A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [4]
While its setting may be very exotic and remote, the historical position of A Hero of Our Time places it right in the thick of things literary. It is a pivotal book that sits on the cusp between Romanticism and Realism, at a moment when Russian literature was forging its path from poetry to the novel. Until 1840, Russian writers had merely flirted with the novel. As the Russian literary critic Boris Eikhenbaum wrote, “Lermontov died early, but this fact bears no relation to the historical work which he accomplished, and changes nothing in the resolution of the literary-historical problem which interests us. It was necessary to sum up the classical period of Russian poetry and to prepare the transition to the creation of a new prose. History demanded it—and it was accomplished by Lermontov.”2 Pushkin had just died after producing short stories and his famous novel-in-verse, Eugene Onegin, and Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy had yet to emerge. Gogol was writing prose but had produced only short stories until this point. With his book, the young Lermontov, only twenty-six when he wrote A Hero of Our Time, called the Russian novel into being.
As a writer, Lermontov is said to have been influenced by the works of Byron, Chateaubriand, Constant, and, of course, Pushkin. The novel with which A Hero of Our Time is often compared is Alfred de Musset’s La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle for their similar titles and descriptions of moral malaise. In turn, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy were each influenced by Lermontov—his metaphysics, his ironic stances, and his descriptions of the Caucasus. But, as scholar John Garrard explains in his essay “Old Wine in New Bottles: The Legacy of Lermontov,” A Hero of Our Time occupies a special place in the development of Russian literature:
[F]ar too much time is spent tracking down possible domestic and foreign sources for his works and far too little time is given over to an exploration of what Eikhenbaum called many years ago Lermontov’s “art of fusion” (iskusstvo splava), his ability to combine a variety of available elements into a new and original form. . . . It is arguably true that Lermontov had a more lasting impact on the shape and contours of the Russian novel than either Pushkin or Gogol. A Hero of Our Time possesses three of the most central characteristics of the Russian novel: 1) psychological analysis; 2) concern with ideas; 3) sociopolitical and ethical awareness. None of these features is the exclusive property of the novel in Russia, but the intensity with which they are engaged does help define the Russian novel and differentiate it from the novel elsewhere.3
As a piece of social commentary, A Hero of Our Time created quite a stir when it emerged, immediately garnering both praise and criticism. It came out at a time when the debate between Slavophiles and Westerners about Russian cultural identity was coming to a crescendo. Slavophile critics such as S. P. Shevyrev and Apollon Grigoriev complained that Pechorin represented the vices of the West, not of Russia. Belinsky, on the other hand, defended the work’s validity as a portrait of a Russian type by placing it as descendant from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Indeed, as Vladimir Nabokov describes in a piece called “The Lermontov Mirage” (The Russian Review, November 1941), Pechorin and Onegin