Grove Koger
What was the first Russian novel? It may have been Ivan Vyzhigin by Faddei Bulgarin, which was published in 1829 and in English translation by George Ross two years later. I haven’t read it, and I suspect that there are few now living who have, either in its original language or in English. But shortly after its publication, better-known novels by major Russian writers began to appear.
Nikolai Gogol published a short version of Taras Bulba in 1835, and Alexander Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter followed in 1836. Aside their historical importance, these two works remain quite readable today. But a longer novel dating from 1840 was destined to surpass them in psychological insight and technical innovation. The work was A Hero of Our Time, and its author was a young army officer named Mikhail Lermontov.
Born in 1814, Lermontov was a sickly child whose grandmother took him to spas in the northern Caucasus in hopes of improving his health. The treatment seems to have worked, but as an unruly military officer, he had two opportunities to become acquainted with the more mountainous regions to the south, finding himself banished there twice—in 1837 and again in 1840.
Throughout most of Lermontov’s life, Russia had been waging what historians call the Caucasian War, a protracted series of conflicts in which Lermontov’s compatriots fought a variety of indigenous peoples, including the Circassians and the Chechens. Russia had annexed Georgia, which lies south of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, in 1801, but the territory between southern Russia and Georgia remained unconquered. In an effort to pacify the region, Russia had established a series of forts in a rough line—the North Caucasus Line—stretching from the northern shores of the Black Sea on the west to the Caspian Sea on the east. And to make it easier to move troops, it had improved the surface of the 132-mile Georgian Military Road, an ancient route linking the southern Russian city of Vladikavkaz with the Georgian city of Tbilisi.
Young Lermontov had begun publishing romantic verse, much of which reflected the “exotic” allure of the Caucasus, in the late 1820s, and began writing his novel, which was set in the same region, in 1837 or early 1838. Three of its sections appeared in the magazine Otechestvennye Zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland) in 1839 and 1840, with book publication following shortly afterward.
The novel is written in six sections of varying lengths. They’re related by three different narrators, arranged out of chronological order, and are even cast in differing modes. However, they’re linked by Caucasian settings and recurring characters. And in the background is the ever-present Caucasian War.
In the first section, “Bela,” an unnamed narrator recounts his meeting along the Military Road from Tbilisi with an aging officer named Maxim Maximych. Forced to take shelter in a native hut during a snowstorm, the two exchange remarks and Maximych recounts a tragic story involving another officer, Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, and a young Circassian woman.
Separated for a few days on the road, the two travelers meet again in the novel’s second section. The setting is Vladikavkaz, where they encounter Pechorin himself by chance. Maximych is overjoyed to see his old comrade in arms, but Pechorin feigns indifference and tells the two that he is on his way to Persia. He also urges the disappointed Maximych to do whatever he wishes with the personal papers that he had left with him. The narrator immediately asks for the papers, which are, as we subsequently learn, pages from Pechorin’s journal.
In the next, brief section, which takes place sometime later, the narrator explains that he has learned that Pechorin has died in Persia and that therefore he is publishing three extracts from his journal. “Taman” is set in the port of that name on an extension of the Black Sea known as the Sea of Azov, and “Princess Mary” takes place in the spa town of Pyatigorsk. The third extract, “The Fatalist,” is set in a village on the eastern flank of the Line and dramatizes the question of whether fate or chance governs our lives. While they illustrate different aspects of Pechorin’s character, the picture that emerges is of the ultimate Byronic hero—brooding, cynical, arrogant, and self-destructive.
Lermontov shared those characteristics, and they came to the fore at the end of his short life, when fate (or was it chance?) also took a hand. In late July 1841 he ridiculed a fellow officer so incessantly that the man challenged him to a duel. The event took place the afternoon of July 27, but although Lermontov refused to aim at his opponent (saying loudly, according to one account, that he would not “fire on that fool”), the other officer shot him in the chest, killing him instantly.
The cover at the top of today’s post, scanned from my 1958 Doubleday Anchor paperback, is by Edward Gorey and is based on an 1837 oil by Lermontov himself, Caucasian View with Mount Elbruz. The map, taken from the same edition, is by Raphael Palacios and is adapted from an original by Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir’s son. The elder Nabokov judged Lermontov’s language harshly, but added that if we consider him as a storyteller, “then we do marvel indeed at the superb energy of the tale.” The third image is another 1837 oil painting by Lermontov, The Military Georgian Road near Mtskheta (Landscae with a Saklia—Dwelling of Caucasian Mountaineers). Mtskheta, by the way, is a city in Georgia. The fourth image, also by Lermontov, is an 1837 sketch of Taman; both it and the painting are reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The final image is a 1957 Soviet stamp celebrating Lermontov, and was designed by Vasily Zavyalov.
World Enough 