LERMONTOV
The romantic movement in Russia was, as far as Pushkin was concerned,
not really a romantic movement at all. Still less was it so in the
case of the Pléiade which followed him. And yet, for want of a better
word, one is obliged to call it the _romantic_ movement, as it was a
new movement, a renascence that arose out of the ashes of the
pseudo-classical eighteenth century convention. Pushkin was followed
by a Pléiade.
The claim of his friend and fellow-student, BARON DELVIG, to fame,
rests rather on his friendship with Pushkin (to whom he played the
part of an admirable critic) than on his own verse. He died in 1831.
YAZYKOV, PRINCE BARIATINSKY, VENEVITINOV, and POLEZHAEV, can all be
included in the Pléiade; all these are lyrical poets of the second
order, and none of them--except Polezhaev, whose real promise of
talent was shattered by circumstances (he died of drink and
consumption after a career of tragic vicissitudes)--has more than an
historical interest.
Pushkin's successor to the throne of Russian letters was Lermontov: no
unworthy heir. The name Lermontov is said to be the same as the Scotch
Learmonth. The story of his short life is a simple one. He was born at
Moscow in 1814. He visited the Caucasus when he was twelve. He was
taught English by a tutor. He went to school at Moscow, and afterwards
to the University. He left in 1832 owing to the disputes he had with
the professors. At the age of eighteen, he entered the Guards' Cadet
School at St. Petersburg; and two years later he became an officer in
the regiment of the Hussars. In 1837 he was transferred to Georgia,
owing to the scandal caused by the outspoken violence of his verse;
but he was transferred to Novgorod in 1838, and was allowed to return
to St. Petersburg in the same year. In 1840 he was again transferred
to the Caucasus for fighting a duel with the son of the French
Ambassador; towards the end of the year, he was once more allowed to
return to St. Petersburg. In 1841 he went back for a third time to
the Caucasus, where he forced a duel on one of his friends over a
perfectly trivial incident, and was killed, on the 15th of July of the
same year.
In all the annals of poetry, there is no more curious figure than
Lermontov. He was like a plant that above all others needed a
sympathetic soil, a favourable atmosphere, and careful attention. As
it was, he came in the full tide of the régime of Nicholas I, a régime
of patriarchal supervision, government interference, rigorous
censorship, and iron discipline,--a grey epoch absolutely devoid of
all ideal aspirations. Considerable light is thrown on the
contradictory and original character of the poet by his novel, _A Hero
of Our Days_, the first psychological novel that appeared in Russia.
The hero, Pechorin, is undoubtedly a portrait of the poet, although he
himself said, and perhaps thought, that he was merely creating a type.
The hero of the story, who is an officer in the Caucasus, analyses his
own character, and lays bare his weaknesses, follies, and faults, with
the utmost frankness. "I am incapable of friendship," he says. "Of two
friends, one is always the slave of the other, although often neither
of them will admit it; I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a
tiring business." Or he writes: "I have an innate passion for
contradiction.... The presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and
intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament would turn me into a
passionate dreamer." Speaking of enemies, he says: "I love enemies,
but not after the Christian fashion." And on another occasion: "Why do
they all hate me? Why? Have I offended any one? No. Do I belong to
that category of people whose mere presence creates antipathy?" Again:
"I despise myself sometimes, is not that the reason that I despise
others? I have become incapable of noble impulses. I am afraid of
appearing ridiculous to myself."
On the eve of fighting a duel Pechorin writes as follows--
"If I die it will not be a great loss to the world, and as for me, I
am sufficiently tired of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, who
does not go home to bed because the carriage is not there, but as soon
as the carriage is there, Good-bye!"
"I review my past and I ask myself, Why have I lived? Why was I born?
and I think there was a reason, and I think I was called to high
things, for I feel in my soul the presence of vast powers; but I did
not divine my high calling; I gave myself up to the allurement of
shallow and ignoble passions; I emerged from their furnace as hard and
as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble
aspirations, the flower of life. And since then how often have I
played the part of the axe in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of
the executioner I have fallen on the necks of the victims, often
without malice, always without pity. My love has never brought
happiness, because I have never in the slightest degree sacrificed
myself for those whom I loved. I loved for my own sake, for my own
pleasure.... And if I die I shall not leave behind me one soul who
understood me. Some think I am better, others that I am worse than I
am. Some will say he was a good fellow; others he was a blackguard."
It will be seen from these passages, all of which apply to Lermontov
himself, even if they were not so intended, that he must have been a
trying companion, friend, or acquaintance. He had, indeed, except for
a few intimate friends, an impossible temperament; he was proud,
overbearing, exasperated and exasperating, filled with a savage
_amour-propre_; and he took a childish delight in annoying; he
cultivated "le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire"; he was envious of
what was least enviable in his contemporaries. He could not bear not
to make himself felt, and if he felt that he was unsuccessful in
accomplishing this by pleasant means, he resorted to unpleasant means.
And yet, at the same time, he was warm-hearted, thirsting for love and
kindness, and capable of giving himself up to love--if he chose.
During his period of training at the Cadet School, he led a wild life;
and when he became an officer, he hankered after social and not after
literary success. He did not achieve it immediately; at first he was
not noticed, and when he was noticed he was not liked. His looks were
unprepossessing, and one of his legs was shorter than the other. His
physical strength was enormous--he could bend a ramrod with his
fingers. Noticed he was determined to be; and, as he himself says in
one of his letters, observing that every one in society had some sort
of pedestal--wealth, lineage, position, or patronage--he saw that if
he, not pre-eminently possessing any of these,--though he was, as a
matter of fact, of a good Moscow family,--could succeed in engaging
the attention of one person, others would soon follow suit. This he
set about to do by compromising a girl and then abandoning her: and he
acquired the reputation of a Don Juan. Later, when he came back from
the Caucasus, he was treated as a lion. All this does not throw a
pleasant light on his character, more especially as he criticized in
scathing tones the society in which he was anxious to play a part, and
in which he subsequently enjoyed playing a part. But perhaps both
attitudes of mind were sincere. He probably sincerely enjoyed society,
and hankered after success in it; and equally sincerely despised
society and himself for hankering after it.
As he grew older, his pride and the exasperating provocativeness of
his conduct increased to such an extent that he seemed positively
seeking for serious trouble, and for some one whose patience he could
overtax, and on whom he could fasten a quarrel. And this was not slow
to happen.
At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a deep-seated disgust with
himself and with the world in general, and a complete indifference to
life, resulting from large aspirations which could not find an outlet,
and so recoiled upon himself. The epoch, the atmosphere and the
society were the worst possible for his peculiar nature; and the only
fruitful result of the friction between himself and the society and
the established order of his time, was that he was sent to the
Caucasus, which proved to be a source of inspiration for him, as it
had been for Pushkin. One is inclined to say, "If only he had lived
later or longer"; yet it may be doubted whether, had he been born in a
more favourable epoch, either earlier in the milder régime of
Alexander I, or later, in the enthusiastic epoch of the reforms, he
would have been a happier man and produced finer work.
The curious thing is that his work does not reveal an overwhelming
pessimism like Leopardi's, an accent of revolt like Musset's, or of
combat like Byron's; but rather it testifies to a fundamental
indifference to life, a concentrated pride. If it be true that you can
roughly divide the Russian temperament into two types--the type of
the pure fool, such as Dostoyevsky's _Idiot_, and a type of
unconquerable pride, such as Lucifer--then Lermontov is certainly a
fine example of the second type. You feel that he will never submit or
yield; but then he died young; and the Russian poets often changed,
and not infrequently adopted a compromise which was the same thing as
submission.
Lermontov was, like Pushkin, essentially a lyric poet, still more
subjective, and profoundly self-centred. His attempts at the drama
(imitations of Schiller and an attempt at the manner of Griboyedov)
were failures. But, unlike Pushkin, he was a true romantic; and his
work proves to us how essentially different a thing Russian
romanticism is from French, German or English romanticism. He began
with astonishing precocity to write verse when he was twelve. His
earliest efforts were in French. He then began to imitate Pushkin.
While at the Cadet School he wrote a series of cleverly written, more
or less indecent, and more or less Byronic--the Byron of
_Beppo_--tales in verse, describing his love adventures, and episodes
of garrison life. What brought him fame was his "Ode on the Death of
Pushkin," which, although unjustified by the actual facts--he
represents Pushkin as the victim of a bloodthirsty society--strikes
strong and bitter chords. Here, without any doubt, are "thoughts that
breathe and words that burn"--
"And you, the proud and shameless progeny
Of fathers famous for their infamy,
You, who with servile heel have trampled down
The fragments of great names laid low by chance,
You, hungry crowd that swarms about the throne,
Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory,
You hide behind the shelter of the law,
Before you, right and justice must be dumb!
But, parasites of vice, there's God's assize;
There is an awful court of law that waits.
You cannot reach it with the sound of gold;
It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds;
And vainly you shall call the lying witness;
That shall not help you any more;
And not with all the filth of all your gore
Shall you wash out the poet's righteous blood."
He struck this strong chord more than once, especially in his
indictment of his own generation, called "A Thought"; and in a poem
written on the transfer of Napoleon's ashes to Paris, in which he
pours scorn on the French for deserting Napoleon when he lived and
then acclaiming his ashes.
But it is not in poems such as these that Lermontov's most
characteristic qualities are to be found. Lermontov owed nothing to
his contemporaries, little to his predecessors, and still less to
foreign models. It is true that, as a school-boy, he wrote verses full
of Byronic disillusion and satiety, but these were merely echoes of
his reading. The gloom of spirit which he expressed later on was a
permanent and innate feature of his own temperament. Later, the
reading of Shelley spurred on his imagination to emulation, but not to
imitation. He sought his own path from the beginning, and he remained
in it with obdurate persistence. He remained obstinately himself,
indifferent as a rule to outside events, currents of thought and
feeling. And he clung to the themes which he chose in his youth. His
mind to him a kingdom was, and he peopled it with images and fancies
of his own devising. The path which he chose was a narrow one. It was
a romantic path. He chose for the subject of the poem by which he is
perhaps most widely known, _The Demon_, the love of a demon for a
woman. The subject is as romantic as any chosen by Thomas Moore; but
there is nothing now that appears rococo in Lermontov's work. The
colours are as fresh to-day as when they were first laid on. The
heroine is a Circassian woman, and the action of the poem is in the
Caucasus.
The Demon portrayed is not the spirit that denies of Goethe, nor
Byron's Lucifer, looking the Almighty in His face and telling him that
His evil is not good; nor does he cherish--
"the study of revenge, immortal hate,"
of Milton's Satan; but he is the lost angel of a ruined paradise, who
is too proud to accept oblivion even were it offered to him. He dreams
of finding in Tamara the joys of the paradise he has foregone. "I am
he," he says to her, "whom no one loves, whom every human being
curses." He declares that he has foresworn his proud thoughts, that he
desires to be reconciled with Heaven, to love, to pray, to believe in
good. And he pours out to her one of the most passionate love
declarations ever written, in couplet after couplet of words that glow
like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp, Tamara yields to
him, and forfeits her life; but her soul is borne to Heaven by the
Angel of Light; she has redeemed her sin by death, and the Demon is
left as before alone in a loveless, lampless universe. The poem is
interspersed with descriptions of the Caucasus, which are as glowing
and splendid as the impassioned utterance of the Demon. They put
Pushkin's descriptions in the shade. Lermontov's landscape-painting
compared with Pushkin's is like a picture of Turner compared with a
Constable or a Bonnington.
Lermontov followed up his first draft of _The Demon_ (originally
planned in 1829, but not finished in its final form until 1841) with
other romantic tales, the scene of which for the most part is laid in
the Caucasus: such as _Izmail Bey_, _Hadji-Abrek_, _Orsha the
Boyar_--the last not a Caucasian tale. These were nearly all of them
sketches in which he tried the colours of his palette. But with
_Mtsyri_, _the Novice_, in which he used some of the materials of the
former tales, he produced a finished picture.
_Mtsyri_ is the story of a Circassian orphan who is educated in a
convent. The child grows up home-sick at heart, and one day his
longing for freedom becomes ungovernable, and he escapes and roams
about in the mountains. He loses his way in the forest and is brought
back to the monastery after three days, dying from starvation,
exertion, and exhaustion. Before he dies he pours out his confession,
which takes up the greater part of the poem. He confesses how in the
monastery he felt his own country and his own people forever calling,
and how he felt he must seek his own people. He describes his
wanderings: how he scrambles down the mountain-side and hears the song
of a Georgian woman, and sees her as she walks down a narrow path with
a pitcher on her head and draws water from the stream. At nightfall he
sees the light of a dwelling-place twinkling like a falling star; but
he dares not seek it. He loses his way in the forest, he encounters
and kills a panther. In the morning, he finds a way out of the woods
when the daylight comes; he lies in the grass exhausted under the
blinding noon, of which Lermontov gives a gorgeous and detailed
description--
"And on God's world there lay the deep
And heavy spell of utter sleep,
Although the landrail called, and I
Could hear the trill of the dragonfly
Or else the lisping of the stream ...
Only a snake, with a yellow gleam
Like golden lettering inlaid
From hilt to tip upon a blade,
Was rustling, for the grass was dry,
And in the loose sand cautiously
It slid, and then began to spring
And roll itself into a ring,
Then, as though struck by sudden fear,
Made haste to dart and disappear."
Perishing of hunger and thirst, fever and delirium overtake him, and
he fancies that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream, where
speckled fishes are playing in the crystal waters. One of them nestles
close to him and sings to him with a silver voice a lullaby,
unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and alluring like the call of the
Erl King's daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches the high-water
mark of his descriptive powers. Its pages glow with the splendour of
the Caucasus.
To his two masterpieces, _The Demon_ and _Mtsyri_, he was to add a
third: _The Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Oprichnik
(bodyguardsman), and the Merchant Kalashnikov_. The Oprichnik insults
the Merchant's wife, and the Merchant challenges him to fight with his
fists, kills him, and is executed for it. This poem is written as a
folk-story, in the style of the _Byliny_, and it in no way resembles a
_pastiche_. It equals, if it does not surpass, Pushkin's _Boris
Godunov_ as a realistic vision of the past; and as an epic tale, for
simplicity, absolute appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to
nature and terseness, there is nothing in modern Russian literature to
compare with it. Besides these larger poems, Lermontov wrote a
quantity of short lyrics, many of which, such as "The Sail," "The
Angel," "The Prayer," every Russian child knows by heart.
When we come to consider the qualities of Lermontov's romantic work,
and ask ourselves in what it differs from the romanticism of the
West--from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, Musset, Espronceda--we find
that in Lermontov's work, as in all Russian work, there is mingled
with his lyrical, imaginative, and descriptive powers, a bed-rock of
matter-of-fact common-sense, a root that is deeply embedded in
reality, in the life of everyday. He never escapes into the "intense
inane" of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never lost in the dim
twilight of Coleridge. Romantic he is, but one note of Heine takes us
into a different world: for instance, Heine's quite ordinary
adventures in the Harz Mountains convey a spell and glamour that takes
us over a borderland that Lermontov never crossed.
Nothing could be more splendid than Lermontov's descriptions; but they
are, compared with those of Western poets, concrete, as sharp as views
in a camera obscura. He never ate the roots of "relish sweet, the
honey wild and manna dew" of the "Belle Dame Sans Merci"; he wrote of
places where Kubla Khan might have wandered, of "ancestral voices
prophesying war," but one has only to quote that line to see that
Lermontov's poetic world, compared with Coleridge's, is solid fact
beside intangible dream.
Compared even with Musset and Victor Hugo, how much nearer the earth
Lermontov is than either of them! Victor Hugo dealt with just the
same themes; but in Lermontov, the most splendid painter of mountains
imaginable, you never hear
"Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne,"
and you know that it will never drive the Russian poet to frenzy. On
the other hand, you never get Victor Hugo's extravagance and
absurdities. Or take Musset; Musset dealt with romantic themes _si
quis alius_; but when he deals with a subject like Don Juan, which of
all subjects belonged to the age of Pushkin and Lermontov, he writes
lines like these--
"Faible, et, comme le lierre, ayant besoin d'autrui;
Et ne le cachant pas, et suspendant son âme,
Comme un luth éolien, aux lèvres de la nuit."
Here again we are confronted with a different kind of imagination. Or
take a bit of sheer description--
"Pâle comme l'amour, et de pleurs arrosée,
La nuit aux pieds d'argent descend dans la rosée."
You never find the Russian poet impersonating nature like this, and
creating from objects such as the "yellow bees in the ivy bloom" forms
more real than living man. The objects themselves suffice. Lermontov
sang of disappointed love over and over again, but never did he create
a single image such as--
"Elle aurait aimé, si l'orgueil
Pareil à la lampe inutile
Qu'on allume près d'un cercueil,
N'eut veillé sur son coeur stérile."
In his descriptive work he is more like Byron; but Byron was far less
romantic and far less imaginative than Lermontov, although he invented
Byronism, and shattered the crumbling walls of the eighteenth century
that surrounded the city of romance, and dallied with romantic themes
in his youth. All his best work, the finest passages of _Childe
Harold_, and the whole of _Don Juan_, were slices of his own life and
observation, _choses vues_; he never created a single character that
was not a reflection of himself; and he never entered into the city
whose walls he had stormed, and where he had planted his flag.
This does not mean that Lermontov is inferior to the Western romantic
poets. It simply means that the Russian poet is--and one might add
the Russian poets are--different. And, indeed, it is this very
difference,--what he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his
composition,--that constitutes his unique excellence. So far from its
being a vice, he made it into his especial virtue. Lermontov
sometimes, in presenting a situation and writing a poem on a fact,
presents that situation and that fact without exaggeration, emphasis,
adornment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any kind, in the language of
everyday life, and at the same time he achieves poetry. This was
Wordsworth's ideal, and he fulfilled it.
A case in point is his long poem on the Oprichnik, which has been
mentioned; and some of the most striking examples of this unadorned
and realistic writing are to be found in his lyrics. In the
"Testament," for example, where a wounded officer gives his last
instructions to his friend who is going home on leave--
"I want to be alone with you,
A moment quite alone.
The minutes left to me are few,
They say I'll soon be gone.
And you'll be going home on leave,
Then say ... but why? I do believe
There's not a soul, who'll greatly care
To hear about me over there.
And yet if some one asks you there,
Let us suppose they do--
Tell them a bullet hit me here,
The chest,--and it went through.
And say I died and for the Tsar,
And say what fools the doctors are;--
And that I shook you by the hand,
And thought about my native land.
My father and my mother, too!
They may be dead by now;
To tell the truth, it wouldn't do
To grieve them anyhow.
If one of them is living, say
I'm bad at writing home, and they
Have sent us to the front, you see,--
And that they needn't wait for me.
We had a neighbour, as you know,
And you remember I
And she ... How very long ago
It is we said good-bye!
She won't ask after me, nor care,
But tell her ev'rything, don't spare
Her empty heart; and let her cry;--
To her it doesn't signify."
The language is the language of ordinary everyday conversation. Every
word the officer says might have been said by him in ordinary life,
and there is not a note that jars; the speech is the living speech of
conversation without being slang: and the result is a poignant piece
of poetry. Another perhaps still more beautiful and touching example
is the cradle-song which a mother sings to a Cossack baby, in which
again every word has the native savour and homeliness of a Cossack
woman's speech, and every feeling expressed is one that she would have
felt. A third example is "Borodino," an account of the famous battle
told by a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. Lermontov's fishes
never talk like big whales.
All Russian poets have this gift of reality of conception and
simplicity of treatment in a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none
has it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. The difference between
Pushkin's style and Lermontov's is that, when 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. Thus, what Matthew Arnold said
about Byron and Wordsworth is true about Lermontov--there are moments
when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.
In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; but there is a great deal that
is flat and sullen. But if one reviews the great amount of work he
produced in his short life, one is struck, not by its variety, as in
the case of Pushkin,--it is, on the contrary, limited and monotonous
in subject,--but by his authentic lyrical inspiration, by the
strength, the intensity, the concentration of his genius, the richness
of his imagination, the wealth of his palette, his gorgeous colouring
and the high level of his strong square musical verse. And perhaps
more than by anything else, one is struck by the blend in his nature
and his work which has just been discussed, of romantic imagination
and stern reality, of soaring thought and earthly common-sense, as
though we had before us the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings
of a Shelley. Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you take him, one
of the most astonishing figures, and certainly the greatest purely
lyrical _Erscheinung_ in Russian literature.
With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the springtide of national song
that began in the reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for the only
poet he left behind him did not survive him long. This was his
contemporary KOLTSOV (1809-42), the greatest of Russian folk-poets.
The son of a cattle-dealer, after a fitful and short-lived primary
education at the district school of Voronezh, he adopted his father's
trade, and by a sheer accident a cultivated young man of Moscow came
across him and his verses, and raised funds for their publication.
Koltsov's verse paints peasant life as it is, without any
sentimentality or rhetoric; it is described from the inside, and not
from the outside. This is the great difference between Koltsov and
other popular poets who came later. Moreover, he caught and
reproduced the true _Volkston_ in his lyrics, so that they are
indistinguishable in accent from real folk-poetry. Koltsov sings of
the woods, and the rustling rye, of harvest time and sowing; the song
of the love-sick girl reaping; the lonely grave; the vague dreams and
desires of the peasant's heart. His pictures have the dignity and
truth of Jean François Millet, and his "lyrical cry" is as authentic
as that of Burns. His more literary poems are like Burns' English
poems compared with his work in the Scots. But he died the year after
Lermontov, of consumption, and with his death the curtain was rung
down on the first act of Russian literature. When it was next rung up,
it was on the age of prose.