Why we should read Part 28

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.

_Bors G.o.dunv_ 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.

"As bitter as stale aftermath of wine Is the remembrance of delirious days: But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs The past more sorely, as my days decline.

My path is dark. The future lies in wait, A gathering ocean of anxiety.

But oh! my friends! to suffer, to create, That is my prayer: to live and not to die!

I know that ecstasy shall still lie there In sorrow and adversity and care.

Once more I shall be drunk on strains divine, Be moved to tears by musings that are mine: And haply when the last sad hour draws nigh Love with a farewell smile shall light the sky."

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 G.o.d 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.'"

IV

LeRMONTOV (1814-1841)

Lermontov 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 Lermontov was educated at the University Pension at Moscow, and filled all his exercise-books with poetry, all of which betrayed a deeply impressionable, pa.s.sionate, 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 cla.s.s-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 ma.n.u.script. 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. Lermontov loathed the idea of the marriage bond--real love was to him something far higher: his Varenka, 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 Lermontov 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:

"And you, the proud and shameless progeny Of fathers famous for their infamy, You, who with servile heel have trampled down The fragments of great names laid low by chance, You, hungry crowd that swarms about 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 G.o.d's a.s.size; There is an awful court of law that waits.

You cannot reach it with the sound of gold; It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds; And vainly you shall call the lying witness; That shall not help you any more; And not with all the filth of all your gore Shall you wash out the poet's righteous blood."

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 pa.s.sions, and descriptions of a Nature prodigal and pa.s.sionate as her devoted lover. No geography book could ever give such a vivid picture of the Caucasus as Lermontov'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 Ivan Vaslyevich, the young Opriknik, and the Brave Merchant Kalashinkov_," 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 anapaest, 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, Lermontov 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, Lermontov'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 s.p.a.ce 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 Gruzian girl Tamara 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 Tamara'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 Tamara is irresistibly bewitching, one of the most pa.s.sionate love declarations ever written, in couplets of sonorous iambics that glow like jewels and tremble like the strings of a harp.

Tamara 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 Lermontov 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 Lermontov 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 Sh.e.l.ley rather than a Byron.

In 1840 he was challenged to a duel by a son of the French amba.s.sador, in which Lermontov 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 Lermontov himself, although he said, and quite probably thought, that he was merely creating a type.

This Pechorin is an officer in the Caucasus, who a.n.a.lyses 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 pa.s.sion for contradiction ... the presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament would turn me into a pa.s.sionate 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 ign.o.ble pa.s.sions: I emerged from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, but I had lost for ever the ardour of n.o.ble 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 Lermontov 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 Circa.s.sian tribes, showing striking courage combined with perfect modesty.

This experience was the direct inspiration of _Valerik_, 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 Mart?nov, who could not bear Lermontov's jokes in the presence of ladies. As before, Lermontov fired his pistol into the air, but Mart?nov aimed so long that the seconds began to remonstrate. He then fired and killed Lermontov immediately.

As a result Mart?nov only escaped the anger of the mob by being arrested.