lermontov also departs from tradition in his portrayal of the relationship between the Tsar and Kalashnikov. The hero should be torn between his sense of duty to the Tsar and his desire for revenge. The Tsar should be angry with him not because he has killed the oprichnik, but because he declines the Tsar's offer of gifts and an invitation to enter his service.

All too often Soviet comment on Kalashnikov focuses on the “tyrannical” Tsar, attempting to portray Kalashnikov as a sort of proto-Decembrist radical. In fact, however, the Tsar is not shown as a tyrant, and even if he were he plays a minor role in the poem. Furthermore, far from being rebellious, Kalashnikov is a devoted subject of the Tsar. Equally misguided are attempts to decipher the poem as a disguised account of Pushkin's death in a duel over his wife's honor. Such politicized interpretations are an unfortunate legacy of Socialist Realism.

To be sure, Lermontov introduces some of his favorite ideas and themes in this poem, albeit in an uncharacteristically reticent manner. Kalashnikov is undemonic, but he is proud, independent, and something of a merchant “outsider” in Muscovite society. Furthermore, he seeks and achieves revenge, which is one of Lermontov's most enduring themes.

Further, in a manner much less obtrusive than in other works, but nevertheless apparent and quite in tune with the Romantic view of history, Lermontov presents his hero as a man far superior to his, Lermontov's, own contemporaries.

For once, Lermontov does not dot all the “i's” and cross all the “t's.” He allows his reader to draw some conclusions himself. Very often Lermontov lacks faith in his audience, and sometimes has no clear image of who his audience is, except in love lyrics and epistles. Kalashnikov is a notable exception, possibly because the poet has depicted the audience within the poem itself.

A FAIRY TALE FOR CHILDREN

Lermontov's last attempt at a narrative poem, or a tale in verse, promised to be one of his most successful works, but he did not live to complete it. He wrote A Fairy Tale for Children in 1840, just one year after he had completed the final version of The Demon and a short while after he had put the finishing touches to A Hero of Our Time. Both A Fairy Tale and the novel may be regarded as attempts on Lermontov's part to re-explore the demonic theme and the Byronic hero from a more mature perspective. Though I am discussing Kalashnikov and A Fairy Tale for Children together, they are diametrically opposed in subject matter, tone, and setting. Kalashnikov was completed and published during the poet's lifetime, whereas A Fairy Tale appeared in 1842, after the poet's death. Even the title was devised by an editor, who drew upon an ironical statement in the second stanza that the work is a “fairy tale” (skazka) with a moral at the end, which will therefore be suitable for children.

The artistic progress Lermontov has made in a very short time becomes evident if we compare this poem with Sashka. Superficially, the poems are similar. The twenty-seven completed stanzas of A Fairy Tale have exactly the same meter (iambic pentameter) and the same rhyme scheme (AbAbAccDDee) as Sashka. Gone, however, are the long-winded, random, lyrical digressions as well as the “witty” asides. Now the narrator does not seek to dominate both characters and story line. Furthermore, the tone is more balanced, without the extremes of cynicism and melodrama that are such a prominent feature of Sashka. Even unfinished as it stands, A Fairy Tale marks the culmination of Lermontov's efforts to produce a light, ironical narrative poem in the manner of Don Juan or Eugene Onegin.

But there is an implicit difficulty in this comparison. By 1840 the age of the witty, ironical poem was over. Lermontov begins A Fairy Tale with the lines:

The age of epic poems has long since passed,
And tales in verse have fallen into decline;
Poets are not entirely at fault in this
(Although many lack a really smooth line);
And the public has something to answer for, too.

The narrator declares that he himself no longer reads verse (everyone nowadays is too busy), but he still enjoys scribbling poetry. Then he introduces his hero, a type he admits to having portrayed before:

Burning with the flame and power of youthful years,
I used to sing of a different demon:
That was a mad, passionate, childish raving.

The poet wonders whether some young woman might be reading this earlier work now or whether it provides dusty food for mice, in an obvious reference to version VI of The Demon, which he had given in 1838 to Varvara Lopukhina.

Clearly Lermontov has found this image of the demon difficult to escape. In stanza 6 he writes:

My youthful mind used to be disturbed
By a powerful image; among other visions,
Like a tsar, mute and proud, it shone
With such a magical sweet beauty,
That I was frightened … and my soul by ennui
Was gripped—and this wild delirium
Pursued my reason for many years.
But I, bidding farewell to similar dreams,
Rid myself of it also—in verse!

Thus Lermontov himself recognizes how powerful this image had been in his work, and for himself personally. These lines also show how far he has come from the scabrous verse of his Hussar period. Now he can step back and view the image of the Demon calmly but critically.

In stanza 4 the poet invites us into a sumptuous bedroom where a girl is sleeping. In the last lines of the stanza, the reader suddenly realizes that he is not alone:

Against the muslin of the lace pillows
Is silhouetted a young, but severe profile …
And at it gazes Mephistopheles.

Lermontov must have been pleased with the startling rhyme prófil/Mefistófel. The use of the name Mephistopheles points to the transformation of the melodramatic, gloomy Demon into a totally new type, obviously borrowed from Goethe's Faust: witty, self-assured, sophisticated.

Lermontov's new devil resembles the old Demon in his passion for beauty and his tendency to fall in love, but he does not rant and rage or protest his fate. His love for the sleeping Nina appears quite genuine; but it is a pleasure, not a torment. There is no indication that Nina offers him an escape, or indeed that he is searching for salvation.

The poet narrates only the first seven stanzas. The remaining ones that Lermontov completed take the form of Mephistopheles's monologue at Nina's bedside. All this while, we must assume, both the poet and the reader are eavesdropping. We are already familiar with this type of structure: a brief opening narrated by the poet-author followed by an extended monologue by the hero in the presence of a mute heroine. Though Lermontov's narrative skill is greater, he is still using the same structural channels.

The monologue contains many Lermontovian staples. Mephistopheles calls the sleeping girl “My earthly angel,” just as the Demon does Tamara. Like the Demon, he recalls flying about, but this time above St. Petersburg, not the Caucasus. In stanza 12, he speaks of seeing “deceit, madness, or suffering” everywhere, but he is not nearly so extravagant in his condemnation of the earth's inhabitants as was the Demon. Indeed, he smiles down at the earth like the stars.

In stanza 13 Mephistopheles describes a magnificent palace in which princes had once lived and held lavish soirees. Now it is deserted save for one old man, the lone survivor of a distinguished line, and his daughter of fourteen. The old man curses the new times, deals strictly with his servants, suffers from insomnia, and reads Voltaire.

Though the poem's structure is confusing, by this time the attentive reader begins to realize that the devil's monologue is actually a flashback. The old man's daughter is the sleeping girl to whom the monologue is addressed, though we wonder why the devil communicates with Nina in this mysterious manner. Furthermore, he is merely telling her the story of her own youth, which she presumably remembers very well.

In stanza 17 we learn that Nina “grew like a lily of the valley under glass.” She is frightened by her father, and by a stern English governess. As she walks the deserted halls of the palace, she imagines herself at a magnificent ball, flirting with a dashing cavalry officer. The devil speaks of her “cunning glance,” the “pretended severity of her gaze,” and the smile which “snakes itself over her lips” (stanza 23). The devil has already admitted that he is in love with her, and claims that neither Raphael nor Perugino could have done justice to her profile, but the reader suspects that it is not only Nina's beauty which attracts the devil. In her he senses a kindred soul. Even as a child, he says, she was skillful at concealing her feelings. He admires her soul, the type that understands all and is ready to experience everything, “without regret, reproach, or complaint.” “After all,” the devil adds, “I was a little that way myself.”

This poetic fragment ends as Nina reaches the “fateful” age of seventeen, when she must come out in society. Prepared for this ordeal, Nina excitedly goes to a magnificent ball. In the final stanza the devil begins to describe the ball, at which Nina attracts some notice. He takes aim at Lermontov's traditional target—high society with its pretense, artificiality, and petty spitefulness—but his tone is relatively mild.

Problems of structure and narrative stance remain unresolved in A Fairy Tale for Children, but its tone is balanced and integrated. The form of the narrative poem, as Lermontov himself understood, was not one that he could pursue. His future lay in prose fiction, where he made his most enduring contribution, paving the way for the great Russian psychological novels of the mid-nineteenth century through A Hero of Our Time.

Notes

1. Texts of Lermontov's narrative poems are given in Sob. Soch. vol. 2. All translations are mine.

2. Duchesne, Lermontov, pp. 127-28.

3. See the helpful discussion in V. E. Vatsuro, “K tsenzurnoi istorii Demona” [The Demon and the Censorship], in M. lu. Lermontov: Issledovaniia i materialy, pp. 410-14.

4. Duchesne, Lermontov, p. 138.

5. In the following discussion I have drawn upon comments by my colleague, Natalie Moyle.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrëkh tomakh. Edited by V. A. Manuilov et al. 2d rev. ed. Leningrad: “Nauka,” 1979-81. I have given references to this edition in my text for the convenience of the reader since it is easily obtained in the West at this time. The notes, however, are not nearly as full as in the previous editions cited. Furthermore, the interpretations are sometimes subject to political bias. It remains a useful edition, if approached with caution.

Secondary Sources

Duchesne, M. E. Michel Iouriévitch Lermontov: sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1910. A doctoral dissertation; plot summaries with minimal explication. Dated, but valuable for its review of English, French, and German influences in Lermontov's works. This latter portion translated into Russian and still widely used by Soviet scholars: E. Duchesne, Poeziia M. Iu. Lermontova v eë otnoshenii k vusskoi i zapadnoevropeiskim literaturam (Kazan': M. A. Golubev, 1914).

M. Iu. Lermontov: Issledovaniia i materialy. Edited by M. P. Alekseev, A. Glasse, and V. E. Vatsuro. Leningrad: “Nauka,” 1979. Some important articles and materials, with illustrations. The volume is chiefly notable for the review of the Vereshchagina albums (now located in the library of Columbia University) and other albums belonging to the Baron von Koenig-Warthausen in the Federal Republic of Germany. The American scholar Antonia Glasse provided the necessary assistance and contributes an important article, “Lermontov i E. A. Sushkova,” in which she demonstrates that a number of poems, formerly thought to be original, in fact are translations or adaptations from Byron. These discoveries are recorded, without acknowledgement, in the four-volume collection (1979-81).