Let Our Fame Be Great (15 page)

The review, told in the form of a dialogue between three companions and published in a prominent Russian magazine, was very rude about both him and his work. Instead of caring much, he mocks it by reading it out loud in a funny voice. ‘The vexation which reading the article had provoked in me completely disappeared and we burst out laughing in all sincerity,' he wrote.

This despairingly sardonic world view developed further over the years as Pushkin distracted himself from his stultifying existence with flirting and dancing. After his marriage, he was awarded the lowest court rank – something he interpreted as an insult to himself, the greatest poet of his generation, and which may well have been designed solely to keep his gorgeous wife at court – and sank further into rage. In the claustrophobic world of St Petersburg, he was too big to be tolerated and finally was killed in a duel in 1837, victim of a Dutchman who had insulted his wife.

His funeral was closed to non-family members to prevent a political demonstration, but Lermontov exploded with rage anyway. Stinging with the insult that Russia's poet had been killed, and by a foreigner at that, he penned a savage attack on court hypocrisy shocking even by his standards.

‘You, hungry crowd that swarms around the throne, butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory, you hide behind the shelter of the
law, before you, right and justice must be dumb! But, parasites of vice, there's God's assize; there is an awful court of law that waits,' he wrote in a scintillating postscript to his poem ‘Death of a Poet'.

He had gone too far. He had called the tsar's own companions ‘false and worthless slanderers' and would have to pay the price. His rooms were searched. He was confined to barracks and interrogated with all the humiliating skill of the tsar's experts. The reaction was swift; Lermontov was sent to the Caucasus to serve in the dragoons, without even time to say goodbye to his friends. To him, it was a catastrophe, but the Caucasus had finally got the great writer it deserved.

If the tsar's police had intended to beat the young officer into obedience, they were to be disappointed. Pyatigorsk was home to a surprising degree of freedom. A doctor in the town lent him dangerously liberal books when Lermontov arrived to take the waters for most of the summer. He met some of the Decembrists too, including Lorer, the reluctant soldier who described the battle also witnessed by Bell in Chapter 3. It is clear from Lorer's memoirs that Lermontov's bitterness with the world was not just a front preserved for his writing.

‘From the first step of our acquaintance I did not like Lermontov. I was always happy to come upon kind, warm people, who could maintain in all phases of their lives a beneficial ardour in the heart, a living sympathy for all that is lofty or beautiful, but, speaking with Lermontov, he struck me as cold, bilious, irritable, and a hater of mankind in general,' wrote Lorer, who characteristically reacted to the nasty young man by trying to be nice to him.

There was a generation gap. The idealistic Decembrists could not understand the new wave of hard cynics like Lermontov. Another Decembrist, Nazimov, who had been imprisoned together with Lorer in Siberia, was shocked by the young man's attitude to life. ‘We have no purpose, we just meet, go on sprees, follow some sort of career and chase women,' Lermontov told him. And he backed up his petulant words with similarly nasty deeds. He at one point ate a whole picnic himself, without allowing any of his fellow guests to have any. When a would-be poet visited him, Lermontov listened to some of his poetry while eating his pickled cucumbers, then ran away with the cucumbers that remained before his guest had finished.

He did not do any actual fighting that year, since a trip to the Black Sea coast was cancelled when news came that his regiment had to join the tsar in Georgia. He loved the solitary trips on horseback through the magnificent central Caucasus, and he was just settling in at the headquarters of his regiment in Georgia, when news came from the court. He had been pardoned, and was free to return northwards. He took his time, staying in Tbilisi for a while and employing Bestuzhev's language teacher to help him pick up the Turkic of the mountains. But he could not stay for ever. Home once more, he received a full pardon and the right to live in St Petersburg by April 1838. His disgrace had lasted little more than a year, but it had sown ideas in his head that would burst forth in the first great novel in the Russian language.

A Hero of Our Time
is a staggeringly complete work, especially when you consider it was written by a man in his early twenties who had to invent the form as he went along. Written in a structural knot that twists chronology inside out, it recounts the tale of a young man whose passions lead him to destroy everything he touches, to the bewildered consternation of older men who cannot understand his motivation.

In it, he ripped up Pushkin and Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, and mercilessly satirized the celebration of the Caucasus as a place of freedom. Instead, his Caucasus was a place of dissipation, boredom, cynical seduction, savagery and pointless violence. While stationed in a village on the Russian defensive line, the hero Pechorin seduces Bela, a wild beauty of the mountains. Pechorin is a disillusioned hero, unlucky in love, straight out of a Caucasus cliché. But Lermontov took the cliché, wrenched it into a new shape and turned it on its head. ‘When I saw Bela in my home, when for the first time I held her in my lap and kissed her black curls, I – fool that I was – imagined she was an angel sent to me by compassionate fate. . . I was wrong again. The love of a wild girl was little better than that of a lady of rank; the ignorance and the naivety of one pall on you as much as the coquetry of the other. I still like her, I suppose; I am grateful to her for several rather sweet moments; I am ready to die for her – only I find her company dull,' he wrote.

Pechorin was above all bored. Everything he did was to alleviate his boredom. He was even bored of boredom. Fashionable society, he said, was so fashionably bored that it had become rather boring to be bored. ‘Nowadays those people who were really bored the most tried to conceal this misfortune as though it were a vice,' he noted with a sardonic glee.

Lermontov claimed Pechorin was not a reflection of himself, though there was clearly much the two had in common, but a composite image of the whole post-Decembrist generation. He told his audience that previously they had used fiction to escape from the ghastly reality of society, but now reality had entered into fiction, and they would have to face the consequences.

‘You will tell me that a man cannot be as bad as all that; and I shall tell you that since you have believed in the possibility of so many tragic and romantic villains having existed, why can you not believe in the reality of Pechorin,' he asked in the preface to the second edition. ‘People have been fed enough sweetmeats; it has given them indigestion: they need some bitter medicine, some caustic truths. However, do not think after this that the author of this book ever had the proud dream of becoming a reformer of mankind's vices . . . Suffice it to say that the disease has been pointed out; goodness knows how to cure it.'

In a stroke, Lermontov had killed Caucasus fiction as something that the educated elite could take seriously. His ‘hero' was not honourable to Russian women and he did not rescue tribeswomen to a life of Christian respectability. Instead, he moved from being the dupe of a female smuggler – whom he had to throw into the sea to stop her killing him – to being a cynical seducer who treats all women as playthings fit only to stave off boredom.

Unsurprisingly, the tsar was not amused. ‘The author suffers from a most depraved spirit, and his talents are pathetic,' he wrote in a letter to his wife, before going on to spectacularly miss the point of the novel (and, thus, rather confirm its central argument of the vacuity of the tsar's court) by praising Maksim Maksimich, an army captain who is the novel's hapless and stolid stooge. ‘The Captain's character is nicely sketched. In beginning to read the story I had hoped, and
was rejoicing, that he was the Hero of Our Times . . . but such a hope is not to be fulfilled in this book, and M. Lermontov was unable to develop the noble and simple character [of the Captain]. He is replaced by wretched and uninteresting people, who – proving to be tiresome – would have been far better ignored and thus not provoke one's disgust.'

Lermontov, clearly, was not going to survive long at court, especially as he began to misbehave at literary salons and in public. A request to be transferred back to the Caucasus was refused. ‘They won't even let me be killed,' he wrote in a letter. So he tried to arrange death for himself. Challenged to a duel, he met the son of the French ambassador in the snow with pistols. It could have been a startling echo of Pushkin's fate, since the older poet was killed by the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador, but it was not to be. The Frenchman missed, and Lermontov shot upwards.

But it was only a temporary escape. He was arrested for duelling, tried and found guilty. The tsar himself determined the sentence. Lieutenant Lermontov was sent back to the Caucasus, as an infantry officer. The tsar hoped he would ‘brain-wash himself' and rewrite his masterpiece to give the dull Captain a greater part.

Strangely, Lermontov turned out to be an excellent soldier, and a brave despatch rider. There is great irony in the fact that while he made the fictional Caucasus a scene for disillusion and mockery, in truth it was the one place he found freedom. The battles he witnessed in the eastern Caucasus gave fresh material for poems questioning the point of what he was doing, but he entered into the fighting wholeheartedly while it was going on. A poem from this time quotes Kazbek, the giant mountain peak which towers over the pass to Georgia, as saying: ‘Miserable men! Oh, what do they want? The earth's great plain gives room for all beneath the sky; yet ceaselessly and all in vain, alone, they war for ever, why?'

Riding a white horse, and affecting long hair and dirty clothes, he rode through the forests of Chechnya in command of a company of irregular troops, and was repeatedly praised for his bravery. He was recommended for a medal. ‘This officer in spite of all dangers carried out his duties with superior courage and cold-bloodedness, and broke
into the enemy entrenchments in the first ranks of the bravest,' the account said. But the suggestion was turned down in the government, and it was clear his disgrace had not ended.

After a short leave in St Petersburg, Lermontov decided to take the waters at the scene of his childhood love affair: Pyatigorsk, where his fictional hero Pechorin had fought a duel over a princess, whose heart he then broke when he became bored of her.

The cottage he stayed in is now home to a Lermontov museum. Although it is surrounded by Soviet concrete hotels and apartment blocks, it is easy to see how it would have appealed to the writer. It is peaceful and set in a garden of its own, which somehow keeps out the traffic noise and stays warm long into autumn. He received guests here, for, although he was officially in Pyatigorsk to receive treatment, he launched himself into the social scene. He both scandalized and delighted local society, which was thrilled to find itself sharing the resort with the exiled young writer.

Among the guests was one Nikolai Martynov, who had trained as a cadet with Lermontov, and who was the butt of the writer's crueller jokes.

Martynov, a retired major, had affected the dress style of the highlanders. He shaved his head, and wore a tunic and a large, ornate dagger. He was, in fact, the very kind of ostentatious officer mocked by Lermontov in
A Hero of Our Time
. His clothing prompted Lermontov, with deliberate crudity, to refer to him as ‘the ferocious highlander with the big dagger'. It was a joke too far, and once more Lermontov was challenged to a duel.

It was crazy for him, already in a severely compromised position, to fight a duel at all. If word leaked out, he would lose his rank, his property and any chance of a return to polite society. But it was not certain that news would leak out. On his last duel, he had fired into the air, and apparently he intended to do so on this occasion as well. If both parties did so, then honour would be satisfied, and the matter could be hushed up.

But Lermontov was not the kind of man for that. According to the excellent account in Laurence Kelly's
Lermontov: Tragedy in the Caucasus
, the writer could not resist one more humiliation. Turning to his
second, he said loudly: ‘I shall not fire at this fool' and ostentatiously declined to fire. Martynov, ‘goaded beyond control', strode towards him and fired his pistol at close range. Lermontov fell. He died a few minutes later.

Historians have given wildly different accounts of why Lermontov was killed. Soviet writers liked to argue that Martynov had been acting on secret government instructions to kill the poet, while another account has the hapless Martynov insulting the writer and forcing him to propose a duel. The account given by Kelly seems by far the more in keeping with his personality, however.

I like to think that Lermontov lived faster than normal people. Had he not died in the duel in July 1841, he would have died in battle soon after. He had already written one of Russia's greatest novels, as well as several of its great poems, and he was only twenty-six years old.

When the Crimean War ended in 1856, and the foreign troops left Circassia, the full fury of the Russian response fell on the highlanders.

And the situation looked even bleaker with the accession of a new, energetic tsar. Many believe Nikolai I, who had been so inflexible about the sites of Russian fortresses in the 1830s and stifled some of the century's greatest writers, to have been the most reactionary of all the Russian tsars, and almost any change would have been for the better. As it was, his oldest son Alexander proved a revelation. Nikolai died in 1855, during the Crimean War, his spirit perhaps broken by the dreadful performance of the Russian army he had created, and Alexander initially struggled with his father's legacy. His true potential was only shown when he had concluded peace.