A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [1]
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Foreword
Mikhail Lermontov finished writing his novel, A Hero of Our Time, at roughly the same age that I was working in a Blockbuster video store and annually flunking a remedial math course in college. I may have those dates wrong, but it’s pretty darn close. I’m one of those people who often compares their artistic progress to the work of a few of their literary heroes, and Lermontov was one of them. Georg Büchner was another, and he had written all of his works and was dead by twenty-three (he also found the time to become a medical doctor, but that’s just plain annoying). Or-son Welles terrified America by roughly that same age with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast and had also made what most critics describe as “the best film ever made” (Citizen Kane) by twenty-six. If I’m not mistaken, I think I passed that math class at about the same age.
Lermontov, of course, didn’t live long after the publication of his first prose work (a bullet in a duel saw to that), but he effectively helped chart the course for the modern Russian novel with one stroke. Like a few others—Shakespeare being perhaps the godfather of the bunch—Lermontov began writing in a psychological manner before the term really had any weight to it and well before Freud started seeing the word sex floating in every cup of coffee (and still had the use of his own jaw). One could carry on at some length and gush intellectually about all of Lermontov’s influences and influential works, but most of you would know that I simply looked him up on Wikipedia and that I’m really just reciting somebody else’s research back to you. I’d rather try to be truthful and express a little respect toward someone who stumbled onto a way of working that, within the confines of one short prose work, actually advanced the way we see and think and feel about the novel.
The character of Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin is one that amuses as much as he distresses. After you have finished reading Lermontov’s work you are thankful it’s only a novel, but you’re also quite sure it’s a truthful portrait of the artist as a young soldier. Much has been made of how autobiographical or not Lermontov’s personality sketch of Pechorin is. In the end, though, that hardly seems to matter. Whether emerging from a poisoned look in the mirror or derived from a thousand details of his friends and neighbors, Lermontov gets the alchemy just right and creates one of the most vivid and persuasive portraits of the male ego ever put down on paper. Everyone from Dostoyevsky to Palahniuk needs to thank Lermontov for not shying away from his “warts and all” creation and for setting the literary bar so damn high. It’s not for nothing that writers like both Turgenev and Chekhov have commented on the ruthless honesty with which Lermontov wrote. Indeed, Chekhov was rumored to have remarked, “Still just a boy, and he wrote that!” (I’m sure if Mr. Chekhov had been flunking a math class he would’ve been even more impressed.)
There are some terrific and clever uses of structure in Lermontov’s work—the diary sections juxtaposed with the other two tales, the multiple narrators, etc.—but I am most taken with his precise and ruthless approach to character. Lermontov never tries to fully explain Pechorin’s behavior, and, most important, he never apologizes for it. This is psychology at its most advanced. Let the critics and the scholars sit about and ponder over the “why” of it all—Lermontov dumps the facts and exploits of his character into the laps of his readers and lets them do some of the work for a change. He writes with the precision of a surgeon but with the heart of Caligula. The life of Pechorin is to be seen,