This self-esteem, in its immaturity, was of a twofold character. It was
not primarily a belief that I was endowed with unusual abilities, but a
childish belief that I was one set apart, with whom, for mysterious
reasons, everything must succeed. The belief in a personal God had
gradually faded away from me, and there were times when, with the
conviction of boyhood, I termed myself an atheist to my friend; my
attitude towards the Greek gods had never been anything more than a
personification of the ideal forces upon which I heaped my enthusiasm.
But I believed in my star. And I hypnotised my friend into the same
belief, infected him so that he talked as if he were consecrating his
life to my service, and really, as far as was possible for a schoolboy,
lived and breathed exclusively for me, I, for my part, being gratified
at having, as my unreserved admirer and believer, the one whom, of all
people I knew, I placed highest, the one whose horizon seemed to me the
widest, and whose store of knowledge was the greatest; for in many
subjects it surpassed even that of the masters in no mean degree.
Under such conditions, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I was deeply
impressed by a book that one might think was infinitely beyond the
understanding of my years, Lermontof's _A Hero of Our Time_, in Xavier
Marmier's French translation. The subject of it would seem utterly
unsuited to a schoolboy who had never experienced anything in the
remotest degree resembling the experiences of a man of the world, at
any rate those which produced the sentiments pervading this novel.
Nevertheless, this book brought about a revolution in my ideas. For the
first time I encountered in a book a chief character who was not a
universal hero, a military or naval hero whom one had to admire and if
possible imitate, but one in whom, with extreme emotion, I fancied that
I recognised myself!
I had certainly never acted as Petsjórin did, and never been placed in
such situations as Petsjórin. No woman had ever loved me, still less
had I ever let a woman pay with suffering the penalty of her affection
for me. Never had any old friend of mine come up to me, delighted to
see me again, and been painfully reminded, by my coolness and
indifference, how little he counted for in my life. Petsjórin had done
with life; I had not even begun to live. Petsjórin had drained the cup
of enjoyment; I had never tasted so much as a drop of it. Petsjórin was
as blasé as a splendid Russian Officer of the Guards could be; I, as
full of expectation as an insignificant Copenhagen schoolboy could be.
Nevertheless, I had the perplexing feeling of having, for the first
time in my life, seen my inmost nature, hitherto unknown even to
myself, understood, interpreted, reproduced, magnified, in this
unharmonious work of the Russian poet who was snatched away so young.