The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

110 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

wilderness, rips out his tongue, installs the forked tongue of a wise serpent in its place, tears out his heart and replaces it with a smoldering coal. Then the voice of God instructs the benumbed man to “Rise, and see, and hear, / Be filled with My will, / and traversing land and sea, / Set fire to the hearts of men with your Word.” In 1841, the year of his death, Lermontov wrote his own “Prophet,” also in iambic tetrameter, picking up where Pushkin’s vision had left off and most likely a disillusioned response to it. Lermontov’s prophet peers into the eyes of people and sees nothing there but “malice and vice.” His neighbors and closest relatives cast stones at him; he wanders the desert like a beggar, proclaiming his truths to the silent planets and stars. Back in town, he becomes a pathetic spectacle: elders point him out to their children with a smug smile. “Look at him: . . . The stupid fellow, wanted to persuade us / That God was speaking through his lips!”

Both prophets suffer, physically and spiritually. Both are outcasts. But for Pushkin, the public is a more transitory thing. His focus remains on the sacred mission of the Word, prophetic or poetic, indifferent to the vanities of the present audience – just as, in Mozart and Salieri, Mozart’s focus remains on the mission of the “chosen few” in Music. No slander or poisoning can obstruct that reality. The prophet in Lermontov’s poem allows his jeering detractors to define the duel between them on their terms. Such abdication of authorial pride Pushkin would never allow.

In an age that admired public display, the duel was a form of self-expression and even self-realization. But the scandals that electrified the Western European public – Victor Hugo’s claim that Romanticism was “liberalism in literature,” for example, or Lord Byron’s outrageous personal behavior over several continents – were not practical options in Russia, where poets were more heavily censored and words (poetic or otherwise) were more quickly criminalized.14 Throughout his brief life, Lermontov acted (and wrote) in a manner so insolent and provocative that by 1840 he had been reduced to a line battalion, twice exiled to the Caucasus, and assigned to a punishment battalion by personal order of Tsar Nicholas I. But Lermontov did not die in battle. In the spirit of his own fictional Pechorin, he provoked a challenge from a former schoolmate and was killed on the spot at the age of twenty-seven.

Pushkin provided another variant on the duel of honor, in Chapter 4 of The Captain’s Daughter. While serving in a small frontier fort in Western Siberia, Pyotr Grinyov, hero of the tale, quarrels with Shvabrin, the villain, over an insult to the reputation of the captain’s daughter. The two men decide to duel (this is the 1770s: the weapon is the saber). On the first try they are prevented from drawing swords by the crew of comic, commonsensical characters who run the fortress, the captain’s wife (“What? Planning manslaughter in our fort?”) and a one-eyed garrison lieutenant. The captain’s wife locks up their swords