In Pushkin's Shadow

Mikhail Lermontov, born 200 years ago this fall, is perhaps Russia’s most mysterious poet. After Pushkin’s irony had seemingly destroyed the romantic worldview, this youth wrote, in his not yet independent childhood verses, of a disappointment with this earthly world, as though he remembered his previous life – a life before Earth.

For any poet we can identify a key poem, a kind of calling card. For Lermontov, that poem is “Angel,” written in 1831 (at 17), and the only early poem he published himself (in 1840):

At midnight an angel was crossing the sky,
And quietly he sang;
The moon and the stars and the concourse of clouds
Paid heed to his heavenly song.
He sang of the bliss of the innocent souls
In heavenly gardens above;
Of almighty God he sang out, and his praise
Was pure and sincere.
He bore in his arms a young soul
To our valley of sorrow and tears;
The young soul remembered the heavenly song
So vivid and yet without words.
And long did it struggle on earth,
With wondrous desire imbued;
But none of the tedious songs of our earth
Could rival celestial song.

It seems as though throughout our poet’s short life (not even 27 years), his soul held onto the sounds of an angelic song – compared to it, all earthly songs are tedious, and earthly life is “such an empty and stupid joke.”

His entire life, Lermontov tried to figure out his relationship with God: at times arguing with Him (which is why the character of the Demon is so important to him), at times thanking Him in bitter tones (as in “Gratitude”), at times repeating “a single wondrous prayer.” After all, if God allows so much evil in the world, then He is either not omnipotent, or not benevolent – hence Lermontov’s mutiny, his doubt, his lack of faith.

Lermontov felt his uniqueness at an early age – as early as 1832 (at the age of 18) he wrote a poem starting: “No, I’m not Byron, I am another chosen one, as yet unknown…” A chosen one – that was why he was always against the crowd, always alone, always a vagrant, a “wanderer, hunted by the world,” whose near future portends a torturous death:

At the place of execution – despised, but proud –
I will end my life

(“The day will come, and, condemned by the world…”)

I have foreseen my lot, my end:
A bloody grave awaits me

(“June 11, 1831”)

I knew: this head you love will go
From your bosom to the gallows.

(“Do not laugh at my prophetic longing…”)

In the last year of his life, Lermontov composed the mystical poem “Dream” – a complex construction of dreams-within-dreams in which he sees his own dead body dreaming of a woman, who sees a vision of a “familiar corpse,” the corpse of the poet who describes his dream and hers.

What, in Lermontov’s mind, can stand up to this evil, paltry world? Not Christian universal forgiveness, not humility. No, only great evil is up to the task. And so we have Lermontov’s demonic heroes: Arbenin, the protagonist of his best drama, Masquerade; the Demon, a central theme in the poet’s works; and Pechorin, the main character of his classic novel, Hero of Our Time.

For most readers, Pushkin’s massive shadow has obscured his predecessors, his contemporaries, and even those who came after him – including Lermontov. Nonetheless, throughout his life Lermontov argued with Pushkin in his work, often contradicting what his great predecessor said. Pushkin’s “Prisoner” ends with the free bird (an eagle), crying out to the sky and the mountains, “Let us fly away!” Meanwhile, Lermontov’s prisoner, hears only

The echoed, measured paces,
Of the wordless sentry walking
In the silence of the night.

While God gives Pushkin’s “Prophet” a gift and commands him to “speak, to burn the hearts of men,” Lermontov’s “Prophet” is persecuted, ridiculed, despised. While Pushkin’s poet is a tsar, drawing power from despising the crowd, for Lermontov not only does the crowd not understand the poet, the poet himself has “lost his purpose.”

Of particular interest is Lermontov’s response to Pushkin’s duel and subsequent death in 1837 (Lermontov was 23 at the time). His poem on the subject is titled “Death of a Poet” – any poet, not just Pushkin. In Lermontov’s worldview, a poet is always at odds with the mob, always persecuted by it, and always doomed to die. And so he writes:

He’s slain – and taken by the grave
Like that unknown, but happy bard,
Victim of jealousy wild,
Of whom he sang with wondrous power,
Struck down, like him, by an unyielding hand.

The “him” in question is Vladimir Lensky, a character from Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. Of course, Lermontov could not have missed Pushkin’s irony in the way he describes Lensky, and yet, in writing of his favorite poet, Lermontov foresees his own fate and future.

While Pushkin sees the poet in verse and the poet in daily life as two different creatures, different realities (“Until the poet by Apollo to sacred sacrifice is called…”), Lermontov, like Byron (another name so important to him), sees life as structured like a work of art.

For Lermontov the future is “either empty or dark”: it can only hold either the judgment of descendants, just and pitiless, as described in “The Thought,” or divine judgment, from which Pushkin’s murderers cannot hide. But the past is more important. In the past, Lermontov seeks strong-willed characters (as in “The Lay of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich…”) and heroic deeds (“Borodino”); at 18 the boy writes:

And I have lost count of my years
And grasp at the wings of oblivion

(“I used to count in kisses…”)

Pechorin, the “Hero of Our Time,” admits: “There is not a man in the world over whom the past has acquired such a power as over me. Every recollection of bygone grief or joy strikes my soul with morbid effect, and draws forth ever the same sounds... I am stupidly constituted: I forget nothing – nothing!”

For Lermontov’s characters (and perhaps, for the poet himself), love is the only force capable of reconciling man with heaven. Arbenin, having fallen in love with Nina, is ready to accept the divine realm; the Demon confesses to Tamara that:

On my sad soul from world’s first eon
Deeply your image was impressed.

But when love collapses, that much greater is the ensuing tragedy. Arbenin kills Nina; the Demon’s kiss proves fatal for Tamara.

It appears that happiness in love is impossible, and not just on Earth: Lermontov’s lovers fail to recognize each other even “in a new world,” beyond the grave:

… death came, and they met beyond the grave,
But in this new world they did not recognize each other.

(“They loved each other so long and so tender…”)

Russian literature of the 1830s was shifting from poetry toward prose. Pushkin felt the shift, and wrote The Tales of Belkin, The Queen of Spades, and The Captain’s Daughter. Lermontov clearly felt it as well, and wrote Russian literature’s first great psychological and philosophical novel.
“ A Hero of Our Time,” writes the author in the introduction, “is indeed a portrait, but not of one man. It is a portrait built up of all our generation’s vices in full bloom.” Which vices does he mean? Lermontov had already written about his generation in “The Thought” (1838); in the novel, the generation is represented by Pechorin and his paradoxical double, Grushnitsky. Their egoism, skepticism, and disdain for others are clear as day. But why?

Many who have written about the novel point to Nicholas I’s cruel and inhumane rule, to the disappointment of an entire generation, which came of age after the Decembrists’ defeat (See Calendar, page 24)… That may be so, but that is not the main point. In the novel’s last story (“The Fatalist”), Pechorin returns home and looks at the stars. He finds it silly to imagine that once, there lived people who believed the “heavenly lights” took an interest in their fates and their affairs.

“And what then? These lamps, lighted, so they fancied, only to illuminate their battles and triumphs, are burning with all their former brilliance, whilst they, with their hopes and passions, have long been extinguished, like a little fire kindled at the forest’s edge by a careless wayfarer! But, on the other hand, what strength of will was lent them by the conviction that the entire heavens, with their innumerable habitants, were looking at them with a sympathy, unalterable, though mute!... And we, their miserable descendants, roaming over the earth, without faith, without pride, without enjoyment, and without terror – except that involuntary awe which makes the heart shrink at the thought of the inevitable end – we are no longer capable of great sacrifices, either for the good of mankind or even for our own happiness, because we know the impossibility of such happiness; and, just as our ancestors used to fling themselves from one delusion to another, we pass indifferently from doubt to doubt…”

There’s the reason: there cannot be faith (recall that the woman Pechorin chases after in vain is named Vera, i.e. Faith), and all else follows – “a cheated son’s bitter jeer at his ruined father,” as he writes in “The Thought.”

But that is not how Lermontov ends his life. His last poem (“I go out along upon the road”), his poetic will and testament, reminds us of this poet’s secret, a secret he left for us and that we may never understand:

Through the fog, the flinty highway glistens
I go out alone upon the road.
Night is still; to God creation listens
While the stars commune in heaven’s code.
Heaven’s arc is glorious and splendid!
Lucent blue envelopes earth’s repose.
Why am I so pained and discontented?
Thwarted hopes, regret for what I chose?
I expect this life to give me nothing,
And the past? There’s nothing I repent.
Freedom’s calm is all that I am seeking!
That my life in slumber hence be spent.
But not the graveyard’s lifeless slumber…
I would wish a never-ending rest,
One in which life’s force forever after
Stirred the air that heaves within my breast.
That all night, all day angelic singing
Would my senses soothe with words of love,
That an oak tree, evergreen and rustling,
Would lean down, and lull me from above.

For a more biographical article on Lermontov, see Russian Life, Oct/Nov 1999.

Translation Credits:

“Angel” ~ From the Ends to the Beginning, A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, a free, online resource. Translators: Tatiana Tulchinsky, Andrew Wachtel, and Gwenan Wilbur. Editors: Ilya Kutik and Andrew Wachtel.
 (russianpoetry.net)

“The Poet” ~ translated by Julian Henry Lowenfeld ( bit.ly/poetpushkin)

“Death of a Poet” ~ translator unknown: bit.ly/deathofapoet

Hero of Our Time ~ translation by J. H. Wisdom & Marr Murray, with edits by Eugenia Sokolskaya

Demon ~ translation by Charles Johnston (Random House, 1979)

“I Go Out Alone Upon the Road” ~ Translation by Nora Seligman Favorov and Lydia Razran Stone, published in Chtenia 02 (Summer 2008)