How he hates us, ordinary mortals! No, he seldom hates; he reserves his
hatred for God, for life, for the universe. For us, weak bubbles driven
on the surface by uncontrollable forces, he has only contempt. Yet,
though hating and despising, he is infinitely dear to us: the thick
melancholy vein that bulges across his wildcat forehead makes him almost
human; the taut string of his remote harp vibrates at times with such
yearning and pain that we feel nearly at home with that alien-on-earth,
Mikhail Lermontov. We are glad with a petty gladness whenever we
discover in him this weakness, his humaneness; we chuckle at the
comfortable feeling of being able to observe him on the level plane,
freed from the necessity of throwing our heads far back in order to
perceive him on the lonely peak. He is our brother, we boast; and we
inflict on him the severest punishment for a genius—forgiveness.
But his contemporaries could not forgive him. A general sigh of relief
echoed the official announcement of his death “in a fearful storm
accompanied by thunder and lightning on the Beshta mountain in the
Caucasus”. “Bon voyage”, exclaimed Nicholas I, rubbing his hands in glee
over the departure of one of his most undesirable subjects, the
uncompromising mutineer. The church refused to bury the arrogant denier.
Society applauded Major Martinov whose bullet snapped the life of the
unapproachable aristocrat, the mocker of customs and conventions, the
maimer of feminine hearts, the careless, fearless duellist who played
with life, his own or that of others, as with a valueless toy. The
people—there was not such a thing in Russia of 1841.
Society organism cannot digest a foreign element. We are too local in
our terrestrial standards to tolerate an individual who is made not of
the same stuff that we are made of. Lermontov was a child of a different
planet who fell upon our earth by some crude mistake, doomed to chafe
twenty-six years among humans. As a child he protested against the fatal
misplacement; he discharged his venom in demolishing flower-beds, in
torturing animals with tears in his eyes, in brandishing his tiny fists
against his grandmother, when he observed her mistreating the serfs.
When he grew up—and he grew up early: at ten he loved a girl; at fifteen
he conceived his greatest poems, _Mtzyri_ and _Demon_—his protest had
calmed down. He no longer wept or raged—he hated God and despised
mankind. His contemporaries tell us that no one could stand his heavy
penetrating look. Men hated and feared him; women hated and loved him,
as they always do extraordinary things. Lermontov took revenge for his
accidental association with mankind; he left behind him a long row of
broken hearts and wounded ambitions. His rebellious spirit sought rest
in chaos, in torturing others and himself, in creating around him an
atmosphere of tragedy, in reckless fighting with the wild Caucasian
mountaineers.
And he, the mutinous, seeks storm,
As if in storm he may find peace.
Pechorin, the hero of his autobiographical sketches collected in _A Hero
of Our Time_, is the first Nietzschean in literature. His terse,
unpretentious maxims and paradoxes have been re-echoed by Dostoevsky,
Nietzsche, Przybyszewski, and other writers of the superman-literature.
As always is the case with deliberate or unconscious commentators, they
liquefy the original. One carelessly dropped sentence of Lermontov is
elaborated in tons of Dostoevsky’s gallous psychology, in mountains of
Nietzsche’s brain-splittering philosophy, in cognac-oceans of the
vivisectionist-Przybyszewski. Pechorin does not talk much; he is too
aristocratic for extravagance in words. Pechorin does not compromise; he
is not made of that stuff. He neither repents nor seeks atonement; in
his hatred for reality he does not erect a consoling phantom in the
image of a Superman; he would dismiss with a contemptible shrug Falk’s
matrimonial and sexual tribulations. Pechorin is eternally alone. Those
who approach him are scorched with his unhuman flame. Alone, in the
steppe, after a mad ride which kills his horse, Pechorin hugs the soil
and weeps “like a child”. Like a child pressing to its mother’s bosom,
plaintively demanding the Why and the Wherefore of existence among
strangers. Shall we chuckle at the suddenly-discovered weakness of our
enemy? Or shall we modestly turn away our eyes from the stolen sight of
a god in his nudity?
I once called Lermontov a sorrowful demon. Not a Lucifer, not a
Mephistopheles, but a Russian demon, as the sculptor Antokolsky
conceived him. Lermontov-Demon-Pechorin, a quaint superman, neither god
nor devil, a pluralistic being, a combination of cruelty and compassion,
of contempt and sympathy, of cynicism and sentimentalism, of the
loftiest and the basest, of the unhuman and of the human-all-too-human.
Dostoevsky?
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[1] A Hero of Our Time, by M. Y. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A.
Knopf.