SOURCE: Golstein, Vladimir. “Heroism and Individualism: The Russian Context.” In Lermontov's Narratives of Heroism, pp. 1-27. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Golstein asserts that while individualism was valued in the West in the nineteenth century, it was routinely discouraged in Russia, accounting for his country's often negative appraisal of Lermontov's representations of the individual hero.]

MISREADINGS OF HEROISM

“I want a hero: an uncommon want / When every year and month sends forth a new one.” So declared Byron in his immortal satire Don Juan. This statement from the creator of what later became known as the “Byronic hero” highlights the paradoxical situation that existed during the Romantic period, when a burgeoning cultural demand for new heroes was met by a correspondingly growing supply.

Lermontov's own celebrated novel A Hero of Our Time (1839) underscores his readiness to meet Byron's challenge and reveals his own concern with social, philosophical, and artistic aspects of heroism. One of the goals of my study is to demonstrate that the demand for heroic personalities was even more urgent in Russia than it was in the West, and that Lermontov's oeuvre successfully met this demand.

Nevertheless, because Lermontov's heroes responded to cultural needs rather than cultural expectations, his work encountered considerable resistance. Pechorin, the controversial protagonist of A Hero of Our Time, has been the object of constant misunderstanding, criticism, and attack since the book's publication. Was he to be taken for a hero or a villain? Did he speak for Lermontov or not? Many were ready to condemn Pechorin and Lermontov together. In fact, no Russian writer of similar stature has been the object of such a degree of hostility and misreading as Lermontov. Accusations of demonism, of lack of originality, of being as obnoxious as his own characters, or of simply being a shadow produced by the West accompanied Lermontov long after his death, which occurred at the age of twenty-seven as a result of a duel.

In the preface to his novel, Lermontov implied that his critics' hostility was fueled by their resistance to unpleasant truths: “People had been fed enough sweetmeats, it has given them indigestion: they need some bitter medicine, some caustic truths” (2). What were the sweets that the public expected to find in the novel, entitled A Hero of Our Time, and what bitter truths did they find instead?

I suggest that it was precisely his portrayal of a new kind of heroic personality, his presentation of characters who fully embodied the individualistic spirit of the Romantic age, that Lermontov's readers found difficult to accept. Lermontov—and this is my central thesis—was not just a renowned Romantic poet: he was also a serious social and ethical thinker who explored with sympathy and understanding the liberating as well as tragic dimensions of heroism and individualism. Sadly, his complex treatment of these issues has frequently been maligned or misperceived, making it difficult to understand either his art or his thought. Dostoevsky, for example, insists that there is only one solution to the problem of proud Romantic heroes: “humble yourself, proud man” (1972-90, 16:139), the solution that Dostoevsky rather simplistically attributes to Pushkin and to Pushkin's own complex treatment of the issue. Referring to frequent Russian appeals for humility, the Symbolist poet Dmitry Merezhkovsky explains Lermontov's achievement, and the hostility that it caused, in the following way:

Where in Russia is that “proud man” who has to humble himself, after all? One sometimes feels like answering this constant call for humility with: How much further? And the only man in Russian literature who did not fully humble himself was Lermontov. … And it is this refusal to humble and surrender, a refusal which metaphysically and religiously asserts itself, that Russian literature cannot forgive Lermontov.

(1991, 384)

While the main body of this study analyzes Lermontov's depiction of autonomous, independent, and self-reliant characters, who “metaphysically and religiously” assert themselves, here I shall survey the dominant cultural expectations connected with the issues of heroism and individualism as articulated by Lermontov's contemporaries and by some of his later opponents (Slavophiles, Dostoevsky, Solov'ev, Berdiaev, Vladimir Lossky).¹ This survey will reveal the reasons behind the persistent misreading of Lermontov and delineate the true scope and insights of his project.

Commenting on the genre of the novel, Jacques Barzun remarked that the undermining of heroism has always been part and parcel of the Western novel: “from its beginnings in Don Quixote and Tom Jones [the genre of the novel] has persistently made war on two things—our culture and the heroic” (quoted in Trilling 1972, 84). Russian literature, with its fixation on such values as unity, harmony, and self-sacrifice, seems to take up this project with a vengeance. Indeed, Tolstoy's War and Peace is explicit about its rejection of a Western type of hero, while Dostoevsky's novels present a terrifying gallery of egotistical, self-centered, and murderous characters who equate autonomy, strength, and self-reliance with amoralism, demonism, crime, and emptiness. To account for this suspicion of heroism and self-assertion, the nineteenth-century critic, Apollon Grigor'ev, posited the dichotomy between meek (Russian) and predatory (inspired by the West) character types. Grigor'ev's dichotomy enabled another critic, Nikolai Strakhov, to announce in his review of War and Peace: “What is War and Peace—this vast and multicolored epic—if not the apotheosis of the meek Russian type” (1970, 150) and then to interpret Russian literature as engaged “in the intensive search for a purely Russian ideal” that demanded “the execution and dethroning of types with claims to heroism” (150).

This search for a “purely Russian ideal” that dominated the art and thought of major nineteenth-century Russian authors and critics created a situation in which the only possible form of heroism was that of self-renunciation. Cultural fixation on an otherwordly ideal enabled the Russian philosopher Georgii Fedotov to describe this spiritual tendency of Russian thought as “kenotic” (literally, “self-emptying”); that is, “the imitation of Christ in His kenosis, His self-humiliation and His voluntary, sacrificial death” (1975, xiii). Fedotov maintains: “kenoticism, in the sense of non-resistance, or voluntary suffering, remains forever the most precious and typical, even though not always the dominant motive of Russian Christianity” (xiii). This religious ideal might become fully secularized, as in the case of the radical intelligentsia—Sergei Bulgakov's essay, “Heroism and Sanctity” (“Geroism i podvizhnichestvo”) (1911) scrutinizes the process—yet its key components remain the same: promotion of self-sacrifice and self-renunciation at the expense of the liberating and creative potential contained in the self. Bulgakov (1993) observes: “the concepts of personal morality, of personal self-perfection, of the development of personality are extremely unpopular among the intelligentsia, and conversely, the word “communal” (obshchestvennyi) acquires a special, sacred character” (323). This impersonal orientation of Russian anthropology, this fear that one individual's gain is another's loss, is captured in the following observation of another Russian philosopher, Fedor Stepun (1936):

The question is whether in its deepest soul a people is attracted more by the hero, glorious in his own right, or by the silent saint. … The whole meaning of saintliness is to have no individuality of one's own and to will no destiny of one's own, but to be only a window through which God looks into the world, and men look up to God. In the overcoming of the hero and the heroic pattern of life by the Saint, then, is to be sought the deepest meaning of all religious antipathy to form.

(22-23)

Stepun suggests here that “the overcoming of the hero” implies obliteration of individuality, antipathy to form, and therefore to matter; refusal to be engaged in creating patterns or structures; and ultimately the embrace of silence.

Besides its obvious political and social implications, such an anthropology, with its tendency to reject heroism in favor of saintliness, creates a problem for aesthetics as well. The Slavophiles, who among the secular thinkers were the earliest to promote saintliness at the expense of heroism, clearly allowed ideology to muddle their aesthetic sensibility. Discussing the Slavophiles' failure to respond adequately to the Italian humanistic art in which “everything belongs to a human person,” Vassily Botkin, one of their opponents in the Westernizer camp, observes:

They [Slavophiles] got lost within their aesthetic dogmas. In order to be true to themselves they had to contemptuously reject all of the Italian school, yet beauty, unfortunately for them, influences even them, in spite of their views. … Because of that they constantly contradict themselves, lie, deceive, yet lack courage to turn themselves into true Russian Old-Believers; furthermore, various sciences have already corrupted them.

(1984, 260)

Following a similar line of thinking, Dostoevsky (1972-90) once dismissed Pushkin's, Lermontov's, and Tolstoy's gentry characters as “representatives of petty ambition”: “As heroes, those beginning with Sylvio and the Hero of our time down to Prince Bolkonsky and Levin represent nothing but petty self-love (melkoe samoliubie)” (16:329). Such wholesale dismissal fails to differentiate between Anatol' Kuragin and his sister on the one hand, and Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha on the other. When applied to Lermontov, such as approach misses an important part of Lermontov's project: the constant juxtaposition of the heroic and nonheroic; that is, Pechorin and Grushnitsky, Kalashnikov and Kirebeevich, Arbenin and Prince Zvezdich.

In other words, if the critics' ideal of a hero is that of a monk, and if heroism implies the rejection of the world and the conquest of oneself through self-control and self-resignation, then it becomes difficult to judge dispassionately literary characters, most of whom operate in the world. Even if the presence of the kenotic ideal might account for the metamorphosis of, say, Tolstoy's Father Sergius, other characters of Russian literature, such as Pushkin's Tatyana or Grinev, Lermontov's Mtsyri or Pechorin, Tolstoy's Levin, Bolkonsky, or Bezukhov do not really fit into such a system of coordinates, or rather, when applied to them, it produces distorted results.

Equally inadequate is the traditional charge of “poshlost'” (banality) or “meshchanstvo” (petty middle-class concerns) with which Russian cultural tradition tends to dismiss decent characters, diligently working at maintaining social and material order.²

Chekhov (1974-83) reminded us that “between ‘there is God’ and ‘there is no God’ lies a huge field, which the truly wise man crosses with great effort. Yet, Russian man knows only one of those extremes, while the middle is of no interest to him” (17:224). To cross such a field requires a tremendous effort precisely because God is silent, and therefore the burden shifts to the individual; one has to rely solely on oneself in order to establish and maintain the individual commitments and relations that constitute one's life. In other words, there is a vast field of human activity—such as the production of artistic, intellectual, or material goods, or honorable and responsible behavior toward fellow men—that do not fit the strict dichotomy between material self-assertion and spiritual self-renunciation. It is this field that great literary texts, including those of Lermontov, strive to explore, as they are concerned with the study of actual human experience rather than the attempt to substitute some philosophical or moral scheme for it.

In her brilliant Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (1982), Shirley Robin Letwin stresses the inadequacy of imposing abstract schemes upon the complexities of human character and experience:

Any general or universal conclusions about the human world are necessarily abstractions from a reality that consists of distinctive individuals, of “characters,” each of whom has to be known in himself and may always do something unexpected. Such abstractions may explain that reality by disengaging some aspect of it, but they are not an advance to a “higher truth” any more than a dressmaker's pattern is superior to the finished garment.

(60)

Following the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his insistence on the inadequacy of applying the dichotomies used by science, philosophy, or religion to human individuality, Letwin (1982) observes:

If all human experience is rational, a man is not a self-divided being, with “higher” and “lower” parts; he is not a “rational animal” born to one law and bound to another. He is all one, an intelligent being. … Human individuality is not due to passions escaping from the control of reason; nor is it the product of “alienation” or of adopting an independent standpoint; it is simply the inescapable quality of a rational being. One may choose … to regard individuality as an evil, to seek the uniformity of a commune. But short of destroying his rational faculties, a man cannot lose his individuality because he cannot cease to be the maker of his own experience.

(59-60)

According to Letwin, serious authors approach their characters as “the makers of their own experience,” constantly engaged in various relationships with fellow human beings; learning, modifying, and changing their conduct. Their nearsighted critics, however, resort to some external, a priori given system of values enabling them to simplify the choices, complexities, and tensions of human interaction. Letwin's own investigation of Trollope's gentlemen heroes reveals that a particular social and cultural situation—that of nineteenth-century England—has to be scrutinized from a perspective on human personality and human relatedness that goes beyond the usual dichotomies of “spiritual” versus “material,” or “selfish” versus “altruistic.” Complicated codes of honorable conduct typical of the aristocratic cultures of Europe, and England in particular, would not fit into these dichotomies.

In terms of Russian literature, Letwin's approach to fictional characters finds its parallel in William Mills Todd III's investigation of the aristocratic mastery of conventions, which enabled him to do justice to the accomplishment of Pushkin's Tatyana (1986, 106-37). Likewise, the theory of prosaics, articulated recently by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (1990) can be interpreted as an attempt to consider the achievements or failures of various characters of Russian literature on the basis of the “prosaic,” middle-class values, contained in the texts themselves, yet ignored by the critics. In a similar way I suggest that to evaluate Lermontov's exploration of heroism adequately one needs to consider it in the context of Lermontov's concern with the individualistic ethos of Romanticism. It was Lermontov who, long before Chekhov, set for himself and for his heroes a task of traveling through the huge field that lies “between ‘there is God’ and ‘there is no God.’” The accomplishment of Lermontov and his protagonists should therefore be measured by the degree of their embodiment of the spirit of autonomy, dignity, and self-reliance, as well as by their refusal to side with those for whom the content of this vast field and the efforts one spends while crossing it is frequently “of no interest.”

INDIVIDUALISM

It is clear that behind the culture's tendency to interpret certain actions or characters as heroic and misread others as trivial if not demonic lies the dominant expectations as to what constitutes human personality. In order to appreciate fully Russian views on the subject of human personality, a certain linguistic excursion is in order. The Russian language has various terms related to human being, three of which are essential. Russians differentiate between individ (an individual), lichnost' (which might mean both a person and personality), and individual'nost' or samobytnost' (uniqueness, individuality, personality). Pushkin, for example, provides the following gloss on the latter concept when in his 1830 story “The Squire's Daughter” (“Baryshniakrestianka”) he refers to “the uniqueness of the character, its individuality (osobennost' kharaktera, samobytnost' [individualité]), without which, according to Jean-Paul, human greatness does not exist.”

The majority of Russian thinkers view “individuality” as something positive; in fact, the argument that frequently unites the Slavophiles with Herzen, Kropotkin, and the Marxists is that Western individualism is the enemy of “individuality.” Much more complicated, however, is the use of the concepts of “individ” and “lichnost'.”

According to Veselitsky (1972), the cluster of words associated with the root “individ” began to be introduced into Russian philosophical and literary language in the late eighteenth century. They gradually replaced the set of words through which Russians attempted to provide a calque for the Latin root “individ”: nedelimyi, nerazdel'nyi, chastnyi, osoblivyi, osobyi, edinstvennyi, edinyi. The process of replacement was not very peaceful, and conservatives voiced frequent complaints against the use of such obscure foreign terms as “individuum,” or “individual'nyi.” In a series of articles Belinsky defended the use of the terms, claiming that the complaints about the words reflected the refusal to come to terms with the very concepts that these words represented (Veselitsky 1964, 14-24). In fact, according to Veselitsky, it was Belinsky's frequent use of the term “individual'nost'” that was instrumental in its introduction into the Russian language. Pushkin, we recall, used a French spelling of the term for his tale.

Regardless of this initial reluctance, by mid-century the older concepts of lichnost'/“lichnyi (person/personal) began to be used interchangeably with the terms individ/individual'nyi, describing anything related to a human being: “in the first decades of the nineteenth century the words individual'nyi, individuum gravitated toward and, in fact, joined the range covered by words lichnyi, lichnost', litso” (Veselitsky 1972, 38, 159-60). It should be pointed out that the overlapping of semantic fields connected with these concepts continues today, as it does in English (see the recent discussion of these concepts by various Russian historians, sociologists, and psychologists in a 1990 issue of the Russian anthropology journal, Odysseus: Man in History (A. I. Gurevich 1990, 6-90).

However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, several Russian religious philosophers began once more to draw a sharp distinction between the concepts of lichnost' and individ. The texts of Berdiaev, Florensky, Bulgakov,³ Vladimir Lossky, and many others elaborate or utilize a radical opposition between the terms, so that the term “individ” comes to mean a human being as that part of physical nature that cannot be further divided, while “lichnost” means a human being as reflecting the “image and likeness of God”: it grows, is never identical to itself, and cannot be seen as a part because potentially it can encompass all.⁴

According to Vladimir Lossky, the road from an individual (individ) to a person (lichnost') is paved by renunciation:

A person who asserts himself as an individual, and shuts himself up in the limits of his particular nature, far from realizing himself fully becomes impoverished. It is only in renouncing its own possession and giving itself freely, in ceasing to exist for itself that the person finds full expression in the one nature common to all. In giving up its own special good, it expands infinitely, and is enriched by everything which belongs to all.

(1976, 124)

The movement from one extreme to another is accomplished through asceticism: “The individual, i.e. that assertion of self in which person is confused with nature and loses its true liberty, must be broken. This is the root principle of asceticism” (Lossky 1976, 122). And it is also the root principle for becoming an ideal monk: “for that reason, F. Vagrius says that a perfect monk ‘will after God, count all men as God Himself’” (122).

Although these concepts began to be articulated several decades after Lermontov, they are clearly grounded in a peculiar sensibility that was shaping Russian attitudes toward the individual back in the 1830s and 1840s. It is this sensibility that lies at the root of the frequent dismissals of anything related to individ, that is, of many self-evident Western individualistic values, such as religious, moral, legal, social, and economic autonomy, independence, and self-reliance. In order to clarify this sensibility and appreciate Lermontov's courageous challenge to it, let us explore the tortuous road traveled by the ideology of individualism within both Russia and the West.

During the first half of the nineteenth century Western Europe was a locus of profound cultural cataclysms and transformations. Religion ceased to exist as the organizing and unifying principle of society, culture, and personal conduct. In addition, historical and economic development resulted in particularization and alienation. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold” (Yeats, “The Second Coming”): this passage sums up the point of view of the period. The nineteenth century gave birth to the concepts of alienation propounded by Hegel and Marx, to the pervasive pessimism of Schopenhauer, the religious existentialism of Kierkegaard, and to the literary expression of alienation and loss contained in the writings of numerous Romantic authors. Several key European events ushered in the collapse of existing social, political, and religious hierarchies, with an impact best summarized as the Miltonic “paradise lost.” What Milton pronounced on observing the changes introduced by the Renaissance and Reformation became a fait accompli after the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and industrialization.

Coincident with these losses, however, there appeared new patterns of heroic behavior that utilized the individual's inner resources, energy, and self-reliance. In other words, new realities resulted in the creation and articulation of new doctrines usually described under the general concept of “individualism.” Commenting on this complicated term, Max Weber remarked: “the expression individualism includes the most heterogeneous things imaginable” (1958, 222). Indeed, according to Steven Lukes's evenhanded and informative study, Individualism (1973), the concept of “individualism” serves as an umbrella for various, sometimes distantly related, doctrines of economic, political, social, moral, and religious individualisms. While all these individualist doctrines began to appear at approximately the same time, and were caused by approximately the same historical events, such as the Renaissance, Reformation, and the emergence of capitalism, they are not logically or conceptually tied to each other. What connects them is their appeal to a system of core, individualistic ideas and values, such as “respect for human dignity, autonomy, privacy and self-development” (Lukes 1973, 125). Furthermore, regardless of the inconsistencies that these doctrines contain, and regardless of the artificial concept of the “abstract individual” central to the majority of them, the core values that inform these doctrines lie at the heart of two cardinal ideals of modern times: equality and liberty (Lukes 1973, 125-45).

Milton's portrayal of Satan captures the dynamics of the new trends. Satan finds himself on his own from the very beginning of the poem; he also articulates a rationale for dealing with new circumstances. Having lost the battle for supremacy over the outside world, he will rely on his inner strength: “What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome?” (Paradise Lost, book 1, lines 105-8). Regardless of Milton's own intention to debunk his rebellious protagonist while promoting the cardinal Christian virtues of humility, obedience, and patience, Satan articulates and embodies new forms of heroism, such as energy, will, and refusal to submit. These features were to become the main traits of individualism, the core of its healthy ethos, so that unleashed individual energies helped the West to confront the numerous religious, economic, and social problems of the last two centuries. Religious/communal loss and disorientation was accompanied by the compensatory increase of individual heroism and self-reliance. In the West the death of God and the birth of the Superman historically go hand in hand. Hence the Romantic period was a period of great heroes such as Napoleon and Byron, as well as of hero worship, an attitude immortalized by Thomas Carlyle.⁵

This is not to say that the doctrines or values of individualism did not encounter resistance. Milton's Satan, we recall, always had both supporters and detractors. The same holds for individualistic doctrines and, paradoxically, for similar reasons. According to Ian Watt's Myths of Modern Individualism (1996), the cultural movement of the Counter-Reformation was, in part, an attack on the dangerous, individualist-oriented trends of the Renaissance and Reformation: this critique gave rise to the new myths of Don Quixote, Faust, and Don Juan. By producing “a hero who was an emblem of individualism which fails” (137) the initial creators of these myths highlighted the transgressive and destructive aspect of their protagonists. “The final emblematic punishment of all three protagonists can be seen as the unpalatable lesson which the Counter-Reformation attempted to teach to the individualism of the Renaissance” (ibid.). However, during the period of Romanticism the presentation of these characters became much more sympathetic, enabling Watt to characterize the later treatment of these mythic heroes as “romantic apotheosis of Renaissance myths” (193-228).

As they began to define themselves in opposition to the Enlightenment, however, various Romantic thinkers developed their own anti-individualistic program. Interpreting the excesses of the French Revolution as the direct result of the Enlightenment's rationalism, skepticism, and the glorification of the individual, these thinkers began to attack the allegedly dangerous doctrines of the philosophes. The most typical complaint was that of centrifugal, decentralizing tendencies inherent in individualism, tendencies bound to tear the state and society apart. A French conservative thinker, F. de Lamennais, prefiguring the endless complaints of other conservatives, be they Russian or Western, denounced “individualism which destroys the very idea of obedience and of duty, thereby destroying both power and law; and what then remains but a terrifying confusion of interests, passions and diverse opinions” (Lukes 1973, 6).

In other words, the anti-individualistic program ushered in by the Counter-Reformation received a second life in postrevolutionary Europe. As in the case of the Counter-Reformation, the most vocal critics were conservative Catholic thinkers, whose criticism, given Russia's recent emergence from medieval ways of thinking, exerted a lasting influence on the Russian outlook. One of the most extraordinary of these figures was Joseph de Maistre, who spent fifteen years in Russia serving as ambassador from the kingdom of Sardinia.⁶ De Maistre's personal charm and powerful rhetoric had a lasting impact upon the Russian governing elite. In his 1811 note addressed to Count N. P. Rumiantsev, but clearly meant for Emperor Alexander I, de Maistre makes a powerful plea to Russia's ruling circles to save the country from the impact of Western education; according to him, Russia's institutions, including that of Orthodoxy, were too weak to confront the dangerous Western doctrines of freedom (Mestr 1937, 187-94). De Maistre's writings also influenced such diverse thinkers as Nikolai Karamzin, Petr Chaadaev, Mikhail Lunin, Aleksei Khomiakov, Feodor Tiutchev, and Vladimir Solov'ev. The latter wrote an entry on de Maistre in the Brokgaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, singling out his polemics with Bacon's empiricism, his critique of human rights that ignore the “organic solidarity of all creatures,” and his interest in the “collective reason of humankind” (Solov'ev 1897, 349-52).

In fact, according to Isiah Berlin, it was this group of counterrevolutionaries who at the turn of the nineteenth century virtually invented the doctrine of “the western world as in some sense ‘rotting,’ as being in rapid decay” (1979, 64). This doctrine found its way to Germany and Russia, becoming a major tenet in the attitudes of numerous Russian thinkers, who were convinced (or rather, were reinforced in their convictions) that the West's new individualistic doctrines and values were dangerous and destructive, and that Russia had to be protected from them. Spurred by rivalry and insecurity, Russians, similar to Germans and other latecomers to modernity, have always been enthusiastic about various doctrines pronouncing the “decline of the West.”

De Maistre, who never tired of attacking Protestantism, rationalism, and individualism, was adamant in his rejection of freedom and the autonomy of the individual. In fact, de Maistre was one of the first to use the term “individualism” in its modern sense, when in 1820 he spoke of “this deep and frightening division of minds, this infinite fragmentation of all doctrines, political protestantism carried to the most absolute individualism” (Lukes 1973, 4). In his Etude sur la souveraineté, De Maistre envisioned the following, clearly medieval, way of confronting this dangerous ideology:

Government is a true religion. It has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests. … Man's first need is that his growing reason be put under the double yoke [of church and state]. It should be annihilated, it should lose itself in the reason of the nation, so that it is transformed from its individual existence into another—communal—being, as a river that falls into the ocean does indeed persist in the midst of the waters, but without name or personal identity.

(quoted in Berlin 1991, 125-26)

The conviction that individualism contained a destructive potential was shared by both left and right. Saint-Simon (an even more influential thinker in terms of emerging Russian views on the subject) attacked the eighteenth-century “defenders of individualism” for refusing to “go back to a source higher than individual conscience.” He insisted that individualism with its two “sad deities … two creatures of reason—conscience and public opinion” led to “one political result: opposition to any attempt at organization from a center of direction for the moral interests of mankind, to hatred of power” (Lukes 1973, 7).⁷

Even the liberals, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, were if not downright critical of individualism, at least very much concerned with its inevitable outcome: selfishness, isolation, and a weakening of social bonds. Tocqueville clearly associated individualism with the spreading conditions of equality and democracy, yet warns of the price of this progress: “thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely in the solitude of his own heart” (1945, 106). While distinguishing individualism, which he sees as a “calm and mature feeling of self-reliance,” from egoism, he nevertheless maintains that “individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness” (104).⁸

Individualism, as Tocqueville correctly foresaw, was destined to play a pivotal role in the history of the United States. In Russia, however, its march was much less triumphant, as Russia's historical development differed drastically from that of the West. The momentous development of the concept of the individual throughout the Renaissance and Reformation bypassed Russia entirely, while the teachings of the Enlightenment and French Revolution were often greeted with suspicion and misunderstanding.

In other words, the Counter-Reformation's critique of excessive individualism found a very receptive audience in Russia. It is hardly surprising that a country that never experienced the positive, liberating aspects of Renaissance and Reformation, but knew very well the dangers of disunity and civil strife, found the Counter-Reformation arguments against inevitable social and moral chaos very convincing.⁹

In Western Europe, cultural and spiritual losses occurred gradually and had prepared an individual strong or heroic enough to confront them. Not so in Russia, where the institutions of serfdom and autocracy, the system of ranks, the enforced Westernization of the previous century, the loss of religion among the ruling class, and a barely nascent middle class left the country with very few people ready to exercise and defend their individual rights and their autonomy. In her attempts to be on a par with Enlightenment Europe, Catherine the Great clearly encouraged the appearance of the new self. Catherine's reign, in spite of her later doubts, planted the seeds of individual dignity and individual importance, at least within the Russian nobility; it was further encouraged by Russia's victory over Napoleon. Yet barely had the Russian gentry began to enjoy its sense of independence and its pride in individual accomplishment than the Decembrist fiasco reversed the process, plunging the country into a trauma of resignation and alienation. As Herzen saw it, Russia's nobility had never recovered from the shock of suppression; “it withered away” (1954-66, 7:209). In the absence of historically grounded traditions, the emerging sense of self could not withstand the shock.

After the events of 1825, the Russian government increased the discouragement, if not outright suppression, of all political, social, and economic manifestations of individualism. This desire to stifle and submerge the individual in the hierarchies of state, religion, and community found expression in what became the government's guiding principle of cultural life in the 1830s and 1840s: “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality.” In a notorious 1848 statement to the teachers of military schools, a government official, Iakov Rostovtsev, relegated individual autonomy to the narrow confines of family life: “Conscience is needed only in family and private life; when it comes to matters of state and government service, its role is played by the authorities” (quoted in Ivanov-Razumnik 1911, 183). A. I. Bariatinsky, a prominent field marshal of the period, who also happened to have been a classmate of Lermontov at Saint Petersburg's Junker Academy, described Nicholas I's regime in the following terrifying image: “Nicholas saw the country as a billiard table, and did not like to see anything rise above the monotonous plane of the table surface” (quoted in Gershtein 1986, 211). Responding to the mood of the period, the popular court playwright, Nestor Kukol'nik, declared that “if they order me, tomorrow I'll become a midwife” (quoted in Ivanov-Razumnik 1911, 174). Indeed, Russian government seems to be very much concerned with appointing poets to the position of mid-wives, as one of the most thoughful people of the period, poet and critic Prince Viazemskii, acknowledges in his 1846 entry to his diary:

Our government considers it is to be a weakness and example of dangerous permissiveness to take into account the natural abilities and inclination of the man who is being appointed to an office. Man is born to stand on his feet: that is precisely why he must be put on his hands and told “walk!” Otherwise, what is the meaning of power when it obeys the general order and flow of things? In addition, a certain apprehension plays its part here: man in his proper place acquires a certain strength, a certain individuality [samobytnost'] but the government wants mere tools, frequently crooked and uncomfortable to use, but for that reason all the more dependent on its will.

(Viazemsky 1992, 251)

These few examples taken at random indicate the reigning social and cultural attitude toward the values of individualism. Lermontov's contemporary, Alexander Herzen, commented on this essential difference between Russia and the West in a diary entry for 4 July 1843: “The rights of the free rational human being are accepted [in England] with the same certainty that they are entirely denied in our country” (1954-66, 2:292). In his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, Herzen sees Russia's attitude toward human personality in a more tragic light: “Everywhere in Russia a man's personality is sacrificed without the slightest mercy and with no reward” (Herzen 1982, 149).

Subjected to the stern and repressive policy of the government, the Russian cultural elite found itself totally disoriented. Vissarion Belinsky, the most influential critic and key thinker of the period, gave voice to the post-Decembrist generation, complaining about resignation and tormenting “self-consciousness” (refleksiia). The recurrence of such images as “lost paradise” and “the wandering Jew” in his letters testifies to an emerging awareness of the individual's sense of loss and disorientation.¹⁰ Unprepared to confront their losses by falling back upon inner resources, Russian intellectuals had to look for guidance to various philosophical, social, or religious systems. Belinsky's own furious and well-documented embrace of diverse doctrines, ranging from Hegelianism to Socialism, is a case in point. Setting the trend for future generations, Belinsky constantly searched for a master ideology, for what William Blake calls “mind-forged manacles,” to guide him through the maze of unresolved moral questions.

As the Russian intellectual elite of the second quarter of the nineteenth century attempted to find a way out from its sense of disorientation and loss, it inevitably turned to the West. Therefore in Russia a comprehensive exploration of the theme of individualism began only with the advent of Romanticism. Many of the insights of Romanticism, insights that constitute only a chapter in the history of Western individualism, form an entire book in Russia.

Literature and the arts in general have frequently been the vehicle for introducing the Russian public to the equivalent of centuries of Western economic, legal, and cultural development. Romanticism, in this sense, was an enormously important cultural force. Its concern with the plight of the self, with rebellion, and even demonism provided Russian artists and ultimately the Russian public with an opportunity to rethink the makeup of the human personality, and to renegotiate its place within society and the universe. The symbolist poet and critic Viacheslav Ivanov acknowledged Russia's profound cultural indebtedness to Romanticism and its individualistic ethos in his essay, “Byronism as an Event in the Life of the Russian Spirit” (1916): “We, the Slavs, discovered the societal revelation of human personality in the depth of the English spirit. Such a revelation was Byronism” (1994, 269).¹¹

Russians were certainly infected with European Romanticism's enthusiasm for individualism and its core values, yet they were also susceptible to its anti-Enlightenment program, with its attacks on the social contract, human rights, rationalism, and religious skepticism. As a result, many Russians could not fail to see individualism as an explosive, dangerous, and destructive force that disrupts the proper function of human society and culture. In fact, the negative qualities associated with individualism, namely, atomization, alienation, egotism, and the ensuing civil strife and disorder, were destined to alarm Russians, shaped as they were by the constant fear of invasion and civil strife. This fear of explosive individualistic doctrines was shared not only by the tsarist regime and the Church, but also by the majority of ordinary Russians. It is thus no surprise that appeals to confront this evil—if not by force, then by the means of religion, mystical doctrines of state and people, or by the calls for self-renunciation—became fundamental to the rhetoric of Russian opponents of individualism. Beginning with Karamzin, Russian intellectuals articulated Russian national identity precisely in terms of unity and social cohesion, as opposed to the Western fixation on individualism and its inevitable conflicts.

In other words, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Russian cultural elite found itself confronted, on the one hand, by the Western Romantic ethos, with its revolutions, declarations of human rights, doctrines of individualism, and literary interest in self-analysis, biography, and confession; on the other, by post-Decembrist repression coupled with increased conservative attacks on individualism. The tension of this confrontation resulted in a lively debate on the nature of the human being and the limits of individual rights and responsibilities.

This debate was largely restricted to the literary journals of the day; these were practically the only forums in which public discussions of any question, whether cultural, social, or economic, could take place. The polemical texts of writers and journalists, both radical and conservative, Slavophiles and Westernizers, filled such periodicals as Moskovskii Vestnik (1827-30), Moskovskii Telegraph (1825-34), Moskvitianin (1841-56), Sovremennik (1836-66), and Otechestvennye Zapiski (1839-67). In fact, according to an authoritative student of Russian intellectual history, Andrzei Walicki, it was “the idea of personality” that fueled the polemic between Slavophiles and Westernizers (1979, 135). It was this polemic that was destined to shape all future Russian discussions on historical, philosophical, and religious issues.¹²

Westernizers embraced the Western type of personality and individualism, bemoaning its absence in Russia. In his seminal article “A Glance at the Legal Norms of Ancient Russia” (1847), the historian Konstantin Kavelin states that “an individual who realizes his eternal, unconditional dignity is a necessary condition for any spiritual development of a nation”; he stresses that it is the historical task of Russia “to create a personality” (sozdat' lichnost') (Kavelin 1989, 22-23). In a letter to Kavelin, Belinsky sadly observes that “the concept of personality is only in its infancy among us” (1978, 9:682). In an earlier letter to his friend, V. P. Botkin, Belinsky maintains that “the human personality (chelovecheskaia lichnost') is now more sacred to me than history, more sacred than society, more sacred than mankind. This is the idea and the thought of our age!” (9:403; emphasis in original). Herzen devotes an entire chapter in his collection From Another Shore (1850), entitled “Omnia Mea Mecum Porto,” to a passionate defense of individualism against the traditional accusations of pride and egoism. “It is slaves who are the least selfish,” remarks Herzen bitterly (1954-66, 6:130), adding that love, which moralists usually oppose to individualism, can be as “dirty, beastly, and narrow” as egoism. Another collection by Herzen, Caprices and Meditation (1862) which unites three of his essays written in the 1840s, argues that it is one's duty to discard existing intellectual authority and to strive for moral and philosophical independence and autonomy. Even the conservative Russian critic Stepan Shevyrev admitted in his essay “A Russian Looks at the Contemporary Education in Europe” that the question of human personality became central to both literature and criticism and acknowledged that Western education owed its success to Western individualism (1841, 219-96).

Regardless of such admissions, Shevyrev's lead article for the newly founded magazine, The Muscovite (Moskvitianin) (1841) also contained the term “the rotting West,” which would serve as a battle cry for all future conservative attacks on the West. Shevyrev, not surprisingly, attributed the main source of Western “rot” to the excesses born of the overdeveloped ego of unrestrained individual freedom.

The thrust of conservative attacks can be seen in an exchange between Belinsky and a conservative critic, S. Burachok. Echoing the views of Kant, Belinsky once remarked that “the purpose of man is man.” This relatively anodyne and hardly original remark produced the following bitter response from Burachok: “it is a lie … there is only one road that leads man toward happiness: cast yourself out, take up your cross and follow Christ” (1840, 78). Writing in a government-sponsored journal, Burachok not only hypocritically propounded the ideals of Christian self-renunciation but also took part in a very disturbing and long-standing practice of the Russian government: appropriating the nation's most cherished religious ideals for the sake of political expedience. Burachok is clearly unaware of what George Fedotov reminded us in his discussion of the first Russian monastic saint, Theodosius: “A true kenotic, in imitation of Christ, humbles himself before the lowly, not before the powerful” (Fedotov 1975, 13).

The calls for self-renunciation found further articulation in the writings of the Slavophiles. Their leading theoretician, Aleksei Khomiakov, insisted that human personality was the product of sin and evil, and one's task, therefore, was to renounce it and cease being a separate individual:

God wanted man to rely on the strength of his faith, and his love of the Savior, in order to renounce his personality, the personality of sin and evil, and embrace the sanctity and perfection of his Savior. United in such a way with Christ, man is not what he used to be; he is not a separate person, he is a member of the Church.

(1994, 93)

Khomiakov's rhetoric is telling as it underscores the dominant Slavophile oppositions: the human personality is deemed inherently malicious and sinful; this isolated and lonely personality is opposed to the man who renounces his personality and becomes a member of the Church.

Khomiakov's association of a separate personality with sin and evil is one of the most important features of Russian anthropology. Richard Gustafson (1995) points out that one of the most influential Russian philosophers, Vladimir Solov'ev, attributed the very existence of separate individuals to original sin: “Original sin is caused by the individual's separation from God and results in the individual's separation from other individuals” (177). We are obviously dealing here with a rather persistent paradigm that Gustafson traces back to the works of Origen: “With Origen, then, ‘we are not fallen because we are men; on the contrary, we are men because we are fallen’” (172). In support of Gustafson's observations one can refer to Solov'ev's third public speech on Dostoevsky's death:

While the dark foundation of our nature, evil in its absolute selfishness, and mad in its striving to satisfy its egoism, to relate everything to the self and to define everything through oneself—while this dark foundation is present, not yet transformed—while this original sin is not vanquished, we cannot accomplish anything real, and the question of what is to be done does not make any sense.

(Solov'ev 1988, 311; my emphasis)

Solov'ev grounds the humanistic interest in the self in original sin and predictably insists that this self has to be vanquished. Furthermore, he sees individual human enterprise as the perpetuation of the fallen condition, and easily dismisses human achievements as illusory and irrational. Similar examples of the religious basis of Russian anti-individualism can be found not only in the texts of Khomiakov and Solov'ev, but in the majority of Russian texts that discuss the issue of human personality. Berdiaev (1939) observes: “egocentrism is the original sin of man, the violation of the true relationship between self and other” (111; my emphasis). Berdiaev defines individualism as “isolation of the part from the whole or the revolt of the part against the whole” (114) and then interprets it as a form of slavery: “the individualist is a slave of oneself” (115). Lossky (1976) underscores the theological foundation of these views of the separate self: “It was only as a consequence of sin that these two first human persons became two separate natures; two individuals, with external, relationships between them. … After original sin human nature became divided, split up, broken into many individuals” (123; my emphasis). Echoing the Slavophiles, Lossky insists that the only way for human nature to be restored lies through the unity of the Church: “We find in the Church the unity of our nature perpetually being realized, for the Church is more united than a collective totality. … Only in the Church can they [human beings] realize themselves in their true diversity” (108).

The Slavophile attitude toward separation suggests that any interest in or insistence on autonomy and separation are bound to be viewed as sinful if not demonic. Indeed, Slavophile-inspired ideology demonizes Peter the Great for separating “the people” (narod) from the gentry; demonizes reason for separating itself from “integral knowledge”; demonizes law for separating people from the unity of love; Protestantism for separating people from the Church; and individualism for separating people from each other.¹³

By giving voice to subconscious cultural attitudes and shaping future religious and philosophical discourses, the Slavophiles left a lasting impact on Russian thought: unity, integrity (tsel'nost'), organicity, fullness (polnota), and brotherhood would be associated with positive and Orthodox values; autonomy, separation, property, self, rationality, law, and the impersonal collective with demonic and Western ones. If one considers the persuasiveness and resonance of Slavophiles dichotomies, it will become clear that individualism in Russia was damned before it even appeared.

Slavophiles are obviously correct in their basic premise of human interconnectedness; as Aristotle maintained in his Politics, one who lives outside the community is either a beast or a God. Yet the Slavophiles' fixation on this basic fact, their exaggerated interest in visions of the past and future harmonies at the expense of concrete individual experience, was bound to take a utopian and fantastic turn. Leo Tolstoy, no stranger to the idealization of the peasant commune and communal values himself, nevertheless insisted in 1895 that “in a heap, in a crowd, or gathering only evil can be accomplished. Good is done only by each single person separately” (1935-64, 53:7). Tolstoy was also appalled by the utopian, unfounded, and essentially irrelevant concepts of the Slavophiles. In his 1872 letter to Strakhov he writes:

I hate all these chorus principles [khorovye nachala] and structurings of life [stroi zhizni] and communes and brother-Slavs, invented one way or another. I simply love things definite, clear, beautiful, and balanced, and I find them in peasant poetry, language and life, and I find the opposite in our way of life.

(61:278)

Tolstoy, it should be noted, echoes here Lermontov's own response to the Slavophiles: his lyrical poem, “Motherland” (“Rodina”) (1841).

One thing can be said about the Slavophiles: they were consistent; they defended their ideals and fought the evil they perceived. “The autonomy of the individual, they [the Slavophiles] argued, leads to the disintegration of society and condemns human beings to isolation and loneliness” (Walicki 1989, 446). Slavophiles believed that the true freedom and development of an individual could only be achieved within the unity of believers (sobornost'). Yet, according to Walicki, “the freedom allowed by this type of unity is therefore a freedom prior to the stage of individuation: not freedom of the individual, but of the social collective” (199).

The Slavophile attitude is a clear example of what Louis Dumont in his study of individualism defines as “holism”; that is, “an ideology that valorizes the social whole and neglects or subordinates the human individual” (1986, 279). The opposite of “holism” is the ideology of individualism, which Dumont sees as “a major feature in the configurations of features that constitutes modern ideology” (279). In his German Ideology, Dumont interprets various German Romantic theories as typical “holistic” responses toward modern civilization, and stresses the inevitable similarities between German ideology and all later responses to modernity:

All the cultures that later came under the impact of modern civilization were, like the German, essentially holistic, and therefore either had to operate similar responses to individualism, or find the German recipes ready at hand to help them. The success of the ethnic theory of the nation is thus no mystery nor, more specifically, is the reception of Herder among the Slavs of Central Europe, and the respective vogue of Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel in successive phases of Russian intellectual history in the nineteenth century.

(1994, 26)¹⁴

Summarizing the polemics of the period, Walicki observes: “criticism of Western individualism—more primitive than that of the Slavophiles but founded on similar premises—was a cornerstone of all conservative doctrines during the reign of Nicholas.” He then adds an observation that sheds light on Lermontov's predicament: “particular hostility—downright hatred at times—was shown to Lermontov, whose work was felt to embody individualism in its most arrogant and challenging form” (1989, 358).

By transforming the polemic over the duties and responsibilities of the individual into a discussion of the utopian harmony achieved by the human person within a peasant commune (mir) or religious community (sobornost'), the Slavophiles neglected one of the burning issues of the day: the nature of everyday human behavior in contemporary society. Ginzburg (1977) puts it this way: “The Slavophile outlook included radical anti-individualism; therefore their circle could not spell out the problems of the contemporary reflexive personality” (39). Lermontov, however, was interested precisely in contemporary personality, as his novel A Hero of Our Time amply testifies. It is against the reigning attitudes toward the individual that one should consider Lermontov's position as articulated in A Hero of Our Time: “the history of a human soul, be it even the meanest soul, can hardly be less curious or less instructive, than the history of an entire nation—especially when it is the result of self-observation on the part of a mature mind” (63).

It is no coincidence that the Slavophiles were scandalized by Lermontov's antagonistic and self-asserting hero. One of the leading Slavophiles, Iuri Samarin, commented on Lermontov's death: “He owed a huge debt—his novel, Hero of Our Time. It had to be paid, and Lermontov, by going forward and abandoning his selfish self-reflection, would have paid and would have comforted many. Now nobody can repay it” (quoted in Gershtein 1941, 122). Obviously, by the debt, Samarin understood the damage done to Russian society by the presentation of a complex, contradictory, yet appealing protagonist, a man of autonomous and independent character, capable of both good and evil. Samarin's complaint was rather premature, however; if nothing else, Russian writers, including Dostoevsky, repaid Lermontov's debt in full, as they produced and dutifully condemned a whole gallery of autonomous, independent, and destructive individuals.

LERMONTOV AND HEROISM

Lermontov's work was immediately hailed by Belinsky as the expression of the dominant mood of the period because his lyric poetry provided the Russian public with a voice to express its sense of loss, despair, and disorientation. The greatest poem of Lermontov's early period, “Angel” (1831), describes an angel carrying a soul from heaven down into “the world of grief and tears” (dlia mira pechali i slez) (1:233). Although Lermontov started his career as a poet of loss, he did not remain an elegiac poet for long: his heroes do not merely contemplate or lament their losses, but confront them with energy and resoluteness. Indeed, already in his earliest prose text, the unfinished historical novel Vadim, Lermontov draws a clear opposition between active heroes and resigned observers: “Nowadays, the life of young people takes the form of thought, rather than action; there are no heroes, but there are too many observers” (4:180).

Lermontov's heroes refuse to remain observers. The actions through which they come to terms with their losses and with the universe that produces them defines the degree of their heroism. By the end of the century perceptive critics, like the populist N. M. Mikhailovsky in an essay on Lermontov aptly entitled “The Hero of Meaningless Time” (“Geroi bezvremen'ia,” 1891), recognized Lermontov's program of articulating a heroic personality for this period of repression and resignation: “If we start looking for the main motif in Lermontov's poetry, for that central point that preoccupied him most frequently and thoroughly, and to which the majority if not all of his texts can be directly or indirectly reduced, we'll find it in the realm of heroism” (1989, 414).

In his 1842 letter to Belinsky, Vassily Botkin, one of the few defenders of the middle class in Russia, makes the following estimation of Lermontov's impact upon Russian art, utilizing Shevyrev's connection of Western putrefaction to the advances of individualism: “It is through Lermontov that the spirit of ‘European rot’ appeared in Russian art for the first time. The essential inner unity of his art consists in the rejection of all patriarchy, authority, tradition, and existing societal conventions and connections” (Botkin 1984, 246). Botkin recognizes that Lermontov rejects “the spirit and worldview created in the Middle Ages; in other words, of the existing social organization” (246). It is curious that Botkin connects Lermontov's program with the attack upon the Russian Middle Ages, equating Lermontov's role with that played by the doctrines of individualism in the West. Lermontov, however, not only questioned traditional rules of conduct; he also explored new forms and principles of behavior based on the core values and ideals of individualism: autonomy, privacy, and self-development.

Early traumatic experiences (the death of his mother and separation from his father) left Lermontov vulnerable to images of evil, loss, alienation, and exile developed in Western Romanticism. The story of the fallen angel, or demon, who experienced the loss of paradise firsthand and is destined to be punished by God, was an important myth for Lermontov; it certainly supplied the poet with rich literary material. Lermontov opens his major narrative poem, “The Demon” (1838), on which he worked for almost a decade, with the theme of the Fall, with the Demon's exile and separation. Lermontov thus remains within the parameters set by Russian tradition, which sees separation and alienation as inexorably connected to the Fall. Yet, rather than bemoaning it or fantasizing ways of escape, the poet explores its inevitability. Paradise is doomed to remain lost for all of Lermontov's protagonists. How does one live in the present state of alienation and separation? How does one deal with other individuals? What choices does one make and on what grounds?

“The Demon” reveals the paradigmatic predicament of an individual: loneliness and anxiety caused by the memory of lost bliss is coupled with an awareness of the stifling confinement of the present. Both protagonists of the poem, the Demon and Tamara, feel stifled and frustrated in their worlds. Yet, similar to Lermontov's other protagonists, neither of them is willing to side with God as a means of overcoming their anxiety. Although she enters a convent, Tamara fails to find an escape from her inner tension, from her attraction to and fear of the Demon. It is only through a song that she finally expresses and overcomes her inner turmoil. The Demon, on the other hand, in his attempt to recover a “lost paradise,” resorts to a tragic solution, echoed in other Lermontov texts as well: he strives to resolve his anxiety of loss and separation through love, in this case through possession of Tamara, but it leads only to her destruction. The poem is specific in its criticism of the hero's destructiveness, a destructiveness caused by the protagonist's investing erotic love with the potential for salvation. Lermontov's poem discloses the reasons behind the Demon's tragedy: the urgent need to recover lost bliss coupled with artistic fruitlessness. Lermontov underscores this fruitlessness by making the Demon compose a trite and primitive love song. The combination of aesthetic blindness with rebellion makes the Demon capable only of destruction.

Lermontov, as we see, is well aware of the potentially tragic consequences of blind self-assertion. Unlike the Enlighteners, Lermontov embraces the complex, contradictory, and precarious position of the individual, seeing his freedom as a tragic fate. Yet, he leaves it to other Russian writers to condemn the demonism, narcissism, and rebellion of an overdeveloped personality. The first major text that Lermontov published, “The Song of Tsar Ivan Vassilyevich, His Young Oprichnik, and the Stout-hearted Merchant Kalashnikov” (1837), constructs a self-reliant, independent hero and glorifies his defense of integrity, autonomy, and privacy.

In this poem Lermontov presents an emblematic heroic act: Kalashnikov challenges the external norms of society and religion on the basis of his own inner principles of honor and integrity. He challenges and kills the oprichnik Kirebeevich (who insulted his wife) and then refuses to disclose the motives for his action to the tsar.

By presenting a bourgeois character, who is noble and independent, Lermontov shows his true insight in the social, economic, and political dimensions of individualism. The merchant Kalashnikov is preoccupied with his property, yet he also guards his honor and integrity. The defense of property and the defense of self go hand in hand, suggests the poet, as opposed to numerous Russian opponents of private property.

Kalashnikov deliberately refuses to appeal to the two acknowledged authorities of Russian society: God and Tsar, rulers of heaven and earth. Without being a rebel against either of them, Kalashnikov disregards their commands. He posits personal truth as a legitimate contender among the truths of society and religion and asserts his right to live and act according to the laws of his own conscience. Having killed his enemy he responds to the tsar's inquiry: “I have killed him of my own free will; but why I did it, I shall not disclose to you, only to God” (Ia ubil ego vol'noi voleiu, a za chto, pro chto ne skazhu tebe, a skazhu tol'ko Bogu edinomu) (2:18). Even if Kalashnikov's words echo Christ's answer to the Pharisees, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's” (Matt. 22:21), Kalashnikov's independent actions and proud answer seem to add to Christ's maxim: “But I shall also render unto myself the things which are mine.” Kalashnikov, who views his honor-driven actions as a fight for truth; who insists on the personal administration of justice and speaks truthfully with the tsar; and yet who refuses to explain the reasons behind his actions, is Lermontov's equivalent of the Declaration of Independence. The very suggestion that such reasons might lie outside the tsar's domain is surely a bold and almost unprecedented defense of the right to privacy in a country pervaded by “all-seeing eyes, and all-hearing ears” (1:76) and still shaken by the intrusive interrogations of the tsar and his committee and the rapid surrender of the Decembrists. Kalashnikov's actions, however, are rewarded only with a nameless grave. His claim to individuality is symbolically obliterated. However, the poem says that Kalashnikov's fate inspires the songs of wandering singers; that is, Lermontov's own song. The poet makes it his task to commemorate Kalashnikov's courageous actions, his heroic ability to preserve dignity and integrity, while navigating between all-out surrender and all-out rebellion.

Along with the depiction of heroic conduct, Lermontov attacks behavior that is blatantly nonheroic, that is, weak, impersonal, or irresponsible. Lermontov wrote at a time of almost universal fear, falsehood, and self-denial, occasioned by post-Decembrist repression and its subsequent social trauma. In his first major completed work, the drama The Masquerade (1835), Lermontov contrasts an independent powerful individual, Arbenin, to his society, that is, to a group of nonindividuals who flaunt their socially accepted masks and are incapable of expressing, let alone defending, their personality and their right to develop it.

The metaphor of masquerade that Lermontov constructs in this play is one of the governing metaphors of his art. Lermontov's hostility toward masks and role-playing is directly connected to his interest in the issues of heroism and individualism. The search for a hero and the attacks on masquerade are Lermontov's responses to a cultural conflict that seems to have become a permanent feature of Russian life: the conflict between “civilization and slavery” (Herzen 1954-66, 7:205), that is, between the values and ideology inspired by the West and the repressive reality of Russia. In the particular case of Lermontov's period, the liberating and individualistic values of Romanticism collided with post-Decembrist Russian oppression, creating a tension that was difficult to resolve. Trying to appear as free and progressive Europeans on the one hand, and obedient God- and tsar-loving Russians on the other, the educated Russian public resorted to an endless masquerade that encompassed not only social or political, but also intellectual spheres.

The Masquerade reveals Lermontov's two-pronged approach toward the representation of his society. The author includes several characters who make the concept of “our time” real and tangible, creating a background against which an independent, self-reliant, though violent protagonist becomes a hero. In other words, it is Arbenin's peers' involvement in lies and secret manipulations, their failure to question and modify what they are doing, that underscores Arbenin's heroism. However, Arbenin exemplifies an important paradox: while proudly rejecting the evil that he sees around him, he remains incapable of discerning any other force in the universe and so ends up embracing it. The play thus explores themes that were to remain central to Lermontov: mask-wearing and self-effacement, the resulting social ills on the one hand and the protagonist's “trial by evil” on the other.

Arbenin acknowledges evil's omnipresence: “I saw evil everywhere, yet, being proud, did not bow down to it” (3:39). According to him the world consists of ruthless and manipulative players (igroki) and their victims or playthings (igrushki). He tries to make his way through it by refusing to side with anyone. Likewise, Pechorin seeks a middle ground between master and slave, while Kalashnikov and the Demon navigate between the extremes of rebellion and surrender. Such a search for a middle ground points unequivocally to the relevance of Lermontov's thought; the articulation of such a middle ground of conduct is all the more important for a culture in which passion for the extreme is almost proverbial.

The Masquerade testified to the close connection between Lermontov's thought and the plight of contemporary society. Even though his view of it was rather pessimistic—“with sadness do I look at my generation,” declared the speaker of the 1838 poem “Meditation” (“Duma”)—he was not ready to give up on it, at least not yet. A Hero of Our Time responds to a pressing problem of his day: how to exercise freedom and individuality in a society that has lost its traditional rules of conduct, yet is hostile to any manifestation of independence and personal choice.

In the chapter devoted to the longest tale of the novel, “Princess Mary,” I examine the fundamental tragedy of Pechorin's time, epitomized by Pechorin's opponent, Grushnitsky: the refusal of post-Decembrist Russian society to confront its predicament with honesty and courage, hiding instead behind the masks and illusions of heroism and freedom created by epigones of Romantic literature (Alexander Marlinsky, in particular). I address the meteoric rise of Marlinsky and explore the cultural phenomenon of marlinism; that is, a mode of cultural behavior that supported and nourished blindness and pandered to immaturity, naive theatricality, and refusal to remain oneself. I demonstrate how Pechorin's attack on the human propensity to approach life with closed eyes, in the manner of Grushnitsky, finds its parallel in Lermontov's own attack on the cultural ills of his society.

Clearly I take seriously Lermontov's characterization of Pechorin as a “hero of our time” and try to bring Pechorin back to the critical discussion from which he has been too quickly dismissed by the moralizing tendencies of his many commentators: these include not only the Slavophiles and other religious thinkers but also the majority of the giants of Russian literature. Indeed, the readiness with which such authors as Turgenev (Luchinov in “Three Portraits” or Teglev in “Knock … Knock … Knock …”), Dostoevsky (the Underground Man and Stavrogin in The Possessed), Tolstoy (Dolokhov in War and Peace), or Anton Chekhov (Solyonyi in The Three Sisters) parody Pechorin's worst qualities without sufficiently analyzing the complexity of his character, or the message behind it, reveals in my view not so much the moral superiority of Pechorin's critics, but rather a blind spot in Russian culture.¹⁵

In the chapter devoted to the last tale of A Hero of Our Time, “The Fatalist,” I explore the heroic dimension of Pechorin's conduct, his revolutionary combination of skepticism, sober evaluation of circumstances, resoluteness, and self-reliance. Pechorin risks his life not to test fate, but because he feels the need to prevent the execution of a dishonorable act against others: the slaughter of a son before his mother's eyes. Even though Lermontov condemns Pechorin's cruelty, and presents his plight as essentially tragic, as leading nowhere but to idle and cruel pursuits, he cannot help admiring his relentless self-scrutiny, his refusal to adapt to laws that go against his principles. Although skeptical about all traditional moral and religious doctrines, Pechorin nevertheless, acting on his own accord, chooses good and acknowledges his obligations toward others. That fact alone flies in the face of many pious condemnations of individualism, and its alleged connections to amoralism and selfishness.

Furthermore, I approach “The Fatalist” as a parable that contains Lermontov's warning against preoccupation with metaphysical or universal schemes, hopes, or illusions when confronted by concrete choices and concrete manifestations of evil. The tale's blindly courageous protagonist, Vulich, fails to notice a slaughtered pig and runs headlong to his death at the hands of a drunken Cossack destroying everything in his path. This was meant as a warning to Lermontov's contemporaries who refused to see what was under their nose, preferring to ignore the brutality and violence taking place in front of them yet who spent a considerable amount of energy studying and promoting Schellingism, Hegelianism, sobornost', and other utopian schemes.

It should be noted here that the majority of Lermontov's protagonists fail in their proud desire not to bow down to evil but rather to find a way of avoiding the traditional extremes of victim and victimizer. Arbenin, Pechorin, and the Demon eventually surrender to evil, taking the aggressive side of the equation. Lermontov not only explains the reason for such a decision; more important he articulates the only possible way of confronting evil and resolving the hated extremes that all of his protagonists must face. I refer to the response of the lyrical persona in Lermontov's 1829 poem, “A Letter” (“Pis'mo”): “everything has betrayed me; poison is everywhere; only the sound of the lyre has been faithful to me” (vse izmenilo mne, vezde otravy, lish liry zvuk mne neizmenen byl) (1:101). Lermontov's characters inevitably find themselves in a world of evil. In the cases of Arbenin, Pechorin, or the Demon, it is pride and honor that they use as a bulwark against evil; in the case of the persona of “A Letter,” it is “the sound of the lyre.”

Analysis of Lermontov's oeuvre reveals that it is precisely the reality of harmonious sounds that constitutes a possibility of redemption, containing a secret knowledge of the world's lost harmony. Lermontov began to view art—that is, the awareness of and participation in the aesthetic dimension of existence—as the only tangible means of resolving inner turmoil and integrating the collapsed fabric of the universe.

Even though all of them strive to conduct themselves with integrity, self-reliance, and courage, Lermontov's heroes differ drastically in two separate yet related ways: their artistic sensibility, and their attitudes toward other individuals. They range from the likes of Arbenin and the Demon, who easily resort to evil and violence, to Mtsyri (“Mtsyri,” 1839), who flatly rejects any imposition of himself upon others. The tragic denouements of Lermontov's major texts, whether The Masquerade, “The Demon,” or A Hero of Our Time, reveal that pride, strength, and independence prove destructive if they are not moderated by aesthetic experience, by “the sound of the lyre.” The orphan and exile Mtsyri yearns for his lost motherland and is tormented by the same anxieties as the Demon or Pechorin. Mtsyri, however, learns to accept his losses courageously and stoically and declines to try to recover them through external possession or aggression. Lermontov makes it clear that Mtsyri's stoicism and integrity are sustained by his artistic sensibility. Mtsyri's aesthetic experiences during his escape allow him temporarily to regain lost bliss, and thus give him strength and courage to persevere till the end.

Lermontov's ultimate hero, therefore, is Mtsyri, a character whose precarious balance between self-assertion and continuous rejection of evil is sustained by his artistic nature. Although many of Lermontov's heroes must face the same choices, only Mtsyri manages to achieve a balance as he both literally and figuratively travels the narrow path between extremes. In the figure of Mtsyri, Lermontov manages to solve the puzzle, to fuse his demand for heroic individuality with his poetic demand for nondestructiveness. Mtsyri's whole life is heroic (and that is why it is so short, one might add): he stoically and courageously confronts a cruel fate and manifests his heroism by combining activity and detachment, energy and nonviolence, lack of faith and transcendence.

Commenting on the terrifying and self-perpetuating symbiosis between tyranny and the suppression of individualism, Norbert Elias, a leading scholar on individualism, writes:

Among the peculiarities of a dictatorial regime is the development of a specific social make-up in the individuals living under the regime. They are highly attuned to external control and often feel disorientated at first if this weakens or disappears. As personal initiative, the individual capacity to make decisions, is less socially rewarded in the framework of such a state, and perhaps disapproved of or even punished, such a regime often has a self-perpetuating character. The people living in this structure are often made more or less insecure, get into conflict with their consciences, when required in one way or another to show a greater degree of self-regulation. Their social make-up makes them tend involuntarily to re-establish the familiar external control, as by a strong leader.

(1991, 181)

With this in mind, it would seem all the more necessary to heed those thinkers and writers who attempt to provide a groundwork for the healthy development of individualism; who refuse to appeal to any outside authority; who promote reliance upon inner resources and principles, thus contributing to a native tradition capable of putting an end to the self-perpetuating cycle described by Elias.¹⁶ Seen from the perspective of Russia's persistent attempts to disregard the values of individualism, to promote the public over the private sphere, to reduce the individual to a function within the social hierarchy, or to concoct utopian schemes of universal happiness in the face of concrete abuse of the most basic human rights, Lermontov's own independence, his depiction of proud, autonomous, and self-reliant characters, is in itself heroic.

The paucity of legitimate models of behavior in a time of confusion, disorientation, and persecution makes Lermontov's contribution to Russian culture all the more significant. His literary representation of various heroes introduced the Russian public to the only models of behavior lying outside the usual paradigms of religious humility, resignation, or wholesale revolt. Lermontov seems to suggest that it is dangerous, futile, and dishonest for an individual—particularly within the Russian context—to fall back on ready-made formulas of obedience, service, and self-renunciation. On the other hand, the call for rebellion frequently denies the individual's responsibility toward others. Instead of such destructive extremes Lermontov advocates behavior based on individual choices, while insisting that such choices should be made on the grounds of inner principles of conscience and integrity. Just as Lermontov rose to the occasion and provided an immediate and brilliant poetic response to Russia's tragic loss of Alexander Pushkin (“Death of the Poet” [“Smert' poeta”], 1837), so did he respond to his age's urgent need for heroes who embody and celebrate the values of individualism. Thus we can claim him to be not only Russia's greatest Romantic poet, or the father of Russian psychological prose, but also a courageous and consistent promoter and defender of the doctrine that for better or for worse defines modernity itself.

Notes

1. There is a growing interest in the problem of individualism in the former Soviet Union. Terrified by the abuses of Soviet-style socialism and Soviet-style Marxist studies, Russian scholars have begun to explore alternative traditions; see Obolonsky (1994) or Kantor (1994). Both books contain what might be called a post-perestroika revisionism of traditional Soviet interpretations of Russian literature, history, and culture.

   One can also refer to A. Ia. Gurevich (1990a, 1990b) or to P. S. Gurevich (1995).

   Among the prerevolutionary Russian studies of the issues related to individualism and literature, one should single out Andreevich (1905) and Ivanov-Razumnik (1911).

2. In Golstein (1997), I argue that Gogol was much less willing to dismiss his hard-working characters than were his readers (243-57).

3. On Bulgakov see Meerson (1996).

4. According to Berdiaev (1939), “individuum is a naturalistic, biological, and sociological category. … It is characterized as the subordinated part of the whole and as the part that egoistically asserts itself” (31). Personality (lichnost'), on the other hand, is “not a naturalistic, but spiritual category … it is not a cell, and it does not enter into the organism as part of the whole. It is the primal integrity and unity … it is not part of the world, but it is correlated to the world, and it is correlated to God” (35). Berdiaev claims that “human being is a personality because God is a personality, and vice versa” (44). By establishing inexorable ties between God and man, Berdiaev foregrounds the connection between the very concept of the human person and the existence of God. He then defines heroism as true service to God: “asceticism is the response to the calling of God … a true asceticism connected with personality is the heroic element in man” (43). The well-known Russian theologian, Vladimir Lossky, admits that he has not “found what one might call an elaborated doctrine of the human person in patristic theology” (1985, 112). Lossky therefore models his view of personality on the idea of divine persons or hypostases in Trinitarian theology; the analogy with the Trinity results in the following dichotomy: “a person can be fully personal only in so far as he has nothing that he seeks to possess for himself, to the exclusion of others, i.e. when he has a common nature with others … otherwise we are in the presence of individuals, dividing nature among themselves” (106). In his earlier text, Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (written in 1944), Lossky (1976) explains what “individ” means:

   the man who is governed by his nature and acts on the strength of his natural qualities, of his “character,” is the least personal. He sets himself up as an individual, proprietor of his own nature, which he pits against the natures of others … thereby confusing person and nature. This confusion, proper to fallen humanity has a special name in the ascetic writing of the Eastern Church—filavtia, or, in Russian, samost'.

   (122)

5. In fact, the losses of the nineteenth century created a paradoxical situation. Depiction of heroism is possible in the climate of shared values: a hero is someone who embodies social and cultural values, be it the martyr of Christianity or a warrior of paganism. When such systems of values collapse, however, as they did during Romanticism, the search for heroes becomes endless, as nobody seems to agree about what constitutes one. Hence, Byron's ironic comment on the need for heroes at a time when “every year and month sends forth a new one.” It is clear that the Byronic or “demonic” hero, as Goethe understood the term, could not reign for long and was bound to give way to various anti-heroes of modern literature. As Peter Thorslev (1962) has written, the Romantic period was “our last great age of heroes” (14-24).

6. On de Maistre in Russia see M. Stepanov (1937), Edwards (1977), and Berlin (1979, 57-81; 1991, 150-58).

7. According to Lukes (1973), Saint-Simon's disciples were the first to use the term individualisme systematically in order to refer to the set of ideas and attitudes underlying the modernity. They characterized the contemporary moment as the clash of opposing values: “disorder, atheism, individualism, and egoism” on the one hand, and “order, religion, association and devotion” on the other (7).

8. Furthermore, Tocqueville associated American democracy and individualism with a decline in artistic standards, prefiguring Russian aristocratic dismissals of the West as a tyranny of the petite bourgeoisie with their petty property-oriented concerns and small artistic achievements.

   Particularly revealing is the turnaround of Alexander Herzen, who began as a revolutionary leader and staunch defender of the individual rights of Russians. In exile, face to face with the Western bourgeoisie, he rapidly modified his position. Enraged by bourgeois culture and private property (which he saw as inexorably connected) Herzen was only too eager to dismiss Western achievements. Siding with the Slavophiles, he began to see the Russian peasant commune as a fertile ground for achieving “individual'nost'.” On the development of Herzen's views, see Malia (1961).

9. Russian writers were destined to resuscitate the Counter-Reformation project well into the nineteenth century, as they continued to explore the dangers of separation, egotism, and autonomy, and continued to stress the need of some external guidance for human affairs. Indeed, Dostoevsky's famous novella, Notes from the Underground (1864), features what Watt (1996) describes as “a hero who was an emblem of individualism which fails” (137). Joseph Frank (1986) has recently underscored the Underground Man's connection to other champions of individualism/anti-individualism: “The term ‘underground man’ has become part of the vocabulary of contemporary culture, and this character has now achieved—like Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust—the stature of one of the great archetypal literary creations” (310).

   Dostoevsky, we recall, characterized the Underground Man as an “anti-hero.” Similar to the early myths of Faust and Don Juan, which were intended to undermine Renaissance heroism, Dostoevsky undermined the heroes of Romanticism (including those of Lermontov, to whom the Underground Man explicitly refers) by presenting an anti-hero who parodies and trivializes them. While defending the individual's freedom and autonomy, the Underground Man reenacts in his own life all the negative aspects traditionally ascribed to individualism: its self-centeredness, disorientation, alienation, and blind caprice. Echoing the fate of the early individualistic heroes who were glorified during the cultural upheavals of the Romantic period, Dostoevsky's paradoxical protagonist has acquired a new resonance within twentieth-century Western culture. Yet, in terms of the Russian situation, Notes from the Underground reinforced the Russian tendency to dismiss individualism as a dangerous Western import.

10. In a letter to V. P. Botkin of 9 February 1840, Belinsky (1978) writes: “the external circumstances are terrible, and the thought of them stings the soul. … What is in store for us? Only one thing: tears and grief for a lost paradise, and even that only at moments, and the usual state of awareness of one's fall into death and eternity” (9:307).

11. This belated development, as well as the powerful intellectual and cultural charge that Russians inherited from Romanticism, explains why Romanticism remained a productive force in Russia, and produced great Romantic poets and individualists such as Mayakovsky or Tsvetaeva well into the twentieth century. The Western origin of individualism also explains why any proponent of individualism is frequently labeled as “non-Russian,” and his or her views are frequently dismissed as nothing but pale copies of Byron, Stirner, or Nietzsche.

12. For a more detailed analysis of Russian attitudes toward human person, as articulated in the polemics between Westernizers and Slavophiles, see Ivanov-Razumnik (1911), as well as Walicki (1989).

13. The source of Slavophile doctrines might be the Russian religious and cultural tradition itself, as they themselves claimed, or the writings of German conservative Romantics, as suggested by various scholars, including Walicki (1989, 160-78), or it might be a combination of both. But even if the Slavophiles themselves were not at the origin of the Russian fears of separation and individualism, they dressed these fears in contemporary religious and philosophical terminology, and therefore left a lasting legacy on Russian cultural attitudes. Khomiakov (1994), for example, insisted on the impossibility of individual salvation: “nobody can be saved alone. The one who is saved, saves himself within the church, in unity with other members of the church” (15). He thus foreshadowed many other utopian dreams of communal salvation, be it Solov'ev's fascination with vseedinstvo (all-unity), or Fedorov's idea of the “common task” for all of the humanity, or Bolshevik insistence on the need for world revolution in order to achieve the ideal communist society. The results of the Slavophiles' powerful rhetoric can be seen in the Russian tendency to adorn words by adding the root “all” (vse) to them: (vseobshchii, vsemirnyi, vsestoronnii, vsenarodnyi, vseob'emliushchii), which is quite opposite to, say, English, where the tendency is to coin words with the root “self”: the self, self-reliance, self-help. That such words are notoriously difficult to translate into other languages is quite revealing of the respective cultural attitudes.

14. Confirming Dumont's observation, Walicki (1989) points to certain similarities between the Slavophile dichotomy of a group of individuals versus the Orthodox unity of believers (sobornost') and a similar opposition of Gemeinschaft (community) versus Gesellschaft (society, collective) found in the work of a German sociologist, Ferdinand Tonnies (168-78). I suggest, however, that these oppositions should be considered within an even wider context of what I would call the Romanticist revival of antinominalism; that is, an attempt on the part of the “holist” ideology to multiply and posit the existence of mysterious entities, far beyond necessity, thereby ignoring a still very useful intellectual tool known to philosophy: Occam's razor.

    It is this Romanticist project that lies behind the creation of mysterious entities, such as “narod” (folk) imposed upon that of the nation, or sobornost' imposed upon that of a group. Later it will find expression in the opposition between the concepts of “individ” (individual) and “lichnost” (person, personality).

    This antinominalist impulse is nourished and supported by the doctrines of theology (such as Trinitarian and Christological doctrines, or the view of the Church as the mystical Body of Christ). Kantorowicz (1957) explores how the doctrine of the dual nature of Christ found its way into the very elaborate political and legal doctrine of the King's Two Bodies. Western political thought had obviously moved far beyond its medieval roots, so it is now very reluctant to apply theological doctrines to the legal or political spheres. Russian political and social thought, however, preserved many of the medieval features.

    The medieval dimension of Russian thought was made particularly visible by the Slavophiles in their striving for holistic knowledge and their refusal to see the religious, political, social, and private spheres as truly separate. It is thus hardly surprising that the admirer of Slavophile thought I. A. Essaulov proudly insists that the medieval Russian text “The Sermon on Law and Grace” with its rejection of legalism in favor of love and grace already contains all the components of the Slavophile doctrine (1995, 28-33). Likewise, in his 1914 study of Dostoevsky, Viacheslav Ivanov (1994) utilizes the concept of sobornost' to describe the status of an individual during the Middle Ages, while connecting the Renaissance with the disintegration of this divine harmony:

    During the Middle Ages the human person (lichnost') experienced itself as but a link in the hierarchy of sobornost'-like subordination (sobornoe sopodchinenie) to a common structure, which was presumed to reflect the hierarchical harmony of the Divine world. During the Renaissance, it [the person] tore itself away from this heavenly and earthly harmony, and felt itself as alienated, and, in this haughty alienation, as self-reliant and self-centered.

    (284)

    Russian fascination with the Middle Ages, that is, with the period of preindividualist, holistic existence, can also be seen in Nikolai Berdiaev, who, in his 1924 essay “New Middle Ages,” called for the establishment of the new (“irrational and trans-national”) cultural paradigm modeled on the Middle Ages (1990, 3-35).

15. Andreevich (1905) approaches Russian literature specifically from the perspective of the “idea of individuality” (ideia lichnosti) and claims that throughout the nineteenth century the general attitude of Russian writers toward individuality and its freedom was that of hostility and suspicion.

16. Former and present literary figures, both in Russia and the West, might complain of the burdens and dangers of an overdeveloped ego, yet the historians and philosophers of the twentieth century are confronted by a more terrifying phenomenon: “the revolt of the masses” (Ortega y Gasset 1968). It is precisely the masses of nonindividualized people lacking ideologies or values of their own who create and support the terrible regimes responsible for endless destruction of human life.

All citations in Russian come from Lermontov (1984). Volume and page references appear in the text. All quotations from A Hero of Our Time are taken from Nabokov (1988, vol. 6). Page references appear in the text. Prose citations from Russian are given only in translation. Except where noted, all translations are my own. When I quote from a multivolume edition of a Russian author, the volume and page references appear in the text. For complete authors' names, titles, and publication data on works cited, see the Selected Bibliography.

Selected Bibliography

Andreevich (E. A. Solov'ev). 1905. Opyt filosofii russkoi literatury. Saint Petersburg.

Belinsky, V. G. 1978. Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh. Moscow.

Berdiaev, Nikolai. 1939. O rabstve i svobode cheloveka. Paris: YMCA Press.

———. 1990. Novoe srednevekov'e. Moscow.

Berlin, Isaiah. 1979. “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” In Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, with an Introduction by Aileen Kelly, 22-82. New York: Penguin Books.

———. 1991. “De Maistre and the Rise of Modern Fascism.” In The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. New York: Knopf.

Edwards, David. 1977. “Count Joseph Marie de Maistre and Russian Educational Policy, 1803-1828.” Slavic Review 36:54-76.

Essaulov, I. A. 1995. Kategoria sobornosti v russkoi literature. Petrozavodsk.

Frank, Joseph. 1986. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Golstein, Vladimir. 1997. “Landowners in Dead Souls; or, The Tale of How Gogol Blessed What He Wanted to Curse.” Slavic and East European Journal 41-42:243-57.

Gurevich, A. Ia., ed. 1990a. Chelovek i kul'tura. Individual'nost' v istorii kul'tury. Moscow.

———. 1990b. Odyssei. Chelovek v istorii. Moscow.

Gurevich, P. S., comp. 1995. Chelovek. Moscow.

Ivanov, Viacheslav. 1994. Rodnoe i vselenskoe. Moscow.

Ivanov-Razumnik (R. V. Ivanov). 1911. Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli. Individualism i meshchanstvo i russkoi literature i zhizni XIX v. Vol. 1. Saint Petersburg.

Kantor, Vladimir. 1994. V poiskakh lichnosti. Opyt russkoi klassiki. Moscow.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King's Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Khomiakov, A. S. 1994. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 2, Raboty po bogosloviiu. Moscow.

Lermontov, Mikhail. 1954-57. Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Moscow.

———. 1984. Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Edited by I. Andronnikov. Moscow.

———. 1988. A Hero of Our Time. Translated by Vladimir Nabokov, in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis.

Lossky, Vladimir. 1976. In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.

———. 1985. The Mystical Theology of Eastern Christianity. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.

Lukes, Steven. 1973. Individualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Malia, Martin. 1961. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Nabokov, Vladimir. 1988. “Translator's Foreword.” In A Hero of Our Time, by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Vladimir Nabokov, in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov, v-xix. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis.

Obolonsky, Aleksandr. 1994. The Drama of Russian Political Thought: The System Against the Individual. Moscow.

Ortega y Gasset, José. 1968. “The Self and the Other.” In The Dehumanization of Art, and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature, 175-204. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stepanov, M. 1937. “Zhozef De Mestr v Rossii.” In Literaturnoe nasledsvo, 29-30:577-726. Moscow.

Thorslev, Peter L. 1962. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Walicki, Andrzej 1989. The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Watt, Ian. 1996. Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.