JOHN GRIMES

He might have removed mountains or carved out empires; instead he turns his nails against provincial society and scratches. Pechorin—egoist, self-seeker, hater, superman in swaddlings—stifled to madness by the air of Russia, bled of energy, his idealism thwarted; fearing to raise his head from the ashes and launch against circumstance, there was nothing in all Holy Russia that could test his soul in supreme activity. He lacked the moral courage that forced the sons of the fathers into revolution. There was left mockery, and the insulting of the soul with puny wickedness, vapid and provincial. So genius was poured into the mould of the commonplace.

Pechorin sought a splendid isolation. He killed humanity in his heart, became a creature of self, and began to hate as sincerely as a revengeful, spoiled child. His hatred becomes sordid vindictiveness; his emotions correspond to tantrums. He feeds upon the ruined hopes and the despair of society, making himself “an author of middle-class tragedies.”

He looms before us on the screen, menacing, grandiose, Byronic. But he is great only from the scaling of values. His contact is incessantly with weaker types who bend or break before him. Grushnitski is a modish idealist; Bela, a captive maid who acknowledges his right to do as he wills; Vera, a hysterical sentimentalist of that spirituelle type to whom the intense physical traits of Pechorin make a ready appeal. She quiets her scruples with the sacred notion that she is sacrificing herself, soul and body to one whose life would otherwise be incomplete. Princess Mary is a typical Byronese victim, a devotee at the shrine of heroism, who for nothing in the world would give herself to a man who has not some mystery or who has not been the victim of some crushing sorrow. Contrast her with the vital, passionate Natalya in Turgene’s Rudin.... Pechorin hunts easy game. He acknowledges that he has never loved women of spirit: “Once only I loved a woman with a firm will that I was unable to vanquish. We parted enemies.” What would these erotic, parasitic Byrons subsist upon nowadays? Woman is no more the mere giver; she asks and receives in return.

Pechorin wins from us not honest hatred but contempt. One searches the book for an honorable impulse upon his part. He is a washed-out Byron; a pale Don Juan. He loves many women for the excitement of mere change. “We live out of curiosity. We expect something new. How absurd, and yet how vexatious!” Women fall at his feet and he asks derisively: “Can it be that wickedness is so attractive?” He knows the ways of his victim by heart, he anticipates her every move, and calls her accomplishment tiresome. Passion has shriveled until it is an inglorious segment of his life. It is a thing of curiosity rather than of sympathy. Love is an annoyance, yet he persists in it: “I feel within me an insatiate hunger that devours everything it meets upon the way. I look upon joy and suffering only in their relation to myself, regarding them as nutriment that sustains my spiritual forces.... To none has my love ever brought happiness because I have never sacrificed anything for the sake of those I loved. I have only tried to satisfy the strange cravings of my heart, greedily draining their feelings, their tenderness, their joy, their suffering—and I have never been able to sate myself.”

It occurs to Pechorin that such aimlessness cannot but be a misinterpretation of the mystic handwriting of life. “It cannot be that I came purposeless into the world. A purpose there must have been, and surely mine was an exalted destiny because I feel within my soul powers immeasurable. But I was unable to discover that destiny. I allowed myself to be carried away by the allurements of passions innane and ignoble. From that crucible I issued hard and cold as iron.”... “My chief pleasure is to make everything around me subject to my will. To be the cause of suffering or joy to another without having a definite right to be—is it not the sweetest food for our pride?”

Lermontov is honest. He makes no attempt to vindicate a type. He must have smiled at his hater, his incipient superman, shattered by fate casting himself on the bare steppe after killing his horse in a mad ride, and clasping his body to the earth. Did he think to merge himself with the great “I am”?

“Alas! there cometh a time when man shall no longer give birth to a star. Alas! there cometh the time of the most contemptible man who can no longer despise himself!”

Thus spake Zarathustra!

Not submission, self-abnegation, Tolstoyanism, but wholesome self-hatred, acknowledging in one’s self but a bridge to beyond-man. Pechorin saw life as an end in itself. He was a creature of the surface, he feared to plunge into the blue depths.

One smiles at his childlike attempt to be self-efficient, isolated, damnable. But one is impatiently sorry that his splendid vitality was turned from healthful pioneering to the puny triumphs of the ballroom, and the conquest of hysterical ladies. Young Russia despises life except as a means. It will hurl revolutions into the world’s face, it will build empires. Life will be a hot flame of action and not a hectic afterglow of spent passion.

[3] A Hero of Our Time, by A. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.