The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mikhail Lermontov · Герой нашего времени · a novel in five tales, with an author’s preface · St Petersburg, 1840; second edition, with the preface, 1841 · scored on Lermontov’s Russian as he completed it in the edition of 1841, read from knowledge, with Vladimir Nabokov’s translation (with Dmitri Nabokov, 1958) beside it for sense and Paul Foote’s (1966) for comparison; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, each with a plain English rendering, and no translation quoted
Mode
Psychological novel made from a cycle of tales: travel sketch, Caucasian adventure, smuggler romance, society tale in diary form and philosophical anecdote
Mythos
The demonic Romantic hero particularised and ironised; the captive mountain bride; the duel of honour; the wager with fate, a pistol at the wagerer’s own head; the superfluous man, given its fullest early form in prose
Phase
Pechorin’s service in the Caucasus, told against chronology: two tales from outside, one meeting in person, the news of his death on the road from Persia, and then the journal of earlier episodes
Presentation
Fiction; an author’s preface of 1841, then Part One, “Bela” and “Maksim Maksimych”, and Pechorin’s Journal, with its editor’s preface, “Taman”, “Princess Mary” and “The Fatalist”; three narrators in nesting order
Register
From a soldier’s spoken tale and a traveller’s observing irony, through dated diary entries of glances and stratagems, to a confession written calmly the night before a duel and a metaphysical wager closed by a shrug
Scale
One officer and the few lives he enters: a staff captain, a mountain girl, smugglers on a shore, the society of two spas, a rival and three women, on the frontier of an empire
Governing Proposition
An officer travelling in the Caucasus hears from a staff captain the story of a younger officer, Pechorin, and of the mountain girl he took; meets the man once, in passing; learns that he has died on the way back from Persia; and publishes his journal: a night among smugglers at Taman, a summer at the spas that ends in a duel, and a wager with fate. The wager of the book is that a man can be known only by approaching him from outside inward, through witnesses who love him and misjudge him and then through his own lucid pages; that a gifted man with no object turns his intelligence on others as experiment and on himself as spectacle; and that the self-knowledge which should save him changes nothing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book appeared at St Petersburg in 1840. Three of its five tales had come out first in Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland): “Bela” and “The Fatalist” in 1839, “Taman” in 1840. The second edition of 1841 added a preface by the author, and that edition, the novel as Lermontov completed it, is the work. Nothing in it was assembled by other hands. In July 1841, the year after the book appeared, Lermontov was killed in a duel at Pyatigorsk, aged twenty-six.
The preface answers readers who had taken the hero as a portrait of the author or as a slander on the age. The hero is, it says, “портрет, составленный из пороков всего нашего поколения, в полном их развитии”
(a portrait composed of the vices of our whole generation, in their full development). And “нужны горькие лекарства, едкие истины”
(bitter medicines are needed, caustic truths). Whether the title is praise, irony or libel the preface does not settle.
Then the tales, under three narrators in nesting order. An unnamed travelling officer writes travel notes. Into them he sets the spoken account of Maksim Maksimych, a staff captain, who fills “Bela” with what he knew of Pechorin. And after the traveller learns of Pechorin’s death, he publishes Pechorin’s own journal, with an editor’s preface: “Taman”, “Princess Mary” and “The Fatalist”. The order of telling is not the order of the life, and the book is built on the difference.
Movement II
“Bela” opens on the road. The traveller crosses the Cross Pass in snow, and the mountains are drawn with an exactness Russian prose had not had. On the road he hears from Maksim Maksimych, who tells it in soldierly digressions, the story of a young officer once in his fortress: Pechorin, in a tale of horse-theft, abduction and a dagger, in which a mountain girl, Bela, is taken for the price of a horse.
Maksim Maksimych loved Pechorin and does not understand him, and his tenderness is the medium through which the reader first sees the man. The tale is an adventure, told aloud; it is also the first evidence of a pattern, a life entered for the sake of a sensation and left worse. Bela is the first who pays for his boredom, and the teller does not know that this is what he is describing.
In “Maksim Maksimych” the man appears in person. The old officer, hearing that Pechorin is near, runs to meet him, and is given two fingers and a cold greeting. The traveller watches the stranger’s face and gait like a physiognomist and reads a character in them, and still misjudges. Pechorin rides on; his notebooks pass to the traveller; and the traveller learns that Pechorin has died on the way back from Persia. Only then does he read a word of the man’s own.
Movement III
The journal comes to the reader as the papers of a dead man, read as a closed life. Pechorin claims to have written it for no reader, and every generation has asked how far to trust that claim. Its first two tales fall earlier than “Bela” on the usual reconstruction of the chronology, which is argued in its details. So the plans the journal makes for the future are already void when the reader meets them.
“Тамань, самый скверный городишко из всех приморских городов России”
(Taman is the nastiest little town of all the coastal towns of Russia). The first sentence puts a whole tale’s tone into a line. Pechorin, an officer in the town, overhears something he was not meant to hear and pursues it into a smugglers’ night: a blind boy, a girl of the shore, a boat in the dark.
In the boat the girl struggles with him in the dark water, and Pechorin cannot swim. He survives; their trade is wrecked, for no reason but his curiosity, and the blind boy and the girl are left destitute. The tale is a smuggler romance with its Romantic machinery in place, and it is also the journal’s first proof of the law the whole book obeys: he intervenes in a life to feel something, and leaves it worse.
Movement IV
“Вчера я приехал в Пятигорск”
(Yesterday I arrived in Pyatigorsk). “Princess Mary” is a diary in dated entries, at Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, and it is the tale that carries most weight in the book. The plain first line opens onto the town, the mountains and the morning air in a paragraph, and then onto the society of the spas: the balls, the chatter at the well, Werner, the princess Mary, the young Grushnitsky, and Vera, the one woman in the book who is more than a receiver of what Pechorin does.
The princess and Grushnitsky become the matter of his experiments, and the intrigue turns on ridicule and on things overheard. It ends in a duel. The night before it he writes “Зачем я жил? для какой цели я родился?”
(Why did I live? For what purpose was I born?), not as a cry but as a diagnosis, set down calmly by a man who is about to arrange the death of another.
The duel is fought on a narrow ledge above a drop, at six paces, ground Pechorin himself chose so that a wound would be death. An unloaded pistol, a change of ground and Werner’s discovery carry the scene, and Grushnitsky, drawn throughout as a type more than a person, is shot. There is also Vera’s letter, and the ride after it, in which the horse is ridden to its fall and the rider weeps; and the next morning Pechorin mocks his own tears.
Movement V
The last tale turns on a question: is a man’s end written? Vulich tests it with a pistol at his own head, and the pistol misfires. The question of the book, whether character is fate and whether anything is willed, has been put in the form of a wager, the nearest the book comes to an archetypal structure that bears its own weight.
The book does not answer it. At the end the question comes to Maksim Maksimych, the simplest witness, and the old officer declines the metaphysics with a shrug. A novel that began in a soldier’s spoken tale ends in a soldier’s refusal to philosophise, and the man of perfect self-knowledge is left with no more certainty than the man who never understood him. Where “The Fatalist” falls in Pechorin’s life is argued; that it falls last in the book is the design.
The hero proved a type. The gifted, idle, self-wasting man the book gave its fullest early form in prose was named the superfluous man, and Russian literature rewrote him for a century, in Turgenev and Goncharov, in Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, in Tolstoy’s Caucasus and in Chekhov’s duel. The book has been read without break since 1840 and taught in Russian schools across every regime of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The preface promised caustic truths, and the reader is still deciding whether the title is praise, irony or libel.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hard to pass against this book, because each tale answers a question the others leave open. Remove “Bela” and Pechorin has no witness who loved him. Remove “Maksim Maksimych” and there is no moment where the man is seen with no story attached, offering two fingers to the old officer who ran to meet him, and no hand-off of the notebooks. Remove “Taman” and the journal opens on the Pechorin of the spas, not on the man who wrecks a smugglers’ trade for no reason. Remove “The Fatalist” and the book ends on society instead of on the question whether anything is willed. What the test finds is in “Princess Mary”: spa-society scenes, the balls and the well-side chatter, that say twice what they say once, and a Grushnitsky intrigue that repeats its turn of ridicule more than the design needs. A twentieth of the whole, perhaps; the rest is required.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A man of real gifts and no object turns his intelligence on other people as experiment and on himself as spectacle, and the self-consciousness that should save him is the thing that disables him: he knows exactly what he is doing, and the knowing changes nothing. “Зачем я жил?” (Why did I live?) is not a Romantic cry here but a diagnosis, written down calmly the night before he arranges to kill a man. A second disclosure is social: the frontier of an empire as the place where such men are sent, and where their boredom is paid for by others, Bela abducted for a horse, a blind boy and a girl at Taman left destitute. The claim of the preface is borne out by the tales, not asserted by it. Held off the top because the condition is shown in one type, from one class, and the women, Vera excepted, exist mostly to receive what he does.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The book is cool and ironic by temperament, and rises often for all that. The traveller’s crossing of the Cross Pass in snow at the opening of “Bela”, the mountains drawn with an exactness Russian prose had not had; the night boat at Taman and the struggle with the girl in the dark water, Pechorin unable to swim; the duel on a narrow ledge above a drop, at six paces, which Pechorin himself chose so that a wound would be death; and the ride after Vera’s letter, in which the horse is ridden to its fall and the rider weeps. The register is restrained, and the restraint is part of the height. Held below the summit because the elevation is local, scene by scene, and the book’s habit of undercutting itself, Pechorin mocking his own tears the next morning, keeps it from sustaining transport.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Here the book is more evoked than built. Its materials are Byronic and Romantic: the demonic hero, the captive mountain bride, the girl of the smugglers’ shore, the duel of honour, the wager with fate. Lermontov particularises them all and ironises most of them, which is his achievement, but the deep pattern is mostly inherited rather than made load-bearing. What is built is one thing, and it is large: the type of the gifted, idle, self-wasting man that Russian literature then named the superfluous man and kept rewriting for a century, here given its fullest early form in prose. The type lifts the axis above where the inherited materials alone would put it. “The Fatalist” reaches toward a true archetypal structure, a man testing predestination with a pistol at his own head, and lets it close in Maksim Maksimych’s shrug. The deep patterns are evoked and undercut more than built, and that holds the axis here.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The turn is in form and in stance at once. In 1840 Russian prose had Pushkin’s tales and Gogol; it had no psychological novel. Lermontov makes one out of a cycle of tales that look like the travel sketch, the Caucasian adventure, the society tale, the confessional diary and the philosophical anecdote, and arranges them against chronology, so that the hero is approached from outside inward. The stance was the stake: a hero plainly not admirable, offered under a title the public read as either praise or libel, with no moral verdict supplied. The reception bore the risk out, and the preface of 1841 is the author’s answer to readers who took the book as self-portrait or as slander on the age. Held below the top because it is not a break with narrative itself, and its materials are Romantic.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The nested narrators are the argument: Maksim Maksimych, who loves Pechorin and cannot understand him; the traveller, who reads the man’s face and gait like a physiognomist and still misjudges; Pechorin, who understands himself perfectly and is no better for it. The order is the argument too. The reader learns he is dead before reading a word of his, so the journal is read as a closed life, and its plans for the future are already void. The last tale swings back to the question whether character is fate, and lets the simplest witness answer it. Told in order, by one narrator, this would be a Romantic tale of a cold man; told this way it is a study of how a person is known and misknown. Held a tenth off the top by the unequal weight of “Princess Mary”, which tilts the design.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The evidence is a century and three-quarters of return. The chronology of the tales has been reconstructed and disputed. The reliability of the journal as a document written for no reader, which is what Pechorin claims for it, is questioned in every generation. The irony of the title, which the preface does not resolve; whether “The Fatalist” endorses fate, will or neither; the distance between the author and his hero, which Lermontov’s own death in a duel at Pyatigorsk sharpened: each is still argued. Nabokov’s commentary found new matter in the mechanics of the narration, the eavesdropping that carries so much of the plot. The book keeps yielding on the second and third reading, above all on the relation of “Bela” to “Princess Mary”, where the same man is seen loving and failing to love from two sides. Held below the top because the book is compact, and its yield on formal return is richer than on philosophical return.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is Russian literature of the nineteenth century, the most consequential century any modern literature has had. The intrinsic force is high: the first Russian novel of interior life in prose, whose sentences set a standard of clarity and economy that Russian prose then measured itself against, and which stands with Eugene Onegin, which it answers, among the foundations the century’s prose descends from. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Russian literature the reach is very large, through the line of the superfluous man in Turgenev and Goncharov, the self-anatomising consciousness that Dostoevsky turned inside out in the Underground Man, Tolstoy’s officers in the Caucasus, and Chekhov’s duel and his idle intelligentsia, each taking something from this book. Abroad the reach is narrower than that of the great Russian novels it made possible, and that is the margin below the top.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text is whole, and was fixed by the author in the second edition of 1841; there is no loss or recovery to charge. Presence: read continuously since publication, taught in Russian schools across every regime of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and translated into the major languages repeatedly, in English alone by Nabokov, Foote and several later hands. For a span between seventy years and two centuries the axis takes the upper of its usual figures, because presence in Russian is as wide as any book’s, and the axis is held below the widest because outside Russia the presence, though continuous, is narrower than that of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Fabric: nothing in the book is fixed to its moment in a way that dates it; the Caucasian war is the setting, not the subject.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the Russian as far as a reading from knowledge carries it, the prose is the book’s first glory. Lermontov writes sentences of a lucidity and speed new to Russian narrative. The first sentence of “Taman” puts a whole tale’s tone into a line; “Princess Mary” begins with a plain “Вчера я приехал в Пятигорск” (Yesterday I arrived in Pyatigorsk) and then gives the town, the mountains and the morning air in a paragraph. Each narrator has his voice: Maksim Maksimych’s soldierly digressions and tenderness, the traveller’s observing irony, Pechorin’s epigrams. The plotting is sure, the duel sequence above all, with the unloaded pistol, the change of ground to the ledge and Werner’s discovery. Held below 9.0 because the plot leans on eavesdropping more often than craft should allow, in “Taman” and more than once in “Princess Mary”, and because Grushnitsky is drawn as a type to be shot rather than as a person.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs the whole: in each tale Pechorin intervenes in a life for the sake of feeling something, and leaves it worse. Take the two farthest elements: the adventure tale of “Bela”, told aloud by a soldier, with horse-theft, abduction and a dagger, and the journal entries of “Princess Mary”, a drawing-room diary of glances and stratagems. They obey that law: the same man, the same cold appetite for sensation, the same boredom after each conquest, seen first from love and then from within. The smuggler romance of “Taman” and the metaphysical wager of “The Fatalist” are tonally far from both and still answer to it. The range of registers is wide, which makes the coherence count. Held a tenth or two off because the Romantic machinery of “Taman” and the society comedy of the spas sit a little apart in manner.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on what a short novel holds, and it holds more than its length suggests, integrated rather than listed. Consciousness: a single one, at full depth. The state and history: the empire’s war in the Caucasus and the peoples it subjects, Circassians, Chechens, Cossacks, the Ossetes on the road, seen from the officer’s saddle. Society, at the spas. Love in three forms, in Bela, Vera and Mary. The metaphysics of fate and will. And the generation the preface names. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the book does not hold: the family as a living order, labour, the state as anything but posting and rank, and the sacred except as a question. It is not punished for being short; what it encompasses is weighed as it is, and it is less than the great Russian novels it opened the way for.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Living Form at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9, and The Swerve and The Inner Law at 8.8. A text whole and fixed by its author in 1841, read without break since and taught under every regime; nested narrators and an order against chronology that make the book a study of how a man is known and misknown, the journal read as the papers of the dead; sentences of a lucidity and speed new to Russian narrative; the first Russian psychological novel, made from a cycle of tales and offered with no verdict; and one law, a life entered for a sensation and left worse, holding a soldier’s tale and a drawing-room diary together.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7, held by what a short novel leaves out: a consciousness, a frontier war and its peoples, the society of the spas, three loves and a question of fate are held together, but the family as a living order, labour, the state beyond posting and rank, and the sacred except as a question are absent. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.1: one type built, the superfluous man, and the rest of the deep pattern, the demonic hero, the captive bride, the duel and the wager, inherited and undercut more than made load-bearing. The music of Lermontov’s Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged beyond what is plain in its structure.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 falls four tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Mikhail Lermontov’s Герой нашего времени (Geroi nashego vremeni), scored as the novel as Lermontov completed it: the second edition of 1841, which added the Author’s Preface to the text of the first edition (St Petersburg, 1840). The unit is the whole novel: the Author’s Preface; Part One, “Bela” and “Maksim Maksimych”; and Pechorin’s Journal, with its editor’s preface, “Taman”, “Princess Mary” and “The Fatalist”. “Bela” (1839), “The Fatalist” (1839) and “Taman” (1840) first appeared in Otechestvennye zapiski; the magazine printings are context, not the work scored. The book was complete and published in the author’s lifetime, and nothing in it is assembled by other hands. Every axis is judged on the novel in Lermontov’s Russian. No text, Russian or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Russian is quoted only where its words are certain: two phrases of the Author’s Preface, the first sentence of “Taman”, the first entry of “Princess Mary” and Pechorin’s question the night before the duel. In the first sentence of “Taman” the Russian sets a dash after the town’s name, given here as a comma under the house rule on dashes. Beneath or beside each quotation stands a plain English rendering made for this page, not taken from any published translation. Events are paraphrased. Translation · Vladimir Nabokov’s, made with Dmitri Nabokov (1958), the closest version and the most exact in its notes on chronology and narration, read beside for sense; Paul Foote’s (Penguin, 1966), the better English to read, for comparison. Neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged to the novel. The music of Lermontov’s Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Names follow the usual English forms. The order of events in Pechorin’s life is given only as the usual reconstruction, whose details are argued, the place of “The Fatalist” above all. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the novel and of each tale in words, the share of the book given to “Princess Mary”, the order of the beats of the ride after Vera’s letter, the words Pechorin uses of the girl at Taman and of the smugglers’ lives, and later writers’ reported praise of “Taman”, are not given.