But it is not in poems such as these that Lermontov’s most characteristic qualities are to be found. Lermontov owed nothing to his contemporaries, little to his predecessors, and still less to foreign models. It is true that, as a school-boy, he wrote verses full of Byronic disillusion and satiety, but these were merely echoes of his reading. The gloom of spirit which he expressed later on was a permanent and innate feature of his own temperament. Later, the reading of Shelley spurred on his imagination to emulation, but not to imitation. He sought his own path from the beginning, and he remained in it with obdurate persistence. He remained obstinately himself, indifferent as a rule to outside events, currents of thought and feeling. And he clung to the themes which he chose in his youth. His mind to him a kingdom was, and he peopled it with images and fancies of his own devising. The path which he chose was a narrow one. It was a romantic path. He chose for the subject of the poem by which he is perhaps most widely known, The Demon, the love of a demon for a woman. The subject is as romantic as any chosen by Thomas Moore; but there is nothing now that appears rococo in Lermontov’s work. The colours are as fresh to-day as when they were first laid on. The heroine is a Circassian woman, and the action of the poem is in the Caucasus.
The Demon portrayed is not the spirit that denies of Goethe, nor Byron’s Lucifer, looking the Almighty in His face and telling him that His evil is not good; nor does he cherish—
“the study of revenge, immortal hate,”
of Milton’s Satan; but he is the lost angel of a ruined paradise, who is too proud to accept oblivion even were it offered to him. He dreams of finding in Tamara the joys of the paradise he has foregone. “I am he,” he says to her, “whom no one loves, whom every human being curses.” He declares that he has foresworn his proud thoughts, that he desires to be reconciled with Heaven, to love, to pray, to believe in good. And he pours out to her one of the most passionate love declarations ever written, in couplet after couplet of words that glow like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp, Tamara yields to him, and forfeits her life; but her soul is borne to Heaven by the Angel of Light; she has redeemed her sin by death, and the Demon is left as before alone in a loveless, lampless universe. The poem is interspersed with descriptions of the Caucasus, which are as glowing and splendid as the impassioned utterance of the Demon. They put Pushkin’s descriptions in the shade. Lermontov’s landscape-painting compared with Pushkin’s is like a picture of Turner compared with a Constable or a Bonnington.
Lermontov followed up his first draft of The Demon (originally planned in 1829, but not finished in its final form until 1841) with other romantic tales, the scene of which for the most part is laid in the Caucasus: such as Izmail Bey, Hadji-Abrek, Orsha the Boyar—the last not a Caucasian tale. These were nearly all of them sketches in which he tried the colours of his palette. But with Mtsyri, the Novice, in which he used some of the materials of the former tales, he produced a finished picture.
Mtsyri is the story of a Circassian orphan who is educated in a convent. The child grows up home-sick at heart, and one day his longing for freedom becomes ungovernable, and he escapes and roams about in the mountains. He loses his way in the forest and is brought back to the monastery after three days, dying from starvation, exertion, and exhaustion. Before he dies he pours out his confession, which takes up the greater part of the poem. He confesses how in the monastery he felt his own country and his own people forever calling, and how he felt he must seek his own people. He describes his wanderings: how he scrambles down the mountain-side and hears the song of a Georgian woman, and sees her as she walks down a narrow path with a pitcher on her head and draws water from the stream. At nightfall he sees the light of a dwelling-place twinkling like a falling star; but he dares not seek it. He loses his way in the forest, he encounters and kills a panther. In the morning, he finds a way out of the woods when the daylight comes; he lies in the grass exhausted under the blinding noon, of which Lermontov gives a gorgeous and detailed description—
“And on God’s world there lay the deep
And heavy spell of utter sleep,
Although the landrail called, and I
Could hear the trill of the dragonfly
Or else the lisping of the stream ...
Only a snake, with a yellow gleam
Like golden lettering inlaid
From hilt to tip upon a blade,
Was rustling, for the grass was dry,
And in the loose sand cautiously
It slid, and then began to spring
And roll itself into a ring,
Then, as though struck by sudden fear,
Made haste to dart and disappear.”
Perishing of hunger and thirst, fever and delirium overtake him, and he fancies that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream, where speckled fishes are playing in the crystal waters. One of them nestles close to him and sings to him with a silver voice a lullaby, unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and alluring like the call of the Erl King’s daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches the high-water mark of his descriptive powers. Its pages glow with the splendour of the Caucasus.
To his two masterpieces, The Demon and Mtsyri, he was to add a third: The Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Oprichnik (bodyguardsman), and the Merchant Kalashnikov. The Oprichnik insults the Merchant’s wife, and the Merchant challenges him to fight with his fists, kills him, and is executed for it. This poem is written as a folk-story, in the style of the Byliny, and it in no way resembles a pastiche. It equals, if it does not surpass, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov as a realistic vision of the past; and as an epic tale, for simplicity, absolute appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and terseness, there is nothing in modern Russian literature to compare with it. Besides these larger poems, Lermontov wrote a quantity of short lyrics, many of which, such as “The Sail,” “The Angel,” “The Prayer,” every Russian child knows by heart.
When we come to consider the qualities of Lermontov’s romantic work, and ask ourselves in what it differs from the romanticism of the West—from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, Musset, Espronceda—we find that in Lermontov’s work, as in all Russian work, there is mingled with his lyrical, imaginative, and descriptive powers, a bed-rock of matter-of-fact common-sense, a root that is deeply embedded in reality, in the life of everyday. He never escapes into the “intense inane” of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never lost in the dim twilight of Coleridge. Romantic he is, but one note of Heine takes us into a different world: for instance, Heine’s quite ordinary adventures in the Harz Mountains convey a spell and glamour that takes us over a borderland that Lermontov never crossed.