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2 Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time Lermontov created, almost alone, a Russian novel in which the psychology of the hero played a major role. William Harkins A Hero of Our Time effects a remarkable synthesis of Western European and Russian literature of the first third of the nineteenth century. Lermontov set himself the task of inventing modern Russian prose and founded a tradition of psychological realism, drawing from Pushkin to go beyond the themes and heroes that Russian Romanticism had learned from Western Europe, in particular from France. Lermontov counters the thesis, French literature, with its antithesis, which for him, a Russian poet starting to write prose in the 1830s, is represented by the new, spare realism of Pushkin’s prose. By 1840 Russia had not yet produced a modern novel; in April of that year, Lermontov published the completed A Hero of Our Time. He was only twenty-five and had left two earlier prose works unfinished. The novel is far more accomplished than his first attempt, Vadim (1832–34), which echoes the elevated melodrama of Marlinsky.1 Lermontov’s next effort at a novel, Princess Ligovskaya (1836), interweaves the account of the hero’s romantic life with the tale of an impoverished civil servant, rendered in the naturalist tradition.2 It appears that Lermontov was attempting to do what Dostoevsky managed a few years later in Poor Folk (1846): to merge the two principal lines of contemporary Russian literature by uniting the world of the poor clerk with the sophisticated society novel. But the elements of each are undigested in Princess Ligovskaya, the two modes jarringly juxtaposed.3 Perhaps, as Eikhenbaum conjectures , Lermontov understood this. In June of 1838 Lermontov wrote to 34 Raevsky that he was abandoning Princess Ligovskaya: “I’m not writing, publishing’s a lot of nuisance, and I tried it, but unsuccessfully. . . . The novel you and I began dragged on and will probably not be finished, since the circumstances that comprised its basis have changed.”4 In that novel Lermontov had failed to unite the Romantic and the realist schools; in Hero he succeeds. What precipitated this abrupt maturation in Lermontov’s prose? He had had Pushkin’s prose to draw on since the early 1830s, as well as the abundant new French literature of that period. A few influential works appeared closer in time to the composition of Hero: Alfred de Musset’s Confession of a Child of the Century (1836) suggested the title of Lermontov ’s draft: One of the Heroes of the Beginning of the Century, and Charles de Bernard’s Gerfaut (1838) provides a few details for “Princess Mary.”5 The appearance of George Sand’s “L’Orco” in March 1838 inspired the structure of “Taman” and may have helped crystallize the combination of life experience with earlier reading of Pushkin that allowed Lermontov to begin writing Hero that year; together they provided material for elaboration of Pechorin’s character, some plot elements, and models for the structure of a novel made up of separate stories. Each one of the stories comprising Lermontov’s novel has its own particular French sources; the form and genres of the five chapters are inspired principally by Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin but also by de Vigny, Balzac, and possibly Diderot. In the synthesis of these opposed sets of tales, Lermontov achieves a completely new genre of Russian prose, the first Russian psychological novel, answering French Romanticism with Russian “simplicity”; he replaces philosophical, stylistic, and generic clichés of the French and Russian Romantic and naturalist traditions with a spare realism learned from Pushkin and thematizes this achievement by creating a hero who is aware of his literary sources. Lermontov does this self-consciously, even didactically; he deliberately uses French works that would be fresh in his readers’ minds, showing them how these models can be renovated to become the basis of a nonimitative Russian tradition, of which Pushkin is the exemplar. Lemontov’s sophistication escaped some of his contemporaries: “It is simply the unsuccessful experiment of a youthful writer, one who did not yet know how to write books, who was learning to write: the weak, flimsy essay of a young artist with promise. . . . He took up the novel too soon,” wrote Osip Senkovsky of A Hero of Our Time.6 This view of the novel as an “immature sketch,” in Senkovsky’s words, has caused it to be read as a naive adventure tale. Even Nabokov took the novel’s Lermontov...

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