LÉRMONTOFF
It is said that when Turguéneff and his great friend, Kavélin, came together—Kavélin was a very sympathetic philosopher and a writer upon law—a favourite theme of their discussions was: “Púshkin or Lérmontoff?” Turguéneff, as is known, considered Púshkin one of the greatest poets, and especially one of the greatest artists, among men; while Kavélin must have insisted upon the fact that in his best productions Lérmontoff was but slightly inferior to Púshkin as an artist, that his verses were real music, while at the same time the inspiration of his poetry was of a much higher standard than that of Púshkin. When it is added that eight years was the entire limit of Lérmontoff’s literary career—he was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-six—the powers and the potentialities of this poet will be seen at once.
Lérmontoff had Scotch blood in his veins. At least, the founder of the family was a Scotchman, George Learmonth, who, with sixty Scotchmen and Irishmen, entered the service of Poland first, and afterwards, in 1613, of Russia. The inner biography of the poet remains still but imperfectly known. It is certain that his childhood and boyhood were anything but happy. His mother was a lover of poetry—perhaps a poet herself; but he lost her when he was only three years old—she was only twenty-one. His aristocratic grandmother on the maternal side took him from his father—a poor army officer, whom the child worshipped—and educated him, preventing all intercourse between the father and the son. The boy was very gifted, and at the age of fourteen had already begun to write verses and poems—first in French, (like Púshkin), and soon in Russian. Schiller and Shakespeare and, from the age of sixteen, Byron and Shelley were his favourites. At the age of sixteen Lérmontoff entered the Moscow University, from which he was, however, excluded next year for some offence against a very uninteresting professor. He then entered a military school at St. Petersburg, to become at the age of eighteen an officer of the hussars.
A young man of twenty-two, Lérmontoff suddenly became widely known for a piece of poetry which he wrote on the occasion of Púshkin’s death (1837). A great poet, as well as a lover of liberty and a foe of oppression, was revealed at once in this passionate production of the young writer, of which the concluding verses were especially powerful. “But you,” he wrote, “who stand, a haughty crowd, around the throne, You hang men of genius, of liberty, and fame! You have now the law to cover you, And justice must close her lips before you! But there is a judgment of God,—you, dissolute crowd! There is a severe judge who waits for you. You will not buy him by the sound of your gold.... And, with all your black blood, You will not wash away the stain of the poet’s pure blood!” In a few days all St. Petersburg, and very soon all Russia, knew these verses by heart; they circulated in thousands of manuscript copies.
For this passionate cry of his heart, Lérmontoff was exiled at once. Only the intervention of his powerful friends prevented him from being marched straight to Siberia. He was transferred from the regiment of guards to which he belonged to an army regiment in the Caucasus. Lérmontoff was already acquainted with the Caucasus: he had been taken there as a child of ten, and he had brought back from this sojourn an ineffaceable impression. Now the grandeur of the great mountain range impressed him still more forcibly. The Caucasus is one of the most beautiful regions on earth. It is a chain of mountains much greater than the Alps, surrounded by endless forests, gardens, and steppes, situated in a southern climate, in a dry region where the transparency of the air enhances immensely the natural beauty of the mountains. The snow-clad giants are seen from the Steppes scores of miles away, and the immensity of the chain produces an impression which is equalled nowhere in Europe. Moreover, a half-tropical vegetation clothes the mountain slopes, where the villages nestle, with their semi-military aspect and their turrets, basking in all the gorgeous sunshine of the East, or concealed in the dark shadows of the narrow gorges, and populated by a race of people among the most beautiful of Europe. Finally, at the time Lérmontoff was there the mountaineers were fighting against the Russian invaders with unabated courage and daring for each valley of their native mountains.
All these natural beauties of the Caucasus have been reflected in Lérmontoff’s poetry, in such a way that in no other literature are there descriptions of nature so beautiful, or so impressive and correct. Bodenstedt, his German translator and personal friend, who knew the Caucasus well, was quite right in observing that they are worth volumes of geographical descriptions. The reading of many volumes about the Caucasus does not add any concrete features to those which are impressed upon the mind by reading the poems of Lérmontoff. Turguéneff quotes somewhere Shakespeare’s description of the sea as seen from the cliffs of Dover (in King Lear), as a masterpiece of objective poetry dealing with nature. I must confess, however, that the concentration of attention upon small details in this description does not appeal to my mind. It gives no impression of the immensity of the sea as seen from the Dover cliffs, nor of the wonderful richness of colour displayed by the waters on a sunny day. No such reproach could ever be made against Lérmontoff’s poetry of nature. Bodenstedt truly says that Lérmontoff has managed to satisfy at the same time both the naturalist and the lover of art. Whether he describes the gigantic chain, where the eye loses itself—here in snow clouds, there in the unfathomable depths of narrow gorges; or whether he mentions some detail: a mountain stream, or the endless woods, or the smiling valleys of Georgia covered with flowers, or the strings of light clouds floating in the dry breezes of Northern Caucasia,—he always remains so true to nature that his picture rises before the eye in life-colours, and yet it is imbued with a poetical atmosphere which makes one feel the freshness of these mountains, the balm of their forests and meadows, the purity of the air. And all this is written in verses wonderfully musical. Lérmontoff’s verses, though not so “easy” as Púshkin’s, are very often even more musical. They sound like a beautiful melody. The Russian language is always rather melodious, but in the verses of Lérmontoff it becomes almost as melodious as Italian.
The intellectual aspect of Lérmontoff is nearer to Shelley than to any other poet. He was deeply impressed by the author of Prometheus Bound; but he did not try to imitate Shelley. In his earliest productions he did indeed imitate Púshkin and Púshkin’s Byronism; but he very soon struck a line of his own. All that can be said is, that the mind of Lérmontoff was disquieted by the same great problems of Good and Evil struggling in the human heart, as in the universe at large, which disquieted Shelley. Like Shelley among the poets, and like Schopenhauer among the philosophers, he felt the coming of that burning need of a revision of the moral principles now current, so characteristic of our own times. He embodied these ideas in two poems, The Demon and Mtsýri, which complete each other. The leading idea of the first is that of a fierce soul which has broken with both earth and heaven, and looks with contempt upon all who are moved by petty passions. An exile from paradise and a hater of human virtues, he knows these petty passions, and despises them with all his superiority. The love of this demon towards a Georgian girl who takes refuge from his love in a convent, and dies there—what more unreal subject could be chosen? And yet, on reading the poem, one is struck at every line by its incredible wealth of purely realistic, concrete descriptions of scenes and of human feelings, all of the most exquisite beauty. The dance of the girl at her Georgian castle before the wedding, the encounter of the bridegroom with robbers and his death, the galloping of his faithful horse, the sufferings of the bride and her retirement to a convent, nay, the love itself of the demon and every one of the demon’s movements—this is of the purest realism in the highest sense of the word: that realism with which Púshkin had stamped Russian literature once and for all.
Mtsýri is the cry of a young soul longing for liberty. A boy, taken from a Circassian village, from the mountains, is brought up in a small Russian monastery. The monks think that they have killed in him all human passions and longings; but the dream of his childhood is—be it only once, be it only for a moment—to see his native mountains where his sisters sang round his cradle, and to press his burning bosom against the heart of one who is not a stranger. One night, when a storm rages and the monks are praying in fear in their church, he escapes from the monastery, and wanders for three days in the woods. For once in his life he enjoys a few moments of liberty; he feels all the energy and all the forces of his youth: “As for me, I was like a wild beast,” he says afterwards, “and I was ready to fight with the storm, the lightning, the tiger of the forest.” But, being an exotic plant, weakened by education, he does not find his way to his native country. He is lost in the forests which spread for hundreds of miles round him, and is found a few days later, exhausted, not far from the monastery. He dies from the wounds which he has received in a fight with a leopard.
“The grave does not frighten me,” he says to the old monk who attends him. “Suffering, they say, goes to sleep there in the eternal cold stillness. But I regret to part with life.... I am young, still young.... hast thou ever known the dreams of youth? Or hast thou forgotten how thou once lovedst and hatedst? Maybe, this beautiful world has lost for thee its beauty. Thou art weak and grey; thou hast lost all desires. No matter! Thou hast lived once; thou hast something to forget in this world. Thou hast lived—I might have lived, too!” And he tells about the beauty of the nature which he saw when he had run away, his frantic joy at feeling free, his running after the lightning, his fight with a leopard. “Thou wishest to know what I did while I was free?—I lived, old man! I lived! And my life, without these three happy days, would have been gloomier and darker than thy powerless old age!” But it is impossible to tell all the beauties of this poem. It must be read, and let us hope that a good translation of it will be published some day.
Lérmontoff’s demonism or pessimism was not the pessimism of despair, but a militant protest against all that is ignoble in life, and in this respect his poetry has deeply impressed itself upon all our subsequent literature. His pessimism was the irritation of a strong man at seeing others round him so weak and so base. With his inborn feeling of the Beautiful, which evidently can never exist without the True and the Good, and at the same time surrounded—especially in the worldly spheres he lived in, and on the Caucasus—by men and women who could not or did not dare to understand him, he might easily have arrived at a pessimistic contempt and hatred of mankind; but he always maintained his faith in the higher qualities of man. It was quite natural that in his youth—especially in those years of universal reaction, the thirties—Lérmontoff should have expressed his discontent with the world in such a general and abstract creation as is The Demon. Something similar we find even with Schiller. But gradually his pessimism took a more concrete form. It was not mankind altogether, and still less heaven and earth, that he despised in his latter productions, but the negative features of his own generation. In his prose novel, The Hero of our Own Time, in his Thoughts (Duma), etc., he perceived higher ideals, and already in 1840—i. e., one year before his death—he seemed ready to open a new page in his creation, in which his powerfully constructive and critical mind would have been directed towards the real evils of actual life, and real, positive good would apparently have been his aim. But it was at this very moment that, like Púshkin, he fell in a duel.
Lérmontoff was, above all, a “humanist,”—a deeply humanitarian poet. Already at the age of twenty-three, he had written a poem from the times of John the Terrible, Song about the Merchant Kaláshnikoff, which is rightly considered as one of the best gems of Russian literature, both for its powers, its artistic finish, and its wonderful epic style. The poem, which produced a great impression when it became known in Germany in Bodenstedt’s translation, is imbued with the fiercest spirit of revolt against the courtiers of the Terrible Tsar.
Lérmontoff deeply loved Russia, but not the official Russia: not the crushing military power of a fatherland, which is so dear to the so-called patriots, and he wrote:
I love my fatherland; but strange that love,
In spite of all my reasoning may say;
Its glory, bought by shedding streams of blood,
Its quietness, so full of fierce disdain,
And the traditions of its gloomy past
Do not awake in me a happy vision....
What he loved in Russia was its country life, its plains, the life of its peasants. He was inspired at the same time with a deep love towards the natives of the Caucasus, who were waging their bitter fight against the Russians for their liberty. Himself a Russian, and a member of two different expeditions against the Circassians, his heart throbbed nevertheless in sympathy with that brave, warm-hearted people in their struggle for independence. One poem, Izmail-Bey, is an apotheosis of this struggle of the Circassians against the Russians; in another, one of his best—a Circassian is described as fleeing from the field of battle to run home to his village, and there his mother herself repudiates him as a traitor. Another gem of poetry, one of his shorter poems, Valérik, is considered by those who know what real warfare is as the most correct description of it in poetry. And yet, Lérmontoff disliked war, and he ends one of his admirable descriptions of fighting with these lines:
“I thought: How miserable is man! What does he want? The sky is pure, and under it there’s room for all; but without reason and necessity, his heart is full of hatred.—Why?”
He died in his twenty-seventh year. Exiled for a second time to the Caucasus (for a duel which he had fought at St. Petersburg with a Barrante, the son of the French ambassador), he was staying at Pyatigórsk, frequenting the shallow society which usually comes together in such watering places. His jokes and sarcasms addressed to an officer, Martýnoff, who used to drape himself in a Byronian mantle the better to capture the hearts of young girls, led to a duel. Lérmontoff, as he had already done in his first duel, shot sideways purposely; but Martýnoff slowly and purposely took his aim so as even to call forth the protests of the seconds—and killed Lérmontoff on the spot.