A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [3]
God bless writers. How can I not admire a bunch of brave, drunk sociopaths who keep doing the same thing that I love to do? Lermontov showed us the path. All we have to do is keep getting back up on the horse. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Of course, I was still flunking a math class at the age of twenty-six, so beware.
NEIL LABUTE
Introduction
Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin is a hero without a cause—to pervert a latter-day aphorism. He is a cynical young man who fights duels, seduces maidens, hunts wild boar, and stirs up trouble. He will tell you this himself: “I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? . . . There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul . . . But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the bait of passions, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life . . .”
His questions are as relevant today as ever, but Pechorin’s story takes place in the 1830s. Nicholas the First was on the throne, despised by the Russian intelligentsia for his repression of discourse. He had crushed the Decembrist revolt, which had attempted to prevent his ascendancy to the throne. In his book on Russian literature, Maurice Baring describes Nicholas the First’s rule as “a regime of patriarchal supervision, government interference, rigorous censorship, and iron discipline.” The decade was a time of constraints, when young men like Pechorin felt stifled and ineffectual.
Lermontov’s hero is serving in the army, based in the Caucasus, where Russian forces are attempting to subdue its mountain tribes. This mountainous region to the south of Russia today encompasses lands such as Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, and Dagestan. National boundaries have changed over time, but one cannot underestimate the metaphysical place that the Caucasian landscape fills in the Russian consciousness: it is the landscape “where in the mountains martial robbery occurs and the savage genius of inspiration is hiding in the mute silence” (Pushkin, The Prisoner of the Caucasus). Lermontov is often called the “poet of the Caucasus” and it is no surprise, given his descriptions of the terrain: “What a glorious place . . . ! On every side there are unassailable mountains, and reddish promontories, hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of plane trees; there are yellow precipices, covered with the lines of gullies; and right up high: a gold fringe of snow.”
Picture these mountains where dzhigits, skilled horsemen, twirl their steeds on jagged promontories; where abreks, Caucasian freedom fighters, roam the hills in hordes, adhering to nothing but their own moral code; where the chimneys of saklyas, mountain huts, send up smoke, visible to travelers from across vast valleys. The Caucasus was home to some of the fiercest Cossacks, who fought with the Russians in their efforts to conquer the mountain regions. They were also assisted by so-called peaceable princes (tribal leaders who cooperated with Russian forces). If a soldier was fortunate, he might become a kunak of such a peaceable prince—a sworn friend, an adopted brother, on whom great generosity was bestowed. Both the ethnic groups and the languages of the Caucasus are many and varied. These mountains are home