A Hero of Our Time

Introduction

Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin is a hero without a cause—to pervert a latter-day aphorism. He is a cynical young man who fights duels, seduces maidens, hunts wild boar, and stirs up trouble. He will tell you this himself: “I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: why have I lived? For what purpose was I born?… There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul… But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the bait of passions, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life…”

His questions are as relevant today as ever, but Pechorin’s story takes place in the 1830s. Nicholas the First was on the throne, despised by the Russian intelligentsia for his repression of discourse. He had crushed the Decembrist revolt, which had attempted to prevent his ascendancy to the throne. In his book on Russian literature, Maurice Baring describes Nicholas the First’s rule as “a regime of patriarchal supervision, government interference, rigorous censorship, and iron discipline.” The decade was a time of constraints, when young men like Pechorin felt stifled and ineffectual.

Lermontov’s hero is serving in the army, based in the Caucasus, where Russian forces are attempting to subdue its mountain tribes. This mountainous region to the south of Russia today encompasses lands such as Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, and Dagestan. National boundaries have changed over time, but one cannot underestimate the metaphysical place that the Caucasian landscape fills in the Russian consciousness: it is the landscape “where in the mountains martial robbery occurs and the savage genius of inspiration is hiding in the mute silence” (Pushkin, The Prisoner of the Caucasus). Lermontov is often called the “poet of the Caucasus” and it is no surprise, given his descriptions of the terrain: “What a glorious place…! On every side there are unassailable mountains, and reddish promontories, hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of plane trees; there are yellow precipices, covered with the lines of gullies; and right up high: a gold fringe of snow.”

Picture these mountains where dzhigits, skilled horsemen, twirl their steeds on jagged promontories; where abreks, Caucasian freedom fighters, roam the hills in hordes, adhering to nothing but their own moral code; where the chimneys of saklyas, mountain huts, send up smoke, visible to travelers from across vast valleys. The Caucasus was home to some of the fiercest Cossacks, who fought with the Russians in their efforts to conquer the mountain regions. They were also assisted by so-called peaceable princes (tribal leaders who cooperated with Russian forces). If a soldier was fortunate, he might become a kunak of such a peaceable prince—a sworn friend, an adopted brother, on whom great generosity was bestowed. Both the ethnic groups and the languages of the Caucasus are many and varied. These mountains are home to Georgians, Lezghians, Ossetians, Circassians, and Chechens, among others. According to an anecdote told by Edmund Spencer in his Travels in Circassia, Krim Tartary, Etcetera of 1837, when a Turkish sultan sent a learned man to discover the languages of the Caucasus, he returned with just a bag of pebbles. When the sultan asked the man to present his findings, the man shook the bag of pebbles—it was the best imitation he could conjure, having failed in the hopeless task of learning anything of them. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky remarked in 1841: “It is a strange business! It is as if the Caucasus is destined to be the cradle of our poetic talents, to be the inspirer and bear-cub of their muse, the poetic motherland!”[1]

While its setting may be very exotic and remote, the historical position of A Hero of Our Time places it right in the thick of things literary. It is a pivotal book that sits on the cusp between Romanticism and Realism, at a moment when Russian literature was forging its path from poetry to the novel. Until 1840, Russian writers had merely flirted with the novel. As the Russian literary critic Boris Eikhenbaum wrote, “Lermontov died early, but this fact bears no relation to the historical work which he accomplished, and changes nothing in the resolution of the literary-historical problem which interests us. It was necessary to sum up the classical period of Russian poetry and to prepare the transition to the creation of a new prose. History demanded it—and it was accomplished by Lermontov.”[2] Pushkin had just died after producing short stories and his famous novel-in-verse, Eugene Onegin, and Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy had yet to emerge. Gogol was writing prose but had produced only short stories until this point. With his book, the young Lermontov, only twenty-six when he wrote A Hero of Our Time, called the Russian novel into being.

As a writer, Lermontov is said to have been influenced by the works of Byron, Chateaubriand, Constant, and, of course, Pushkin. The novel with which A Hero of Our Time is often compared is Alfred de Musset’s La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle for their similar titles and descriptions of moral malaise. In turn, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy were each influenced by Lermontov—his metaphysics, his ironic stances, and his descriptions of the Caucasus. But, as scholar John Garrard explains in his essay “Old Wine in New Bottles: The Legacy of Lermontov,” A Hero of Our Time occupies a special place in the development of Russian literature:

As a piece of social commentary, A Hero of Our Time created quite a stir when it emerged, immediately garnering both praise and criticism. It came out at a time when the debate between Slavophiles and Westerners about Russian cultural identity was coming to a crescendo. Slavophile critics such as S. P. Shevyrev and Apollon Grigoriev complained that Pechorin represented the vices of the West, not of Russia. Belinsky, on the other hand, defended the work’s validity as a portrait of a Russian type by placing it as descendant from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

Indeed, as Vladimir Nabokov describes in a piece called “The Lermontov Mirage” (The Russian Review, November 1941), Pechorin and Onegin may be cut from the same cloth—but fashions have changed in Lermontov’s hands:

Indeed, A Hero of Our Time is a much greater step toward the Russian novel as we know it largely because it is an effort in prose, which adjusts narrative perspectives from poetical practices. In broad terms, traditional prose lends more dimension to a character than traditional poetry. John Stuart Mill wrote that “all poetry is of the nature of soliloquy,” that when we read poetry we are somehow overhearing the poet, who is addressing himself. Epic poems and novels in verse belong more to the category of sung stories, where the narration is delivered from the poet or bard to his audience. Novels, on the other hand, expand the notions of narration by exploring perspectives. The poem requires you to suspend disbelief—you must agree to its terms. A novel is an act of persuasion of the reader—it seduces a reader into believing it. As the Russian literary canon goes, you could say Onegin is the ready, Pechorin is the aim, and the rest are the fire.

Much has been made of the narrative structure of this novel—which has three narrators in total. The story emerges over the course of various episodes that aren’t chronologically ordered. In fact, originally the novel wasn’t written as one singular work. Lermontov published most of these various episodes separately in journals such as “Notes of the Fatherland” in 1839 and early 1840. He put it all together for publication in 1841. As he did so, one can only assume that he had the liberty to rearrange the text as he saw fit, to sew it into a chronological narrative. But Lermontov chose to leave it in its prismatic, nonlinear, patchwork form. It is a portrait of a man, not a simple tale per se. Most nineteenth-century novelists in the European and later the Russian tradition gave us their characters chronologically intact, showing us their development over the course of time. This is not the case in A Hero of Our Time. If they were delivered in sequential order, the stories would read, “Taman,” “Princess Mary,” “Bela,” “The Fatalist,” “Maxim Maximych,” and, finally, the Foreword to Pechorin’s diary. In fact, if you’re looking for the ending, it appears as a mere comment on page 55, at the beginning of the Foreword to Pechorin’s Journal. But that’s irrelevant—you can’t ruin the ending of this book. The book is a portrait, told as a page-turning adventure story, a psychological look at a young man who exemplified the frustrating quandary of his type. Pechorin is a literary prototype of the “superfluous man” of Russian literature; he is another version of the Byronic antihero; and he is an early model of what would later become a nihilist.

A Hero of Our Time gives us Pechorin delivered from a few different angles, but there is nothing static about this depiction. The hero himself doesn’t evolve exactly, but during the progress of the novel Lermontov brings the reader ever closer to its hero. The first narrator listens to Maxim Maximych, a staff captain posted alongside Pechorin, who describes at length his experiences with our hero. Then this narrator, together with Maxim Maximych, encounters Pechorin himself. And finally, we are given Pechorin’s journal—an episode in a dark corner of Russia near the Sea of Azov and an episode that occurs in a pocket of high society in the Russian spa town of Pyatigorsk—all from the horse’s mouth. Lermontov doesn’t sacrifice any suspense with this structure but rather gives us his hero in ever-closer increments and builds delightful anticipation in so doing.

As C. J. G. Turner writes, “The absence of the author, in the sense of a guiding point of view, is a fundamental—and distinctly modern—feature of A Hero of Our Time. Instead, the values of the text are nicely balanced, leaving the reader free to be primarily repelled by the immorality of Pechorin, or fascinated by his personality…” There are two inroads for the reader into Pechorin’s character—the first is this narrative movement, which becomes increasingly intimate, culminating in Pechorin’s diary. The second is through the perceptions of the characters surrounding Pechorin. Each begins with admiration for him and eventually feels betrayed. Maxim Maximych describes him as “a wonderful fellow, I dare say,” only to feel snubbed by him afterward. Grushnitsky is his friend, and later his adversary. Princess Mary falls in love with him, and sheds many tears as time goes on. Meanwhile, his journals show a sense of poetry, evidence of higher education, and a love of nature. He is self-reflective and sometimes contrite. In a review in 1840, Belinsky wrote that, “In his very vices, a certain greatness shines through, like lightning through black storm-clouds, and he is beautiful and full of poetry, even at those moments when our human feeling is roused against him…”[4] A simple reading has the reader looking for redemption in Pechorin but experiencing a cycle of hopes and disappointments along the way. Some adore his roguishness and derring-do. Others find him repellent and exhausting.

In the preface to Pechorin’s diaries, which is written by the book’s first narrator, a nameless travel writer, we are given the contradiction of the work: “Perhaps several readers will want to know my opinion of Pechorin’s character? My reply is the title of this book. ‘What vicious irony!’ they will say. I don’t know.” A lot has been written about the ironic content of A Hero of Our Time. Pechorin’s remarks are often ironic and indeed sarcastic. The title might be both of these. The reader is constantly invited to reject a literal interpretation of the text. But the beauty of this fiction, and all fiction, is that literal and ironic readings can coexist. Things seem to be one thing and turn out to be another—a novel is a long and nuanced answer to a question. As Roland Barthes wrote, “the essence of writing is to prevent any reply to the question—who is speaking?”[5] And in the author’s preface, which was added to the second edition of the book, Lermontov does warn against simplemindedness when considering his book with a swipe at Russian readers: “Our audience is still so young and simple-hearted, it wouldn’t recognize a fable if there weren’t a moral at the end of the story. It doesn’t anticipate jokes, it doesn’t have a feel for irony; it is simply badly educated. It doesn’t yet know that overt abuse has neither a place in proper society, nor in a proper book; that the contemporary intellect has devised sharper weapons, almost invisible, but nonetheless deathly, which, under the clothing of flattery, deliver an irresistible and decisive blow.”

What is abundantly clear is that, irony or no irony, the tsar wasn’t pleased with either the hero or the “hero.” When A Hero of Our Time was published, the tsar famously disparaged the work in a letter to his wife, dated June 1840:

In addition to the tsar’s disdain, Lermontov’s hero—given a character of such terrific vices and virtues—received a mixed but vigorous reception by reading audiences when it emerged in 1840. And Pechorin’s personage is so clearly wrought that, it seems, the public and various critics jumped to the conclusion that the book was largely autobiographical. Indeed, Lermontov had also spent time in the military in the Caucasus, and, given his poems, was also subject to the cynical inclinations of his generation. In his poem “Meditation” of 1838, he writes, “I look upon our generation with sorrow! Its future is either empty or dark… And life already tires us, like flat path that leads nowhere…” Lermontov was not so terribly different from his hero in life experience and outlook, but he was resistant to such a facile reading of the book and writes in his preface, “Not long ago, several readers, and some journals even, succumbed to the misfortune of believing in the literal meanings of the words in this book. Some were awfully offended, in all seriousness, at the fact that they were presented with such an unprincipled person as the ‘hero of our time’; indeed, others very shrewdly observed that the author had painted his own portrait and the portraits of his acquaintances… That sorry, old ruse!”

Such defenses on the part of Lermontov need not concern us too much nearly two hundred years later. Indeed, that they both served in the Caucasus, and that they both fought in duels gives them much in common. For Pechorin, duels and Russian roulette bring about questions that are central to the book, and indeed central to life: “Is there such thing as predestination?… And if there is definitely such thing as predestination—why were we given free will, and reason? Why should we atone for our actions?” In this book, and in real life, the duel is a manifestation of such questions. And of course, duels were meant to be the stuff of honor and heroics, and yet so many duels in Russia at the time were fought over petty disagreements—if not out of sheer boredom. More heroes doing unheroic things in an age of cynicism. Smaller ironies among one great big one: we lead our lives as though we have choice in our actions and responsibility for these actions, but is “the fate of a man written in the sky” (as Pechorin and his friends discuss in “The Fatalist”)?

What is eerie is that not only did Pechorin and Lermontov share experiences and a troubled sense of purpose, but there is a duel scene in A Hero of Our Time that almost perfectly describes Lermontov’s own death a year or so after the novel emerged. Prince Alexander Vasilchikov, eyewitness to this fateful duel on July 15, 1841, between Lermontov and his opponent Martynov, whom Lermontov had apparently insulted, described the scene of the poet’s death thus:

This gives new meaning to composer Balakirev’s suggestion that Russians travel to the Caucasus to “breathe in Lermontov.”

Lermontov’s life was short but reads like Romantic literature. He was unlucky in life and in love. He was born in Moscow in 1814 and grew up in the province of Penza with his grandmother. His mother had died three years after his birth and his grandmother, by all accounts, was overprotective and possessive of him. He was a shy and idealistic youth and when he was sickly as a child, his grandmother took him to the Caucasus to improve his health. This would be Lermontov’s first exposure to the land he so admired.

At fourteen years of age he moved with his grandmother to Moscow and attended Moscow University Pension for the Nobility and went on to study for a few more years at the university. Afterward he entered the St. Petersburg’s Guards’ School and graduated in 1834. Meanwhile, Lermontov suffered many disappointments, including the death of his father, from whom he had become estranged thanks to his grandmother. His poem “The Terrible Fate of Father and Son” describes the poet’s feelings about this event. The young Lermontov’s love affairs were also plagued by disappointments. The central object of his affections was named Varavara Lopukhina, who is said to have been “pleasant, clever, bright as the day and ravishing.” Lermontov wrote poems to her and made drawings of her but she would marry someone else. Writer and literary historian Janko Lavrin describes Lermontov in particularly vivid tones: “His need of love, ‘romantic’ and otherwise, was unusually intense. But so were his disappointments… Lermontov swallowed his hurt pride; and touchy as he was he never forgave nor forgot… Lermontov was thus compelled to develop at an early age a cold and flippantly ironical attitude toward women simply as a safeguard…”

But to dismiss Lermontov as a romantic poseur in melodramatic episodes is unfair, and his biographer Laurence Kelly writes that the young writer “[I]n heart-searching letters… confessed to a melancholy that was more than a fashionably romantic pose. Behind the masque of social gaiety there was a young man still in his teens, perplexed and unsure, ‘unfit for society,’ ‘seeking impressions, any impressions,’ tortured by the secret consciousness that ‘I shall end life as a contemptible person…’”[8]

Until the mid-1830s, Lermontov’s poetry addresses his personal concerns—loneliness, love, the loss of his parents—but he would soon turn to larger themes, both social and political. After leaving cadet school, he lived in St. Petersburg for a few years, and in 1837 he wrote the poem “Death of a Poet,” which charged the imperial court with mistreating Pushkin and causing his death. It was then that he was arrested, demoted, and sent to the Caucasus to serve with Russian forces in their struggles against the mountain tribes.

“Death of a Poet” marks the start of a most productive period in Lermontov’s career as a writer. Between 1837 and 1840, while Lermontov alternated between stints in St. Petersburg and the Caucasus mountains, he wrote The Demon, The Novice, and A Hero of Our Time, as well as many poems. After his second Caucasian posting, he returned and asked for permission to leave the army to devote himself to his writing. He was denied. In 1841, he was sent again to the Caucasus, where he died in the duel with Martynov. Upon Lermontov’s death, Tsar Nicholas the First is purported to have reacted by saying: “a dog’s death for a dog.” Such were the times for this literary hero.

Translating Lermontov requires a linguistic zoom lens—while working closely one must regularly pull back to see a larger picture of words. The beauty of his work lies at the level of the sentence and the paragraph. Lermontov is not a writer whose words are so carefully chosen that the translator must agonize to get each syllable pitch-perfect. But faced with the task of translating A Hero of Our Time, I did so anyway, out of a sense of fidelity. I followed his every clause carefully, keen to avoid assumptions that can be so easily made in working with writing of a Romantic bent. But most of all, this close reading makes for magic in a translation—in focusing on the building blocks of a text, piling words on top of each other just so, something emerges, an essence that the translator hasn’t forced. As Maurice Baring wrote in 1914: “[W]hen you read Pushkin, you think: ‘How perfectly and how simply that is said! How in the world did he do it?’ You admire the ‘magic hand of chance.’ In reading Lermontov at his simplest and best, you do not think about the style at all, you simply respond to what is said, and the style escapes notice in its absolute appropriateness.”

Lermontov wasn’t a master stylist, he was a master story-teller. That’s not to say that the quality of the prose is lacking but that his writing is very fluent—not meant to be paused over for any great length of time. A reader needn’t look for surprising combinations of words. Lermontov’s language is constantly moving—a motion that becomes clear to a translator only upon achieving enough pace to feel the momentum of his writing. As Eikhenbaum wrote: “A Hero of Our Time looks like the first ‘light’ book; a book in which formal problems are concealed beneath careful motivation and which, therefore, was able to create the illusion of ‘naturalness’ and to arouse an interest in pure reading.”[9] The naturalness to which he refers is a very true characterization of Lermontov’s writing—the author strived to avoid archaic turns of phrase, and easily captures the voices of the various personages. This is the translator’s challenge here: to preserve his nineteenth-century idiom but to avoid anything that seems obsolete to a contemporary reader; to capture the various voices in the novel without too many cultural contortions; to match his rhythms, from paragraph to paragraph; and, above all, to disappear so that the reader may swiftly move through the book and its mountain story. Yes, he tends to repeat words and phrases in this book, and yes, he seems to have a very simplistic palette when it comes to describing colors, and yes, the sun appears from behind cold, snowy, or dark-blue peaks many times over the course of the novel. But his is a feat of narrative, a romping story about a dislikable man who captures your whole attention with his manifold contradictions.