A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [2]
All this talk of psychology and I only now get to the word sociopath. Is there room in the profile of Pechorin to really make a case for it? I think so, and perhaps he’s even one of the very first in serious Western literature—except for maybe Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus and a few other characters who pop up in Jacobean and Restoration drama. Oh, and that one other fellow. You know the one, created by a certain Mr. de Laclos a good fifty years or so before Lermontov started writing prose. Valmont, the chilling central figure of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, is another example of man at his darkest and certainly had to be a beacon toward which the young writer Lermontov steered his literary vessel. How could a character as rich and complex as Valmont not spur Lermontov on in his own work, helping him to create this puzzle of a soldier, one who becomes more complex and distant the more you learn about him? That type of literary figure—one that threads through Büchner’s Woyzeck to Welles’s Kane to Mamet’s Edmond—who time and again intrigues and frightens us with even measure. For who of us is ever really knowable, in the end? Certainly not Pechorin and probably not his creator, either. And that’s just fine by me. (I just wish he hadn’t been so damn young when he wrote it!)
Something that’s rarely discussed in appreciations of Mikhail Lermontov is his work as a visual artist. He was a painter of some distinction, and his nature paintings of the Caucasus Mountains—a place that he knew both from his youth and from his being assigned there twice as a soldier for behavior unbecoming—are masterly in their use of color and in the persuasive sense of detail. That kind of artist’s eye is always visible in A Hero of Our Time. I don’t know the poetic work of Lermontov well enough to comment—that’s what Google is for, kids—but I admire the hell out of him for writing a prose work of such complexity and for such effortless command over character. Thank God he wasn’t a dramatist or I’d hate the guy even more. I think he would’ve been a fine one, however; anyone who can probe so willingly and with such a breathless sense of candor can no doubt write a play. I think that’s the thing that playwrights and novelists need above all else today—more than a sense of structure or some MFA from an expensive school: a love of danger and a willingness to be a spelunker of the human soul. Writing is not for pussies.
I know that the critical reaction was all over the map for A Hero of Our Time, and that warms my heart. You know you’ve done a good day’s work when you’ve split the critical community in two (or three or four). Lermontov lived only a year or so past the publication of his novel and so didn’t have the chance to respond with any additional work. I’d like to believe he would’ve spat in the face of popular opinion, though, and would’ve written exactly what he wanted without caring too much about what anybody else had to say. Anyone who creates a Pechorin doesn’t appear to worry much about what society thinks of him. Lermontov was shot in a duel by someone he’d known for most of his life; apparently the man (a Major N. S. Martynov, to give him his limited due) was angry at Lermontov for some public jibes and challenged him to a duel. Lermontov, like his literary creation before him, took it like a man and said yes. That’s an almost perfect way for a writer to die, really, when you think about it. It’s symbolic of the relationship we have with our critics—we challenge them with our work, and they