Product Description

In structure, the book consists of a collection of short stories and novellas rather than a single narrative. These stories, however, are linked in two ways. Firstly, all feature the same protagonist, Grigoriy Pechorin, a young officer serving with the Russian army in the Caucasus. Secondly, they are bound together by a complex framework featuring a single anonymous narrator (not to be identified with Lermontov himself), a traveller in the Caucasus. The first story, Bela, is supposedly told to this narrator by Maksim Maksimych, a brother-officer of Pechorin. The second, Maksim Maksimych, is related by the narrator himself and deals with a meeting between Pechorin and Maksim. The other three, Taman, Princess Mary and The Fatalist, are all told in Pechorin's own words, taken from his journal which has come into the narrator's hands after Pechorin's death.

It is the fourth tale, Princess Mary, which is the longest and the one which lies at the heart of the work. Bela and Taman are adventure stories with an exotic setting (the Caucasus had the same sort of appeal for nineteenth-century Russians as India had for their British contemporaries). Maksim Maksimych is a linking narrative, and the final story, The Fatalist is an unsettling, spooky treatment of the concepts of fate and predestination.

In Princess Mary, the mood changes abruptly from the romantic exoticism of the earlier stories. Pechorin is stationed in a fashionable spa town in the northern Caucasus. Here he has little to occupy his time, and becomes embroiled in liaisons with two women, the Mary of the title (the daughter of an aristocratic family), and Vera, a former mistress of his, now unhappily married to an older husband. As a result of these intrigues, Pechorin quarrels with Grushnitsky, a rival for Mary's affections, and the story culminates in a duel between the two men.

The loose, episodic structure of the novel must have seemed very radical to readers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lermontov also seems to prefigure later developments in the novel in his treatment of the character of Pechorin, a cynical, amoral figure who does not conform to the normal nineteenth idea of a literary "hero". This may make the title of the book seem ironic. Lermontov himself recognises this when he invents a dialogue between his narrator and his imaginary readers. The narrator says that the title of the book would be his reply should anyone ask him for his opinion of Pechorin's character. "But that is wicked irony!" Lermontov imagines his readers replying, to which the narrator's only comment is "I don't know.....". The suggestion is thereby given that the title can be taken both in an ironic sense and also at face value.

In a limited sense, Pechorin can indeed be seen as a heroic figure. A common usage of the word "hero" (possibly its original usage) is a person of great bravery, and there is no doubt that, in his duel with Grushnitsky, Pechorin shows both physical courage and indifference to death. What he lacks is the moral stature of the true hero in the unqualified sense of the word. We may admire someone who shows courage in order to help others, or in the service of his country, or in defence of a moral principle. Although this is difficult for us to understand today, people in the nineteenth century (or at least the upper classes from which Lermontov came) may also have admired someone who was prepared to risk death in defence of his honour or the honour of a loved one. What does not seem admirable, either from the perspective of the nineteenth century or from that of the twenty-first, is a contempt for death arising out of boredom with life, and it is this boredom which is the motivation for many of Pechorin's actions. His pursuit of Mary and Vera (like his earlier relationship with the Caucasian girl Bela) is born not of love or affection for the women involved, or even of sexual desire, but rather of a lack of anything better with which to occupy himself. He fights the duel with Grushnitsky not out of a belief that some things are worth dying for, but rather out of a belief that nothing is worth living for.

If Pechorin is not a conventional hero, neither is he a conventional literary villain in the sense of a brutal or Machiavellian evildoer, whose evil serves as a contrast to the virtue of the hero or heroine. Although there is something demonic about him in the way he brings misery to others, he is not wholly evil. A surprising side of his character brought out in his journals is his sensitivity to the beauty of nature; vivid descriptions of Caucasian scenery alternate with details of squalid intrigues. This is more than the stock Romantic cliché about wild characters being drawn to wild scenery; Lermontov uses these passages to suggest that even Pechorin sometimes aspires to a better way of life. After the literally breathtaking description of his duel with Grushnitsky, Pechorin concludes the story of Princess Mary with an unexpectedly poetic image, comparing himself to a mariner who has become so used to storm and strife that he cannot abide a peaceful life ashore and who paces the beach, watching for the sail that will take him back to sea.

Although there are similar characters in Romantic fiction, such as Pushkin's Onegin, the restless, cynical Pechorin can also be seen as prefiguring the "outsider" anti-heroes of the literature of the mid-twentieth century. (Camus's Meursault and Osborne's Jimmy Porter are examples that come to mind). More than a century and a half after his creation, Pechorin still seems a very modern figure; an anti-hero for our times as much as his own. I finished the book with only two regrets; firstly, that Lermontov's untimely death prevented him from writing any more novels, and secondly that there do not currently seem to be any English versions of his poetry in print.

The author was also a very good painter. The hard cover edition I have contains 4 paintings by him (one of them was the cover). The death of Lermontov at such a young age was a great loss to the world literature.