Púshkin and Lérmontoff as Prose-Writers

Toward the end of his life Púshkin gave himself more and more to prose writing. He began an extensive history of the peasant uprising of 1773 under Pugatchóff, and undertook for that purpose a journey to East Russia, where he collected, besides public documents, personal reminiscences and popular traditions relating to this uprising. At the same time he also wrote a novel, The Captain’s Daughter, the scene of which was laid in that disturbed period. The novel is not very remarkable in itself. True, the portraits of Pugatchóff and of an old servant, as well as the description of the whole life in the small forts of East Russia, garrisoned at that time by only a few invalid soldiers, are very true to reality and brilliantly pictured; but in the general construction of the novel Púshkin paid a tribute to the sentimentalism of the times. Nevertheless, The Captain’s Daughter, and especially the other prose novels of Púshkin, have played an important part in the history of Russian literature. Through them Púshkin introduced into Russia the realistic school, long before Balzac did so in France, and this school has since that time prevailed in Russian prose-literature. I do not mean, of course, Realism in the sense of dwelling mainly upon the lowest instincts of man, as it was misunderstood by some French writers, but in the sense of treating both high and low manifestations of human nature in a way true to reality, and in their real proportions. Moreover, the simplicity of these novels, both as regards their plots and the way the plots are treated, is simply marvellous, and in this way they have traced the lines upon which the development of Russian novel writing has ever since been pursued. The novels of Lérmontoff, of Hérzen (Whose Fault?), and of Turguéneff and Tolstóy descent, I dare to say, in a much more direct line from Púshkin’s novels than from those of Gógol.

Lérmontoff also wrote one novel in prose, The Hero of our Own Time, of which the hero, Petchórin, was to some extent a real representative of a portion of the educated society in those years of romanticism. It is true that some critics saw in him the portraiture of the author himself and his acquaintances; but, as Lérmontoff wrote in his preface to a second edition of this novel — “The hero of our own time is indeed a portrait, but not of one single man: it is the portrait of the vices of our generation,” — the book indicates “the illness from which this generation suffers.”

Petchórin is an extremely clever, bold, enterprising man who regards his surroundings with cold contempt. He is undoubtedly a superior man, superior to Púshkin’s Onyéghin; but he is, above all, an egotist who finds no better application for his superior capacities than all sorts of mad adventures, always connected with love-making. He falls in love with a Circassian girl whom he sees at a native festival. The girl is also taken by the beauty and the gloomy aspect of the Russian. To marry her is evidently out of question, because her Mussulman relatives would never give her to a Russian. Then, Petchórin daringly kidnaps her, with the aid of her brother, and the girl is brought to the Russian fort, where Petchórin is an officer. For several weeks she only cries and never speaks a word to the Russian, but by and bye she feels love for him. That is the beginning of the tragedy. Petchórin soon has enough of the Circassian beauty; he deserts her more and more for hunting adventures, and during one of them she is kidnapped by a Circassian who loves her, and who, on seeing that he cannot escape with her, kills her with his dagger. For Petchórin this solution is almost welcome.

A few years later the same Petchórin appears amidst Russian society in one of the Caucasus watering towns. There he meets with Princess Mary, who is courted by a young man — Grushnísky, — a sort of Caucasian caricature of Byron, draped in a mantle of contempt for mankind, but in reality a very shallow sort of personage. Petchórin, who cares but little for the Princess Mary, finds, however, a sort of wicked pleasure in rendering Grushnítsky ridiculous in her eyes, and uses all his wit to bring the girl to his feet. When this is done, he loses all interest in her. He makes a fool of Grushnítsky, and when the young man provokes him to a duel, he kills him. This was the hero of the time, and it must be owned that it was not a caricature. In a society free from care about the means of living — it was of course in serfdom times, under Nicholas I — when there was no sort of political life in the country, a man of superior ability very often found no issue for his forces but in such adventures as Petchórin’s.

It need not be said that the novel is admirable written — that it is full of living descriptions of Caucasus “society”; that the characters are splendidly delineated, and that some of them, like the old Captain Maxím Maxímytch, have remained living types of some of the best specimens of mankind. Through these qualities The Hero of our own Time, like Evghéniy Onyéghin, became a model for quite a series of subsequent novels.