July 25, 2009

12. A Hero of All Times

Five and a half years ago, when I first read Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov's novel A Hero of Our Time («Герой нашего времени», 1839/1841), I sympathised greatly with its leading character Grigoriy Alexandrovich Pechorin in that the impressions other characters as well as many other readers and reviewers had of him (and even he had explicitly of himself at times) - namely emotional distance, coldness, calculativity and egocentricism - were in accordance with what I thought was the right way for leading one's life. I was extraordinarily misanthropic, cynical and individualistic back then, and probably because I recognised some sort of a similarity between Pechorin and myself, my support belonged devotedly to the hero when others condemned him deeply. For me Pechorin was a typical Byronic hero whose charismatic strength, social status as an outcast and nihilistic outlook on life made him one of the greatest personages in Russian literature.

After rereading Lermontov's magnum opus with its delightful descriptions of the nature and lifestyle of the people in the Caucasus, the centre of Pechorin's appeal to me shifted significantly. Apart from his selfish adaptiveness, arrogance as well as desire for social and sexual power, which have made him visibly distinguishable from other characters, Pechorin also shows signs of high intelligence, perceptiveness, introvertedness and strong self-criticism. His sharp awareness yet never complete comprehension of himself are accompanyed by his inner emptiness, purposelessness, existential ennui and strong alienation, all of which seem to be reflections of something much deeper than a psychological response to a certain social condition. The following extract from Pechorin's diary brilliantly illustrates this position:

"If I must die, I must! The world will lose little, and I am weary enough of it all. I am like a man who yawns at a ball and doesn't go home to sleep only because his carriage hasn't come."1

Furthermore, Pechorin's estrangement and deep boredom with life somewhat soften the characteristics of his personality and enable reviewers to see him not merely as a cause of suffering for those surrounding him but also as a vulnerable soul deeply and sharply affected by forces unknown to him. Though often cynically explaining his thoughts and behaviour from his fatalistic and socially distanced point of view, there are a couple of paragraphs in his self-description that show the reader a man in deep despair:

"Yes, such has been my lot since childhood. Everyone read signs of non-existent evil traits in my features. But since they were expected to be there, they did make their appearance. Because I was reserved, they said I was sly, so I grew reticent. I was keenly aware of good and evil, but instead of being indulged I was insulted and so I became spiteful. I was sulky while other children were merry and talkative, but though I felt superior to them I was considered inferior. So I grew envious. I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate. My cheerless youth passed in conflict with myself and society, and fearing ridicule I buried my finest feelings deep in my heart, and there they died. I spoke the truth, but nobody believed me, so I began to practice duplicity. Having come to know society and its mainsprings, I became versed in the art of living and saw how others were happy without that proficiency, enjoying for free the favors I had so painfully striven for. It was then that despair was born in my heart--not the despair that is cured with a pistol, but a cold, impotent desperation, concealed under a polite exterior and a good-natured smile. I became a moral cripple; I had lost one half of my soul, for it had shriveled, dried up and died, and I had cut it off and cast it away, while the other half stirred and lived, adapted to serve every comer. No one noticed this, because no one suspected there had been another half."

At the end of Princess Mary, Pechorin's feelings for Vera, the only woman who loves him no matter what, are far more deeper and complex than he allows himself to think, and his emotional state after the duel with Grushnitsky described by himself in the second part of the novel and by the unknown narrator and Maxim Maximytch in the first shows traits of depression indicating that there is a decisive difference between who he makes himself out to be and who he really is. Therefore, there is a sharp contradiction between Pechorin's mind and soul or, as you wish, ego and id: wanting to understand himself intellectually more deeply, his mind is full of explanations and justifications about his inner self, which is not unveiled through this operation but even more concealed.

Apart from Pechorin's own diligent yet poor comprehension of himself, even other two major narrators of the novel - an unknown army officer, who has been suggested to be the author himself, and Maxim Maximytch, an older colleague of Pechorin - don't seem to throw light into the question about his psychological core. Although Lermontov has built up the novel using the technique of multiperspectivity (making it thus a precursor for the cinematic concept known as the Rashomon effect), neither any particular perspective separately nor all of them as a whole provide an adequate translation about Pechorin's soul. Therefore the "truth" of the novel can never be final. Sigmund Freud has stated that one of the main goals of his psychoanalysis was to bring everything in the subconsciousness into daylight, i.e. to make its contents fully conscious. Lermontov seems to have known more than half a century before Freud that the deepest sources of humanity will always remain untransmittable and human soul can never be completely understood.

In his essay Authors and Writers (1960), Roland Barthes claimed that whereas a writer uses the language merely as a means for forwarding the thought and does not generally admit that his message is reflexive, the author knows that his language inaugurates ambiguity and "offers itself, paradoxically, as a monumental silence to be deciphered".2 In A Hero of Our Time, Pechorin's whole personality - in fact, due to the purpose and the composition, the whole plot of the novel - is a reflection of the above-mentioned silence, which makes Lermontov a big author rather than "just" a writer in a Barthesian sense. One might try decipher the silence, but the attempt will always be incomplete, for a human being can never be a fully centralised subject, an executor of his free will, a skilled translator of his own soul. Therefore, it is understandable why the author claims the novel to be not just a portrait of one man but "a portrait built up of all our generation's vices in full bloom". It stunningly portrays the unbearability of being a human, and Pechorin should not be associated with a certain socio-cultural era but could be called as a hero of all times.

1 This and the following extracts from the novel have been taken from its English translation by Martin Parker (available on the Internet: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/myl/hero.htm).

2 R. Barthes. Critical Essays. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, p. 147.