unified by the presence of Grigory Pechorin. A “superfluous man” in the tradition of François-René de Chateaubriand’s René and Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, Pechorin goes beyond them in his moral rebellion, defying ethical standards and looking for his own truth. His life has no purpose or goal. By using multiple narrators and points of view and Pechorin’s own diary records, Lermontov maintains an objective stance while he leads the reader to a penetration of Pechorin’s character. The novel is both semiautobiographical and a psychological portrait of an age. Pechorin, the child of his century, as Vissarion Belinsky described him, represents the social and political dissatisfaction of the 1840’s with the conditions under Nicholas I.

Lermontov’s prose and poetry are included in the five-volume Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (1935-1937) in Russian. English editions include: The Demon and Other Poems (1965), Selected Works (1976), and several editions of A Hero of Our Time, of which one of the best is Vladimir Nabokov’s edition.

Best known for his lyric and narrative poetry, especially The Demon and “The Novice,” and for the only Russian Romantic novel, A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov was nevertheless one of the few dramatic writers in Russia before Anton Chekhov. A child prodigy, he produced an extraordinary literary output before his death at the young age of twenty-six. He wrote all of his dramatic works before the age of twenty-two; he wrote most of them at age sixteen. Although generally considered as products of his youth, and not his mature literary output after 1837, Lermontov’s plays are among the few examples of Romantic drama in Russia. This is especially important because in the 1830’s there were practically no models for the theater in Russian. The only important dramas, Alexander Griboyedov’s Gore ot uma (wr. 1824, uncensored pr. 1831, censored pb. 1833, uncensored pb. 1861; The Mischief of Being Clever, 1857) and Nikolai Gogol’s Revizor (pr., pb. 1836; The Inspector General, 1890), were written after Lermontov’s first plays.

Lermontov, however, grew up with a love for the theater. His maternal grandmother had presented plays in her home, the most notable being William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601) on the occasion of her husband’s suicide. As a child, Lermontov made wax marionettes and composed plays for them. While at the University of Moscow, the center of the theater in the 1820’s and 1830’s, he attended many theatrical performances. He was especially interested in Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, and the German Sturm und Drang became a major influence in his short dramatic career.

Because none of Lermontov’s plays was presented or even published during his lifetime, they cannot be said to have influenced nineteenth century Russian drama. They are, however, valuable to the Lermontov scholar for the important autobiographical insights that they provide. They deal especially with the conflict between his grandmother and his father over his custody and with betrayed, lost, or impossible love. Soviet scholars point to the social implications of his works, noting his hatred of serfdom and his love of freedom, as evidenced by Gromova’s iron hand in Menschen und Leidenschaften and the plea of the serfs in A Strange One.

An ardent member of St. Petersburg high society, Lermontov both longed for social acceptance and despised the empty aristocratic manners of his time. In the tradition of Molière, whom he knew and appreciated, he attacks the St. Petersburg nobility in a series of portraits reminiscent of the French comedian. His contempt is especially evident in Masquerade, which Lermontov had projected as his most successful play, and which he hoped to see on the St. Petersburg stage. Disappointed at the refusal of the censors, he abandoned the theater and turned to lyric and prose works. This apprenticeship with five plays, however, served to sharpen his literary talent, to indicate the value of Romanticism, and to point the way to realism, the true manifestation of Russian literary greatness in the nineteenth century.

Mikhail Lermontov (LYAYR-muhn-tuhf) is as well known for his poetry as for his prose writings. In his homeland, his lyric verse andnarrative poems enjoy continuous publication and are liberally included in the educational curricula. Abroad, his poetic renown is less well established. English translations of his verse are available in The Demon, and Other Poems (1965), in Michael Lermontov: Biography and Translation (1967), in Mikhail Lermontov: Major Poetical Works (1983), and in anthologies. Lermontov also tried his hand at drama. Maskarad (pb. 1842; Masquerade, 1973) is still occasionally performed in Russia as well as in other nations, as is Dva brata (pb. 1880; Two Brothers, 1933). Lermontov’s collected works, Sochtsnentsya M. Ya. Lermontova (1889-1891), first issued in six volumes, remained in print in Russia for more than a century.

Mikhail Lermontov is still one of the most popular Russian writers, joined in this respect by Alexander Pushkin. His talent and unusual circumstances catapulted him to instant fame despite his brief creative span. He continues to capture the public’s imagination, undimmed by revolutionary upheaval and changing cultural values. The acclaim is not undeserved. With A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov made the difficult shift from verse to prose that had eluded his predecessors. Pushkin recognized the novel as Russia’s undeveloped genre but cast his own novel Evgeny Onegin (1825-1832, 1833; Eugene Onegin, 1881) in verse, in frustrating admission that accomplished lengthy fictional prose was beyond his reach. Lermontov, too, was already an accomplished poet when he made the transition successfully, thereby giving to Russian literature its first aesthetically credible novel. Lermontov is also considered the greatest Russian Romantic, a Slavic Lord Byron, Childe Harold in a Russian cloak.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian literature still drew heavily on foreign models. Pushkin had adopted France’s strict neoclassical verse form for his works, carefully avoiding emotional and diffuse outpourings. Lermontov, by nature a Romantic, imported Byron’s Romantic style and content and grafted them artfully into Russian verse and prose. His characters contemptuously reject civilization to seek contemplation and noble savages in the wild region of the Caucasus; they turn melancholy, seek nature, become alienated, die young, and, in general, possess all the major qualities of the Western Romantic hero.

Lermontov’s career was exemplary in another sense as well. The participation of many writers in the 1825 Decembrist uprising induced Czar Nicholas I to muzzle liberal sentiments as strongly in literature as elsewhere, and Lermontov’s forceful poems, boldly bypassing the censors, marked him as a courageous defender of a less repressive way of life, a proponent of reform, at a time when such defenders were scarce because of swift retribution. Lermontov himself paid the price through several incarcerations and exiles. In the late 1830’s, when continuing repression cast a gloom over Russia’s creative mood, Lermontov again caught the zeitgeist by mirroring the doubts, despair, and resignation in his work.

As general withdrawal from public endeavors directed writers to private affairs, Lermontov created a new “hero of the time” in the character Pechorin, showing how frustrated and wasted creative energies wreak havoc on the psychological development of the intelligent individual. Lermontov’s own frustrations served his literary development well. He presented Russian readers with the first hero whose nature is minutely analyzed. Not only psychological introspection but also a psychically ruinous unwillingness to correct moral defects characterizes the Lermontov hero. Whereas previous authors had passed some measure of judgment on ethical offenders, Lermontov coolly showed that destructive malice is as credible an authorial point of view as virtuous aspiration. The czar furiously denounced Pechorin’s misanthropic stance and impure actions, refusing to acknowledge that such dark probings of the mind had a right to fictional existence. Lermontov, thus, fought a brief but fierce and successful battle to broaden Russian literary expression.

In addition to his position as one of the foremost Russian poets of the nineteenth century, Mikhail Lermontov (LYAYR-muhn-tuhf) holds the distinction of producing what many consider to be the first major novel in Russia, Geroy nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Time, 1854). The state of Russian prose during the 1820’s and 1830’s was far from satisfactory. Although several writers had tried their hands at historical novels in the 1820’s, writers in the 1830’s were still wrestling with such basic matters as narrative structure and a suitable literary language for the larger forms of prose fiction. Lermontov himself had begun two novels in the 1830’s—a historical novel, Vadim (1935-1937; English translation, 1984), and a novel of St. Petersburg life, Knyaginya Ligovskaya (1935-1937; Princess Ligovskaya, 1965)—but he never completed them. In A Hero of Our Time, he solved the problems of structure and point of view by turning to the current fashion for combining a series of discrete short stories in a single cycle and taking it a step further. A Hero of Our Time consists of five tales linked by the figure of the central protagonist, Grigory Pechorin. Lermontov uses the device of multiple narrators and points of view to bring his readers ever closer to this hero, first providing secondhand accounts of the man and then concluding with an intimate psychological portrait arising from Pechorin’s own diary records, all the while maintaining his own authorial objectivity. The figure of Pechorin himself, a willful yet jaded egoist, made a strong impact on the reading public, and the Pechorin type had many successors in Russian literature.

Lermontov also wrote several plays, beginning with Ispantsy (pb. 1935; the Spaniards) and Menschen und Leidenschaften (pb. 1935; people and passions), which were inspired by the Storm and Stress period of Friedrich Schiller’s career, and concluding with Maskarad (pb. 1842; Masquerade, 1973), a drama exposing the vanity of St. Petersburg society. Lermontov is most remembered, however, for his prose and poetry.

In poetry, Mikhail Lermontov stands out as a Romantic writer par excellence. Influenced in his youth by such writers as Schiller and Lord Byron, he transformed Russian verse into a medium of frank lyric confession. The reserved and often abstract figure of the poet found in earlier Russian poetry gave way to a pronounced and assertive lyric ego in Lermontov’s work, and Lermontov’s readers were struck by the emotional intensity of his verse. Striving to express his personal feelings as forcefully as possible, Lermontov developed a charged verse style unmistakably his own. Although he seldom invented startling new poetic images, he often combined familiar images in sequences that dazzled his readers, and he used repetition, antithesis, and parallelism to create pithy and impressive verse formulations. Lermontov’s poetic vision and his unabashed approach to the expression of his emotions had a considerable effect on subsequent Russian writers, from Nikolay Nekrasov in the next generation to Aleksandr Blok and Boris Pasternak in the twentieth century.

Iconoclastic in his approach to genre as well, Lermontov completed a trend already apparent in Russian poetry of the 1820’s—the dismantling of the strict system of genre distinctions created during the era of classicism in Russian literature. Lermontov drew on disparate elements from various genres—the elegy, ode, ballad, and romance—and forged from them new verse forms suitable for his own expressive needs. The poet also showed a willingness to experiment with diverse meters and rhythms, and he employed ternary meters, primarily dactyls and amphibrachs, to an extent not seen previously in Russian poetry. Lermontov’s exploration of such meters would later be continued by writers such as Nekrasov.

Although Lermontov’s career was exceptionally brief, his accomplishments were extensive. He is justly considered to be, along with Alexander Pushkin, one of the two most important Russian poets of the nineteenth century. He left a rich legacy for future generations of Russian poets. Having moved past the poetic practices of Pushkin and his contemporaries, Lermontov forged a new style for the expression of the poet’s emotions, a style both rugged and pliant, charged and evocative. His bold assertiveness as a poet and his skilled handling of rhythm and meter found an echo in the work of several generations of later writers. These achievements have earned Lermontov the right to one of the foremost places in the pantheon of Russian poets.

What conditions of Russian life in the 1830’s forestalled the appearance of major Russian Romantics other than Mikhail Lermontov?

Compare Pechorin of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time with Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as “superfluous men.”

What works of Lord Byron seem to have impressed Lermontov most?

From Lermontov’s descriptions, compose a short account of the Caucasus.

Lermontov lived less than twenty-seven years. What deficiencies of his work would he most likely have overcome had he lived longer?