The gipsies admit him into their careless, free, happy life. Alèko, as they call him, falls in love with the only child of a very wise old man and is happy, just loving, lying about in the sun and taking round for show a tame bear.
Zemphìra, the girl, after bearing a son to Alèko, gets tired of him and falls in love with another gipsy. Alèko feels this very much and complains to her father, who tells him that he too in his youth lost his love in a similar way.
"'And thou didst not kill her lover?'" asks her lover. The old gipsy replies:
This does not satisfy Alèko, who kills Zemphìra and her lover, after which the old father implores him to leave their free, kind world and return to civilisation.
Pushkin next writes a Mazeppa of his own, the epic of Peter the Great, but not idealised as Byron's was.... The heroine Marỳa leaves her lover and becomes insane when her father is executed.
This stern, objective fragment of an epic, falling into their sentimental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses, and cupids, was like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan and executed by a god ... it is not surprising that it met with little or no appreciation. It is as if Tennyson had followed up his early poems in a style as concise as Pope's and as concentrated as Browning's dramatic lyrics. It revealed an entirely new phase in his style: hitherto it had seemed as shining and luscious fruit, now it became a concentrated, weighty tramp of ringing rhyme.
Pushkin has been accused (not by the Russians) of sentimentality ... a charge that can be confuted by quoting almost any of his lines at random.
Does this, for instance, reek of sentimentality?—
Or this?—
Or this Tenth Commandment?—
He was not given to brooding over disappointment, nor was there any self-centredness about him. Only once, on his twenty-eighth birthday, does he show himself obsessed with the problems of existence:
He was, par excellence, the singer of this world, reflecting it with a photographic exactness. Gogol called it reality turned into a pearl of creation, which is about the best and most concise definition we could require.
As a result of this Byronic obsession Pushkin was sent to Odessa to join the staff of the Governor. But the atmosphere of rectitude and cold officialdom bored him: trying his best was no good here: he was sent into the depths of the country to do easy and interesting reconnaissance work, to investigate the causes and results of the locust plague. The following is his official report:—
About this time he wrote to a friend a letter which was intercepted. It ran as follows:—
"I am reading the Bible. The Holy Ghost sometimes soothes me, but I prefer Goethe and Shakespeare. There is an Englishman here, a clever atheist, who overturns the theory of immortality—I am having lessons from him...."
The reading public got to know of it and devoured it ... officially it led to his banishment to the estate of his parents. His father bullied him so that he begged to be sent to a fortress. Jukòvski intervened and his parents left him to the care of his nurse, and he had two years of quiet, learning more and more of the old folklore. He wrote six long fairy tales of the school of Ruslàn and Ludmìla. He wrote the long historical poem Poltàva, the novel in verse, Evgèni Onyègin, the historical drama in blank verse, Borìs Godunòv, the story in verse, The Bronze Horsemen, and dozens of shorter poems. He abandoned Byron for Shakespeare.
"Shakespeare," he wrote about this time—"what a man! I am overwhelmed. What a nonentity Byron is with his travesty of tragedy, as compared to Shakespeare." We can trace this influence in Borìs Godunòv.
Shakespeare helped him to develop his power of realism: even his wonderland becomes a matter of course—Russia.
Evgèni Onyègin swept the country off its feet. Society suddenly saw the greatness of the simple beauty of Russia, the dignified, lovable Russian woman: in the hero he reflects his own education, tastes and manners: it is the first work of a consciously psychological analysis in Russian literature.
The typical man of society is bored with life because he does not know what real life is: he "hastened to live and hurried to feel" on too narrow a scale. His first blow is the realisation of the fact that the thoughtful girl of seventeen, whose love he neglected early in life, rejects his passion when she, married, is shining and dignified in society life. Then only, being honestly told by her that she still loves him, but is going to remain true to her husband, he flies from the capital, tortured by his first deep heart pain. Here the story ends. At the beginning he kills a romantic poet, Lensky, in a duel, a man of whom he is genuinely fond, but to whose fiancée, Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face like the foolish moon, he pays court out of sheer devilry. The elder sister, Tatiana, shy and dreamy, and yet clean-cut in character and iron-willed, is the girl who has given her heart to Onyégin and afterwards rejects him. She is as real as Diana Middleton or Sophia Western, as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman, taken straight from life, the crowning glory of Russian life. Mr Baring puts her confession of love on a level with Romeo and Juliet's leave-taking as one of the absolutely perfect things in the literature of the world. It is, he says, a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as spontaneous as a blackbird's song. It is Pushkin's most characteristic work. It is certainly the best-known and most popular. It is all—like Hamlet—quotations! Pushkin himself speaks as having seen the unfettered march of the novel in a magic prism. The scenes are clear, the nail is hit on the head every time, all the labour escapes notice. It arrests the attention as a story, it is amusing; it delights the intelligence. It is simply a story of everyday life executed perfectly by a master spirit.
The girl beseeches him to leave her.
Pushkin's own opinion of the work is shown in the dedication:
In form the novel is like Childe Harold. But the descriptions, the irony, and humour are truly Russian.
As an example of all three in one these may suffice:
"For forty years he nagged with his housekeeper, looked out of the window and squashed flies."
"Once upon a time the head of a secret team of gamblers, now he was a kind and simple father of a bachelor's numerous brood, living the life of a true philosopher: planting cabbages, breeding ducks and geese and teaching his youngsters the A B C."
All the characters use genuine everyday speech, and yet the realistic subjects are magically turned into poetry. "One can be a serious man and yet think of the beauty of one's nails."
An example of his descriptive power may be found in this stanza on Moscow:
As you can see even from these few extracts, the realism in Onyégin is the realism of Jane Austen—meticulous, correct, amazingly sketched in.
He imitated the Koran, blending sensuality with religious enthusiasm and even the element of nonsense in a way that is inimitably reminiscent of the Eastern Law.
Equally brilliant are his Imitations of Dante ... the Divine Comedy lives again for us in Pushkin's rendering: again, in The Journeying of Cæsar, we seem to be reading the Latin classics themselves. But his prose-work as a whole is perhaps below his poetry, though Baring does not think so. Unfortunately in England it is on these very prose works that we have for the most part to rely, because so few of his poems are translated.
He was not born with a passion to reform the world: he was neither Liberal nor Conservative: he was a democrat in his love for the Russian people, a patriot in his love of his country.
There seem to have been in him, however, two distinct spirits, as in so many other Russians—the inspired priest of Apollo and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children of the world. The former characteristic predominated, but the people, his readers, preferred his latter mood; they like the dazzling colours, the sensuousness of his early poems—they could not appreciate the nobler, simpler and more majestic harmonies of Borìs Godunòv and Onyégin.
It is this two-sidedness that makes for his all-embracing humanity—Dostoievsky called him πανανδρωπος—this capacity for understanding everybody which makes him so profoundly Russian. He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional and, like Peter the Great, spent his whole life in apprenticeship and all his energies in craftsmanship. He is completely the artist and never the fighter, which explains the coldness of much of his work.
He was no innovator of forms in his verse: he was content to follow the accepted types; nor did he ever fly too high ... he does not try to unlock the gates of the Unknown: the old iambic introduced by Lomonòsov was good enough for him. Only in Borìs Godunòv does he break out into an imitation of Shakespearean form: the play is rather like Henry VIII. in its plan: it is a succession of isolated scenes, not a coherent drama; there is no definite beginning or end.
On the other hand his scenes, taken by themselves, tragic or comic, are as vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters all live and are convincing.
As a chronicle it is completely successful. There are scenes so inspired as to be really in spirit Shakespearean, an absence of all conscious effort and visible artifice which only the greatest artists can attain to.
As there are no innovations, so are there no mannerisms: metaphors and similes are few and apt. Of Peter the Great we read:
Wholesome, breezy, clear-cut, genuine, free and honest—those are the adjectives to apply to his art. Unfortunately it is impossible to convey in English the ring and beauty of his original work.
While he was at home the Decembrists' revolt took place, 14th December 1824. He was absent from all his old friends and was naturally concerned about them. He petitioned the Government, signing a pledge never to join any secret society, to give him his liberty. One morning a field-yeger appeared, gave him time to put on his greatcoat and take his money, enter the sledge and dash to Petrograd. After travelling two hundred miles he was brought before the young Emperor and the following conversation took place:—
"Pushkin, I hope thou art pleased with thy return. Wouldst thou take part in the 14th December if thou wert here?"
"By all means, Sovereign. All my friends were in it. My absence alone has saved me."
"Well, thou hast played the fool sufficiently long. I hope thou wilt be sensible in the future, and we shall not quarrel. Send me all thy manuscripts. I shall be thy censor myself."
He was received everywhere with open arms. He joined the main current of social and literary life and speedily electrified society. He was for a little entirely happy, but he had overestimated the extent of his freedom. Gradually he realised that he was not allowed even to read aloud his writings without submitting them to his censor.
Borìs Godunòv was refused on the plea that it would have been better if the author had rewritten it in prose, turning it into a historical novel like those of Sir Walter Scott. Consequently the drama did not appear till 1831, much polished and toned down.
In these last years Pushkin founded and edited a literary monthly called The Contemporary, which played a great part in the development of the literature of Russia later on.
The net of officialdom was meanwhile being drawn tighter and tighter round him: he had to attend compulsory meaningless ceremonies at the Court. The Government gave him 20,000 roubles for the publication of his works, and elected him member of the Academy. But they would not allow him to retire from the service. In 1829 he dashed away to the Caucasus without leave.
He joined the ranks and fought, but returned safely. He then married a society beauty whom he loved sincerely but who increased his expenses enormously. He continued to train his talents and wrote a series of brilliant epigrams which increased the number of his friends and foes. He had enemies in every camp.... Meanwhile a young officer, of French and Dutch extraction, by name Baron Dantes, began to press his attentions on Pushkin's wife. Pushkin received a series of anonymous letters ... he, however, trusted his wife completely. She urged him to retire with her to the country to get away from the impending doom, but he challenged the Baron, who had by that time married the sister of Pushkin's wife. Pushkin was fatally wounded in the duel and died mourned by a whole nation.... And what is his legacy? He must have been no mean poet who could induce Turgenev to say that he would burn all his works if he could but have written four lines of the conversation between the Bookseller and the Poet.
His legacy is that he stripped Reality from her daintily-coloured veil—not to show her possible hideousness, but to enjoy the beauty of her form. And beneath his hands nakedness rose like a piece of magic sculpture, warm and breathing of life. His variety and the width of his range are astonishing.
I have attempted to convey something of this. He can write an elegy as tender as Tennyson, a picture of a snowstorm in intoxicating rhythms which would have made Poe green with jealousy; his patriotic poems are lofty and inspired, his prayers humble, sincere and devout. His love poems are as playful as Heine's, as tender as Musset's; he can translate with equal spirit and exactness Byron and Horace, the Koran and Dante. Mr Baring selects two poems as examples of the greatness of his style and the force of his magic.
The other and greater is The Prophet, which is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression: it is, Mr Baring says, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language.
"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the crossing of the ways: and he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as soft as sleep; and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heavens shuddering and the flight of the angels in the height, and the moving of the beasts that are under the waters, and the noise of the growth of the branches in the valley. He bent down over me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore out my sinful tongue, and he took away that which is idle and that which is evil with his right hand, and his right hand was dabbled with blood; and he set there in its stead, between my perishing lips, the tongue of a wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder with a sword, and he plucked out my trembling heart, and in my cloven breast he set a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, and the voice of God called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take heed, and hear; be filled with my will, and go forth over the sea and over the land and set light with my word to the hearts of the people.'"
Lèrmontov was descended from a Scotsman, George Learmonth, who was present at the siege of a small Polish town in 1613.
He had always been connected with the army: his father was an officer, his mother a young girl, at the time of her marriage, of noble birth: she died at the age of twenty. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother, who only permitted him to visit his father on very rare occasions. He was in all respects very lonely, entirely without society or friendship, excellently educated by the very best tutors in noble tastes and refined manners, with such success that he knew French, German and English thoroughly before he was twelve. If ever he saw a serf being punished he would immediately give vent to his anger by attacking the torturer with a knife or stones.
He was, in spite of his fondness for other languages, tenacious of his own, and a great lover of Russia. "In the Russian folklore," he wrote when he was fifteen, "told from mouth to mouth there is probably more than in the whole of French literature."
But it was the Caucasus that first led him to creative art. He was ten when he first accompanied his grandmother to that land, whither she went in search of health. It is, I think, worth while to dwell on the beauties of this country in order to see quite what sort of scenery it was that so fascinated the child's mind.
In his fifteenth and sixteenth year Lèrmontov was educated at the University Pension at Moscow, and filled all his exercise-books with poetry, all of which betrayed a deeply impressionable, passionate, highly strung nature, permeated with views quite extraordinary in one so young.
The two years following saw him a member of the University proper, consciously isolating himself from his contemporaries in spite of adequate means; on the other hand, he launched into the sea of fashionable society life.
The influence of an unending round of balls, masquerades and supper-parties prompted him to write drinking songs and epigrams which could not be tolerated by the Press, while at the same time he showed an extraordinary power of detaching himself from vulgarity and giving himself up to his work. Always he would invest his productions with mockery and sarcasm.
During his second year he left Moscow on account of a row which he got into over an unpopular professor, and went to Petrograd, where he joined the fashionable Yunker's School, and learnt some of the joys of military life.
Half his time was occupied in revelling, the other half in seeking some remote class-room where he could work and satisfy his craving to write.
At the age of nineteen he was commissioned and gazetted in the Life Guard Hussars, already the author of The Demon, though that poem was still in manuscript. A satirical comedy was censored, and other poems began to appear in the reviews, so that not only the literary circles but Society looked with keen expectation for something good at his hands.
One of his poems in particular at this time attracted attention: it is the author's prayer in dedicating a girl to the Virgin. It was so sincere and simple in its religious tone that some of his critics declared that it was merely a pose of his. They failed to realise that his sanctuary was his supreme elation of love for a girl who answered his feelings by friendship. Lèrmontov loathed the idea of the marriage bond—real love was to him something far higher: his Vàrenka, who married another, was his kindred spirit. She it was whom he dedicated to the Virgin, and this relationship finds expression in several of his poems.
For five years he remained in his regiment, and during this time translated Byron, Heine and Goethe ... then in 1837 came the blow of Pushkin's death, which stung Lèrmontov to such a pitch of fury that he wrote his immortal ode, On the Death of Pushkin, which became at once known and repeated throughout the length and breadth of Russia by people who repeated it to, and copied it from, one another:
For this daring outburst he was arrested, tried and banished to the Caucasus, which again acted, as in his childhood, as a direct inspiration. New poems came flying to Petrograd full of human passions, and descriptions of a Nature prodigal and passionate as her devoted lover. No geography book could ever give such a vivid picture of the Caucasus as Lèrmontov's verse and prose. As the Arabs say: "They turn our hearing into seeing." Fame at last descended upon him. Then appeared the "Song of the Tsar Ivàn Vasìlyevich, the young Opriknik, and the Brave Merchant Kalàshinkov," in which the Opriknik insults the merchant's wife, and the merchant challenges him to fight with his fists, kills him and is executed for it. The poem is written as a folk-song, in the style of the Byliny: as an epic there is nothing in modern Russian literature to compare with it for simplicity, appropriateness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and terseness.
Every line begins with an anapæst, followed by some odd dactyls, and ends in a dactyl unrhymed. It has been translated by Madame Voynich admirably, and is published by Elkin Mathews.
While in the Caucasus, his age being now twenty-three, Lèrmontov finished The Demon, on which he had been at work for so long.
The personality of this Demon, the Spirit of Exile, is quite different from the Satanic Mephistopheles or Lucifer. With all his contempt for Earth, Lèrmontov's Demon is fascinating in every way. He is always musing over his former days in Heaven, and vainly seeking some relief in the desert of time and space into which he is cast out alone; he is the embodiment of the idea of loneliness in a proud soul. His sudden love for the Grùzian girl Tamàra inflames him with the desire of abandoning his pride, of opening his heart to Good, of making peace with Heaven ... we are never allowed to forget that the Angel and the Demon had been brothers. Moved by his love, the Demon is on the verge of humility and of opening his heart to Goodness when his pride and hatred return upon him, due entirely to the tone of enmity which the Angel adopts on meeting him. The Angel is a good hater and thorough in his scornfulness. Being Tamàra's celestial guardian, he becomes quite human and understandable when he meets the Demon (whom he might have conquered by greeting him with Heavenly grace) with icy contempt and threats. Here we have a perfect delineation of the kinship between the spirits of good and evil.
The Demon's wooing of Tamàra is irresistibly bewitching, one of the most passionate love declarations ever written, in couplets of sonorous iambics that glow like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp. Tamàra yields to him (what human girl could have done otherwise?) and forfeits her life, but her soul is borne off to Heaven by the Angel: by death she has expiated her offence, and the Demon is left as before desolate in a loveless universe.
Owing to his grandmother's persistence Lèrmontov was recalled before one of his five years' exile had elapsed, and we see him again in Petrograd with his old regiment, a tremendous source of interest to all society, half of whom hated, while half loved him.
In 1838 Duma appeared, in which Lèrmontov gave to the world his view of his contemporaries: it was the severest indictment imaginable, far saner and truer than Byron's, not of the great Russian nation of course, but of the shallow side of that human nature to which he had allied himself. How clear he was of the shortcomings of that lot of people to which he himself, at least outwardly, belonged, and how deeply it hurt him is proved by the exquisite precision with which he exercised his lancet of lampoon.
It is in form a perfect example of his rhymed and scanned prose as it were—that is, not a single word would have to be altered or shifted if you wanted to write it out in prose. It is the work not of a superficial satirist, but of a deep and profound thinker, of a Shelley rather than a Byron.
In 1840 he was challenged to a duel by a son of the French ambassador, in which Lèrmontov fired his shot in the air and received himself a slight scratch. For this he was again arrested and banished as before to the Caucasus. This, the last year of his life, he spent at Patigorsk, a town forming the centre of a fashionable healing-springs district, at the foot of a mountain range. Here he wrote his only novel in prose, The Hero of Our Times, as great a piece of artistry as anything that he did in poetry. It is the first psychological novel in Russia. The hero, Pechorin by name, was undoubtedly Lèrmontov himself, although he said, and quite probably thought, that he was merely creating a type.
This Pechorin is an officer in the Caucasus, who analyses his own character, and lays bare his weaknesses, follies and faults with extreme candour and frankness. "I am incapable of friendship," he says. "Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although often neither of them will admit it: I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a tiring business."
Or again: "I have an innate passion for contradiction ... the presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament would turn me into a passionate dreamer."
On the eve of fighting a duel he writes:
"If I die it will not be a great loss to the world, and as for me, I am sufficiently tired of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, who does not go home to bed because the carriage is not there, but as soon as the carriage is there, Good-bye! I review my past and I ask myself, Why have I lived? Why was I born? And I think there was a reason, and I think I was called to high things, for I feel in my soul the presence of vast powers: but I did not divine my high calling: I gave myself up to the allurement of shallow and ignoble passions: I emerged from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble aspirations, the flower of life. And since then how often have I played the part of the axe in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of the Executioner I have fallen on the necks of the victims, often without malice, always without pity. My love has never brought happiness, because I have never in the slightest degree sacrificed myself for those whom I loved. I loved for my own sake, for my own pleasure.... And if I die I shall not leave behind me one soul who understood me. Some think I am better, others that I am worse than I am. Some will say he was a good fellow: others he was a blackguard."
From this it may be easily seen that Lèrmontov must have been a most trying companion. He had an impossible temperament, proud, exasperated, filled with a savage amour-propre: he took a childish delight in annoying: he was envious of that which was least enviable in his contemporaries. When he could not make himself successful—that is, felt—by pleasant, he would choose unpleasant means, and yet in spite of all this he was warmhearted, thirsting for love and kindness and capable of giving himself up to love—if he chose.
During the course of this second banishment he took an active part in the fighting with the Circassian tribes, showing striking courage combined with perfect modesty.
This experience was the direct inspiration of Valèrik, one of the most beautiful of his long poems on the Caucasus.
After this came his second duel. On this occasion he somehow contrived to offend a somewhat posing officer called Major Martỳnov, who could not bear Lèrmontov's jokes in the presence of ladies. As before, Lèrmontov fired his pistol into the air, but Martỳnov aimed so long that the seconds began to remonstrate. He then fired and killed Lèrmontov immediately.
As a result Martỳnov only escaped the anger of the mob by being arrested.
In 1909 Merejkòvski produced a little book on Lèrmontov as a counterblast to one by Solovyòv in which Martỳnov was hailed as "Heaven's weapon sent to punish blood-thirstiness and devilish lust." It is a blessing indeed that Solovyòv should have been led to attack Lèrmontov, for Merejkòvski was thus brought to criticise Lèrmontov with an amazingly accurate insight. He loved the poet and so his appreciation is the more perfect. "Something like Solovyòv's attitude towards Lèrmontov," he says, "must have been in the minds of the poet's contemporaries and successors. Even Dostoievski mentions him as the 'spirit of wrath.' Nicholas I. expressed grim pleasure at his death. He has been up till now the scapegoat of Russian literature. All Russian writers preach humility, even those who began by heading revolts—Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoievski, Tolstoi ... here is the one single man who never gave in and never submitted to his last breath ... he is the Cain of Russian literature and has been killed by Abel, the spirit of humility. Solovyòv's cry of 'Devilish superman' is only another proof of the fact that the struggle between superhumanism and deo-humanism is the eternal problem of life." Merejkòvski's idea is that Lèrmontov could remember the past of his eternity ... from the ordinary human mind this previous existence is excluded, we dwell on the eternity to come ... but Lèrmontov never did: his mind was concentrated on what he saw left behind him. From the very first his poetry attracts you uneasily: you may—Russian youths often are—be taught to hate him as a "spring of poison" ... he knew the harrowing threat of fruitless ages. Even as a boy he frequently said: "If only I could forget the unforgettable." His Demon is never permitted to forget the past. He lives by what is death to others.
Pechorin, in The Hero of our Days, speaks as Lèrmontov when he says: "I never forget anything—anything."
In one of his poems he laments that his despair is that no love lasts through eternity: he means his eternity. He knows of a kind of existence which is neither this life, nor death as promised by Christianity. That existence is not deprived of love: his idea is that the less earthly, the deeper and greater the passion becomes. The difference between Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations and Lèrmontov's is that Wordsworth speaks of these intimations coming to him from outside this world and Lèrmontov speaks from the outside world himself, as one belonging to it, while realising his temporary existence in this world to which he does not belong. This attitude was a continual torment to him; it made him feel very much of a stranger.
"Usually," says Merejkòvski, "artists find their creation beautiful because nothing like it has existed before." Lèrmontov feels the beauty just where it had been always. That is why there is something so individual and inimitable in him when he speaks of Nature: 'For several moments spent among the wilderness of rocks where I played as a child I would give Paradise and Eternity.'
"He is in love with Nature. He longs to blend in an embrace with the storm and Shelley-like catches of lightnings with his hands. It is the only non-earthly love for earth to be found in poetry. Christianity is a movement from here—thither: Lèrmontov's poetry is from there—hither. He was not-quite-a-man encased in a man's shell. He tried to conceal this, because people do not forgive anyone for being unlike them. Hence his reticence, which people mistook for pride. They thought he was untruthful, posing ... while in reality it was his tragedy that he felt out of place here and tried to be like everyone else. This explains his escape into the sphere of dissipations, his cruel attitude towards the girl he deserted ... when he could feel that at last he was like his contemporaries.
"The fourth dimension seemed to be squeezed into the three for a while, and the icy horror of eternity and the inane temporarily forgotten in the warmth of human vulgarity."
This, Merejkòvski thinks, accounts for that amazing child-likeness in Lèrmontov which dwelt side by side with his pessimism, sadness, bitterness, flippancy and sarcasm. He could always play children's games to the state of self-forgetfulness and had no fear of death, because he knew that there was no death.
"His Demon never laughs and never lies; he has something of the child-like in him. He is always genuine, as far removed as possible from Gogol's spirit of mischief or Dostoievsky's wicked, sneering Devil. Lèrmontov's Devil is beautiful, because he is not thought out, but suffered out by the poet himself; he is hardly a devil at all."
There is a legend that once there was a fight between God and Satan and some of the angels were undecided which side to take. In order to help them to make up their mind they were sent to be born on earth, where they should dwell for a little in a limited world: the soul of Lèrmontov had been in his past one of these. That is why his duality was always such a burden to him. This explains many queer things about Lèrmontov: his amazingly deep passion for a girl of nine when he was ten ("I did not know whence she came") and his having drawn a detailed picture of his death many times before his final duel: most strange of all is Merejkòvski's idea that Lèrmontov remembered the future of eternity. Pushkin is the day-luminary of Russian poetry and Lèrmontov is the night-luminary: "It is high time to rise after our final stage of humility and start on our last revolt, and remember that besides Pushkin we have Lèrmontov and his message to the world.... Because in the end Satan will make peace with God."
He owed nothing to his contemporaries, little to his predecessors and still less to foreign models.
As a schoolboy he imitated Byron, merely echoes these, however, of his reading. Shelley urged him as Byron urged Pushkin to emulation, not imitation. His pride and obstinacy if nothing else would have made him carve out his own path: he chose the narrow path of romance, the Turner method rather than the Constable in his depictions of landscape, as may be seen in Mtsysi, the story of a Circassian orphan educated in a convent, who has ungovernable longings for freedom: he escapes, loses his way in the forest and is brought back after three days, dying from exhaustion and starvation. The greater portion of the poem is given up to his confession: he then tells how insatiable were his desires to seek out his own home and people: he describes his wanderings, hearing the song of a girl ... seeing at nightfall the light of a dwelling-place twinkling like a fallen star, but afraid to seek it. He then kills a panther and in the morning finds a way out of the woods and lies exhausted in the grass under the blinding sun of noon. He then fancies in his delirium that he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream; the fish sing to him in a voice so unearthly that he is enticed and allured as if the fish were the Erl-King's daughter.
In The Testament he rises to an unadorned realism that is little short of magic in its poignancy:
It is such a poem that led Baring to apply to Lèrmontov what Arnold said about Byron and Wordsworth: "there are moments when Nature takes the pen from his hand and writes for him." When one passes in review the vast output of his short life, we are struck by the lyrical inspiration, the strength and intensity, the concentration of his power, the wealth of his imagination, his gorgeous colouring and maintained high level.
It is as though he combined the temperament of a Thackeray with the wings of a Shelley, so exquisitely blended is his romantic sense and stern realism. So simple and straightforward is he that his style escapes notice in its absolute appropriateness, as in The Testament. There is none of the misty vagueness of Keats or Coleridge; he never follows Shelley into the intense inane.
I propose to conclude this chapter with extracts from his masterpiece, The Demon, to illustrate, if I can, the amazing achievement of this Lucifer-spirit. He opens with a description of his hero-devil ruminating over his past: