Society organism cannot digest a foreign element. We are too local in our terrestrial standards to tolerate an individual who is made not of the same stuff that we are made of. Lermontov was a child of a different planet who fell upon our earth by some crude mistake, doomed to chafe twenty-six years among humans. As a child he protested against the fatal misplacement; he discharged his venom in demolishing flower-beds, in torturing animals with tears in his eyes, in brandishing his tiny fists against his grandmother, when he observed her mistreating the serfs. When he grew up—and he grew up early: at ten he loved a girl; at fifteen he conceived his greatest poems, Mtzyri and Demon—his protest had calmed down. He no longer wept or raged—he hated God and despised mankind. His contemporaries tell us that no one could stand his heavy penetrating look. Men hated and feared him; women hated and loved him, as they always do extraordinary things. Lermontov took revenge for his accidental association with mankind; he left behind him a long row of broken hearts and wounded ambitions. His rebellious spirit sought rest in chaos, in torturing others and himself, in creating around him an atmosphere of tragedy, in reckless fighting with the wild Caucasian mountaineers.
And he, the mutinous, seeks storm,
As if in storm he may find peace.
Pechorin, the hero of his autobiographical sketches collected in A Hero of Our Time, is the first Nietzschean in literature. His terse, unpretentious maxims and paradoxes have been re-echoed by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Przybyszewski, and other writers of the superman-literature. As always is the case with deliberate or unconscious commentators, they liquefy the original. One carelessly dropped sentence of Lermontov is elaborated in tons of Dostoevsky’s gallous psychology, in mountains of Nietzsche’s brain-splittering philosophy, in cognac-oceans of the vivisectionist-Przybyszewski. Pechorin does not talk much; he is too aristocratic for extravagance in words. Pechorin does not compromise; he is not made of that stuff. He neither repents nor seeks atonement; in his hatred for reality he does not erect a consoling phantom in the image of a Superman; he would dismiss with a contemptible shrug Falk’s matrimonial and sexual tribulations. Pechorin is eternally alone. Those who approach him are scorched with his unhuman flame. Alone, in the steppe, after a mad ride which kills his horse, Pechorin hugs the soil and weeps “like a child”. Like a child pressing to its mother’s bosom, plaintively demanding the Why and the Wherefore of existence among strangers. Shall we chuckle at the suddenly-discovered weakness of our enemy? Or shall we modestly turn away our eyes from the stolen sight of a god in his nudity?
I once called Lermontov a sorrowful demon. Not a Lucifer, not a Mephistopheles, but a Russian demon, as the sculptor Antokolsky conceived him. Lermontov-Demon-Pechorin, a quaint superman, neither god nor devil, a pluralistic being, a combination of cruelty and compassion, of contempt and sympathy, of cynicism and sentimentalism, of the loftiest and the basest, of the unhuman and of the human-all-too-human. Dostoevsky?
[1] A Hero of Our Time, by M. Y. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
The Poet Speaks
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
There are people in the world who like poetry if they know the poet. There are a good many people in Chicago just now who understand and enjoy Amy Lowell’s poetry because she read it to them at the Little Theatre.