Russian literature. A short introduction

the city-dweller, from tribal culture as represented by local settlers, rather than local settlers from tribal culture), other texts called the very existence of such a boundary into question. The most original and touching character in Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time is not the splenetic Pechorin, a close descendant of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, but the inarticulate and intellectually commonplace Maksim Maksimych, a low-ranking army officer whose knowledge of local conditions has given him not only a brusque intolerance of ‘lazy natives’, but also an exquisitely tactful sensitivity to local beliefs. On the death of Pechorin’s short-term Circassian mistress Bela, it is Maksim Maksimych who not only makes the practical arrangements for the burial, but who offers a moving epitaph to Bela herself:

We buried her behind the fortress, by a stream and near the place where she was sitting that last time. Now the bushes have grown up round her grave, white acacia and elder. I wanted to put a cross up, but, well, you know, I felt a bit uncomfortable about it; after all, she wasn’t a Christian . . .

There is a grating contrast between this passage and Pechorin’s formulaically cynical verdict on Bela when he has tired of her: ‘The love of a female savage is scarcely more appealing than that of a young lady of high society: the ignorance and simplicity of the one grow as boring as the coquetry of the other.’ Even Pechorin’s response to Bela’s death is stereotypical: in the words of Maksim Maksimych, ‘He raised his head and laughed . . . That laugh raised goosepimples all over me.’ For all Pechorin’s tribal play-acting, he remains as distant from the spirit of the mountains and from that of their inhabitants as does the dilettante ‘travel writer’ narrator who discovers Pechorin’s journals and decides to make a literary sensation by publishing these, and who provides the second layer of commentary in Lermontov’s multi-perspective novel.

Lermontov’s novel, then, juxtaposed the Romantic dandy’s pose of assimilation with the mundane man of action’s respect for difference,