My Sister Life and The Zhivago Poems

In Memory of the Demon

✦ 7 ✦ In Memory of the Demon He appeared in the nights, In a glacier’s blue light from Tamára. With his wings he defined The dominion of nightmare and horror. Didn’t weep or enwrap Naked arms that were scarred and tormented. Still the grave lay intact By the fence of the Gruzian temple. Like a hunchback grotesque, At the grating the shape never grimaced. And the flute by the lamp, Though it sighed, never spoke of the Princess. An inferno then swept Through his hair and, like phosphor, it sparkled. The colossus stood deaf To the Caucasus graying for sorrow. At a yard from the door, As he picked at the threads of his caftan, By the glaciers he swore: “Sleep, my love,—I’ll return as an avalanche.” The Demon is the hero of a famous narrative poem by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), Russia’s foremost Romantic poet and the dedicatee of My Sister Life. In Lermontov’s poem the Demon, a fallen angel, is a figure of rebellion and renunciation who roams the Caucasus in a melancholy search for love and peace. He falls in love with the young Gruzian (Georgian) princess Tamara, who ✦ 8 ✦ is about to be married. After killing her bridegroom, he appears to the girl in her dreams. Fleeing to a nunnery in an effort to resist her tempter, Tamara at last succumbs to his passionate suit and, on yielding to his kiss, dies. As the Demon is about to fly off with her soul in his arms, an angel intervenes and carries the girl to heaven. At the poem’s end the Demon is once again condemned to roam the world in eternal solitude. ...