Locating the Russian Hero:
Genre, Gender, and National Identity in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time
By Kristin Rose
English Honors Thesis 2015
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Gothic Legacy and the Russian Psychological Novel…………………………2
Chapter One: “Bela” and the Russian Byron…………………………………………………….12
Chapter Two: “Taman” and the Folkloric Showdown…………………………………………..30
Chapter Three: “Princess Mary” and Breaking Byron…………………………………………..56
Conclusion: Locating the Hero and Defining “Our Time”………………………………………85
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………...90
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Introduction: The Gothic Legacy and the Russian Psychological Novel
“A Hero of Our Time, gentleman, is indeed a portrait, but not of a single individual; it is a
portrait composed of all the vices of our generation in the fullness of their development”
(Lermontov 2).
At the turn of the nineteenth century in Russia, a unified national consciousness began to
emerge in the burgeoning self-conscious of the Russian psychological novel. Mikhail
Lermontov’s 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time is often considered the first Russian psychological
novel, because it employs psychological realism in its focus on the interiority of its hero,
Pechorin, which then produces external action. This genre evolved in the wake of European
literature’s increasing popularity in Russia. Through this novel, we can trace the collaboration of
Eastern and Western ideologies and identities, which begin to define what it meant to be Russian
in the nineteenth century.
Russian authors have long explored the question of national identity thanks to the
“dichotomy in Russia’s physical corpus” between Asia and Europe (Bassin 5). However, a
national Russian identity cannot and should not be simplified to a division between East and
West. The prominent literary culture of the nineteenth century Russian aristocracy makes this a
critical era for the formation of a Russian national identity founded in literature. A conscious
literary culture continues in modern Russia, where statues of famous national authors decorate
squares and books fill the hands of daily metro riders. This is not to say that European literature
defined or continues to define the Russian literary landscape; tracing the way Western genres
translate and transform in a Russian context reveals the way Russia formed its own literary
tradition and national consciousness. The Romantic and Gothic, in particular, move from their
epicenter in the West and travel in quakes until reaching Russia’s “window to the west” and
making a new home in St. Petersburg. After these genres gain popularity with readers in Russia,
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authors like Mikhail Lermontov, deeply versed in “French, English, Russian, and German
literature,” (Mills Todd 138) challenge their appropriation upon Russian soil and foreign
landscapes. A Hero of Our Time is an artifact within the creative process of national identity—
not one of borrowing and mimicry but one of invention through cross-cultural and cross-generic
translation.
I argue that generic models like the British Gothic and Romantic genres provide such
persuasive models and nearly adaptable structures that they become a literary Other against
which Russian authors begin to define a national literature and masculine hero.1 In particular,
the novel’s hero adopts a Byronic persona, which the novel and its female characters work to
unravel; the dubious masculinity and questionable morality of Byronic hero proves a threat to the
conceptualization of a modern Russian hero. I divide my thesis into chapters according to the
women in the novel, because they serve as the deconstructive force against a Byronic
masculinity in a Russian story and setting. Although Mark Simpson argues that Russian authors
of the time “adapt the western norms to a Russian milieu,” his discussion of adaptability,
unfortunately, does not specify adaptation or translation as a process of creation opposed to
fabrication (62). He does not make the critical distinction between the mimicry of Western
authors versus the originality of Russian works inspired by, or against, Western literary models.
Just as Europe viewed Russia as the Eastern Other, so Russian authors began using preexisting
literary forms and communities to develop a new national tradition, which simultaneously others
and encapsulates pieces of the European tradition.
Mark S. Simpson discusses the “paramount” (51) influence of the model set forth by British Gothicists like Ann
Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, Matthew Lewis, and Walter Scott. Russian works like Nikolai Karamzin’s “Bornholm
Island,” Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s “The Cuirassier,” and Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” all introduce the
Russian Gothic and Byronism, while Lermontov greatly expands and transforms this tradition.
1
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The Gothic genre’s success in Europe and its thematic flexibility made it prime for
translation and interpretation in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Russia. Because the
Russian elite was typically well versed in French, English Gothic works came to Russia in
French; waves of gothic translations began appearing in Russia after Anne Radcliffe’s became
popular with Russian readers in the early 1800s (Cornwell 13). Furthermore, the Gothic genre
provides a template for exploring “the darker side of the mind,” (Simpson 91-92) discovering the
irrationalities, or uncanniness of existence—imaginary or real—and navigating the power of the
individual against the unknown. The peak of Gothic popularity in Britain occurred in the 1790s,
with prominent works like Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Ortonto. 2 In these years, books
rich in horror and fantasy, like Radcliffe’s 1794 novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, introduced the
use of supernatural terrors to depict “a dual and more ‘real’ reality, where good coexisted quite
properly with bad” (Simpson 12).3 With the manifestation of evil in villains like the vampire, the
ability to discuss the dichotomy of good versus evil gains new symbols and accessible language.
Thus, in a sense, the supernatural alerts us to the reality of good and evil in everyday life, only in
less fantastic forms.
Gothicism begins to share its popularity in Russia with Romanticism during the early
nineteenth century; Romantic authors like Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott begin to
capture the imaginations of Russian readers with Romantic figures, but the Byronic hero makes
the biggest impact on Russian readers and writers. The duplicity of the Byronic hero as
simultaneously demonic and heroic adds a new level of fascination with the Western man and his
relation to a Russian masculine, heroic identity.4 The connection between the Gothic and
2
For key dates in the history of the Gothic see Ding.
For more on Ann Radcliffe and other influential British Gothicists see Simpson.
4
For more on the Byronic Hero see Thorslev.
3
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Romantic genres remains significant for a conceptualization of the psychological novel and the
Russian hero; for example, Katherine Ding argues that the Gothic may have “established the
popularity of the novel-form,” and its experimentation with the limits of believability directly
link to the rise of the Romantic novel (1). Experiences of terror, awe, and the scope of human
emotion from Gothic literature find a new stage in Romantic fiction, where atmosphere continues
to link directly to emotional experience and identity formation with a focus on national identity
in particular. While the British Gothic did greatly influence the authors and readers of nineteenth
century Russia, it does not necessarily follow that the Gothic is the singular point of origin for
the Russian psychological novel that Lermontov introduces in his seminal work, A Hero of Our
Time. In fact, Russian psychological realists were “leery of the individualism that Romanticism
often valued, and even though they all adopted it in some form they exposed its dark side more
thoroughly than writers from other traditions” (Orwin 6). The individualism at the heart of the
Western masculine identity contradicted the importance of community as a defining factor for
Russian life and identity. Thus, while it is critical to note the influx and influence of Gothic and
Romantic texts in nineteenth century Russia, the process of translation and interpretation of these
genres into a Russian landscape and man leads to a much more complex discussion of a
masculine nationhood derived from generic fusion.
Russian folklore acts as a mediating genre between Western literature and Russia’s
preexisting storytelling tradition; specifically, women from Russian folklore and fairy tales serve
as challenging forces to the presupposed supremacy of the Byronic hero in his Western
masculinity. Byron creates his self-image, as well as the characterizations of his heroes, from
various “Gothic elements” to portray “a fallen angel who was able to dash off a brilliant poem in
minutes but was haunted by a secret past” (Bone 8). The literariness, independence, and
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questionable morality of the Byronic hero are all characteristics that inspire Russian authors like
Lermontov to formulate their own unique heroes. However, while the Russian literary tradition
is just forming in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, themes and characters from
Russian folklore live in the heart of the nation’s storytelling. Vladimir Propp describes the
folktale as “a creation of the most ancient times, but it contains a certain unconscious life
philosophy of the people represented by the tale teller” (159). Thus, the manipulation of
Western figures like the Byronic hero meets elements from Russian folklore to make a
fascinating and unique generic mixture. The presence of folkloric themes connects seemingly
Western characters and themes to an inherently Russian tradition, while challenging the viability
of Western heroes in Russian tales.
While the Gothic and Romantic genres form literary eras in their own right, the mixture
of these movements add to the formation of the Russian psychological novel tradition in the
nineteenth century. Gothic and Romantic influences first manifest in the language of the novel’s
narrator and the hero Pechorin; they allude to famous authors, texts, and characters, adding a
layer of metafiction to this novel’s experimentation with Russian heroism. Despite the fact that
Vladimir Nabokov found Mikhail Lermontov’s only novel, A Hero of Our Time, a worthy
project for his own translation, he labels Lermontov’s metaphors and similes “utterly
commonplace” in his “Translator’s Forward” to the 1986 edition of the novel (Lermontov xiii).
However, what Nabokov finds a commonplace imitation is exactly the generic play that sparks a
new Russian literary identity in its translation onto Russian soil and characters: Lermontov
saturates the novel with Romantic and Gothic language and themes. The hero, Pechorin’s
literary relationship to his foreign and local predecessors, like the British Byron and Russian
Pushkin, are key to the formation of his identity. For instance, Pechorin wonders, “How many
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people, in the beginning of life, think they will finish it as Alexander the Great or Lord Byron,
and instead, retain for the whole of their existence, the rank of titular councilor?” (133). 5 What
distinguishes Lermontov from other Russian authors, like Karamzin, who wrote Romantic heroes
into Western settings, was his decision to place his Russian characters in the Caucasus for the
majority of the novel.6 Locating a seemingly Byronic figure in the Caucasus allows Lermontov
to challenge the adaptability of Gothic themes onto Eastern soil. Pechorin develops into a
dynamic figure in the division between Romantic tropes and a Russian landscape and narrative.
However, the Romantic language that Lermontov uses to characterize Pechorin’s identity
formation via literature complicates Pechorin’s ability to reconcile his Byronic desires with his
Russian context. Lermontov fills his novel with layers of irony, which often times mask the
Eastern landscape in Western glamour or sometimes define foreign figures in Russian folkloric
terminology. Thus, A Hero of Our Time goes beyond mimicking Western genre, and “with its
several narrators and double chronology involved and involves its readers in a search for
something more dynamic and changeable” than a static characterization (Mills Todd 152). The
novel represents a truly creative innovation in its reworking and challenging of Western and
Russian genres.
Following the popularity of Gothic and Romanic genres with Russian readers, nineteenth
century authors and intellectuals began to question the potentially dangerous consequences of
this generic invasion from the West. Lermontov uses his “Author’s Introduction” to warn
against the alluring Romantic figure of Pechorin, but his own use of Romantic prose to paint his
Eastern setting signals an unreliable authorial voice: “A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is indeed
“An average rank in the civil service, the ninth in a scale where the lowest rung (fourteenth) is a Collegiate
Registrar and the highest (first) a Chancellor (Kantsler), corresponding to a Field Marshal in military service” (208).
See Nabokov’s “Notes” of Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
6
Nikolai Karamzin’s Gothic tale, “The Island of Bornholm” (1794) takes place in Denmark.
5
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a portrait, but not of a single individual; it is a portrait composed of all the vices of our
generation in the fullness of their development […] Suffice it that the disease has been pointed
out; goodness knows how to cure it” (2). While it is important to keep in mind the potential
hyperbole in diagnosing an entire nation and the irony of using a novel to expose literature as a
disease, Lermontov’s claim to cure his readership by producing a hero potent in its own
poisonous ideologies remains significant. Lermontov’s metaphor of literature as a disease might
recall for contemporary readers Roland Barthes’s sense of inoculation: “One immunizes the
contents of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation the better to conceal its
principle evil” (Barthes 150). Russian intellectuals do not embrace Western literature to feel
more self-assured in their national identity. Instead, Lermontov plays on an important social
dichotomy of his day: “During the nineteenth century a dissenting argument took shape, stirred
by a growing uneasiness over the Russians’ unquestioning assumption regarding their country’s
European identity and its unity of purpose with the west” (Bassin 9). A division formed between
preserving a pure Russian culture and the rage of European literature.
Despite Peter the Great’s rigid Westernization of Russia through his 1722 Table of Ranks
and laws promoting Western styles of dress and facial hair and “Catherine the Great’s
proclamation that ‘La russe est une puissance européenne,’” (Russia is a European power)
(Cornwell 13), Russians felt that their geographic identity transcended categorization as either
European or Asian. 7 Slavophiles questioned the value of western identification as early as the
1830s, when Lermontov was writing, and proposed an absolutely non-Western uniqueness about
“Russia’s national ethos” (Bassin 9). 8 Thus, when Lermontov warns his readers of the disease
7
The 1722 Table of Ranks divided all government positions into fourteen ranks, which allowed for social mobility
dependent on government work. To see more about the Table of Ranks read "Peter's Table of Ranks."
8
The core meaning of this word, and of those who adopt the label, exists in its epistemology: Slav—“Slavic” and
phile—“lover of.” “The Slavophiles presented a vision of the true Russia, which was based on the nation, the
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Pechorin embodies, he playfully invokes both sides of this argument. He promises to reveal the
characteristics of Western contagion through Pechorin, while masking the authenticity of his
warning through layers of dramatic irony in order to produce a Russian hero unique in his
struggle between a sense of authentic existence and the cloak of a consciously Western, literary
identity.
The narrator’s and Pechorin’s Romantic worldviews originate from a variety of
inspirations: Pechorin continuously alludes to Scott, Byron, Goethe, and Pushkin through the
course of the novel, which contextualizes him within Western European and Russian literary
traditions.9 The dynamic relationship between authorial and generic inspirations at play within
the novel are important to keep in mind while tracking their attempts at translation and
appropriation into an Eastern landscape. Building off Pushkin’s Byronic hero, Eugene Onegin,
Lermontov’s Pechorin entrenches a legacy of Russian identity between reading European
literature and producing a uniquely Russian canon. Thus, Lermontov simultaneously makes his
own artistic assumptions about Western archetypes, like the Byronic hero, and pulls from authors
like Pushkin who have already begun to challenge the Western man upon Russian soil. Since
Onegin is a direct inspiration in the creation of Pechorin, the dualities Pushkin creates in him
also apply to the more developed Pechorin: “What role does he intend to fill? / Childe Harold?
Melmoth for a while? / Cosmopolite? A Slavophile?” (Pushkin 198). His embodiment of the
Byronic Childe Harold, Gothic Melmoth, or nationalist Slavophile changes depending on his
location within or outside of the Russian empire, and the genre of narrative changes accordingly
as well. He oscillates between his characterization by others who define him as “the hero of a
people, and the land. Although they accepted the monarchy, the Slavophiles’ emphasis on the nation made them
hostile to the state.” For more on Slavophiles see Rabow-Edling (20).
9
For instances of these literary references see Lermontov (81, 92, 133, 160).
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novel in the latest fashion” (Lermontov 95) and his self-definition as the victim, scorned by a
society ready to “read in my face the signs of bad inclinations which were not there” (126).
Lermontov boldly titles his novel A Hero of Our Time but leaves the definition of such a hero up
for interpretation. Can the hero of 19th century Russia be villain and victim, or is it most
important that society read him as a man befitting the pages of Romantic fiction? Either way, the
hero Lermontov produces is a reader above all else; he reads Western and Russian literatures as
well as the society around him. He reads life and records it in his diary, producing a dynamic
figure who, although destructive and villainous, offers the novel’s reader a hero of kindred spirit
with an identity formed through literature. Pechorin constructs his identity in a Romantic, heroic
cloak, which leaves us to peel away the literary layers of his self-characterization and find the
man underneath.
I divide the following argument into three chapters framed by the women who influence
Pechorin’s Byronic narrative and deconstruct his Romantic façade. The first chapter is an indepth look at Pechorin’s Orientalization of the Caucasus and the Circassian princess Bela.
Through his Orientalization of the Caucasus in “Bela,” Pechorin gains the power inherent in this
particularly Western hierarchy to raise himself, and Russians, above an Eastern other. However,
the denouement of his relationship with Bela emphasizes Pechorin’s inability to appropriate the
Byronic hero and his fatal masculinity into Russia. In chapter two, I analyze the way elements
from Russian folklore, particularly the rusalka or mermaid figure, reject and emasculate the
Byronic pretender from the town’s liminal Russian space. Russian folklore simultaneously
mixes with the Gothic in the mysterious coastal setting of “Taman” to assert the legitimacy, and
translatability, of each genre, while ultimately revealing the authority Russian women, inspired
by folkloric figures, have over the foreign Romantic hero. Finally, I discuss Pechorin’s mimicry
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of the Byronic male with the Russian aristocracy of Caucasian spa society in “Princess Mary.”
While the Russian aristocracy fosters the mimicry of popular Romantic figures, like the Byronic
hero, the story’s women, Princess Mary and Vera, are vital in stripping away Pechorin’s Byronic
mask and finding the Russian hero underneath.
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Chapter 1: “Bela” and the Russian Byron
“We have many beautiful girls in our villages,
Stars are ablaze in the dark of their eyes.
Sweet is to love them—an enviable lot;
Bold freedom, however, is merrier still” (Lermontov 18).
Fabula and Syuzhet of “Bela”10
Before delving into “Bela,” I will make note of the organization and chronology of the
novel’s stories. Lermontov orders the stories of the novel: “Bela,” “Maksim Maksimich,”
“Taman,” “Princess Mary,” and “The Fatalist.” However, the location and “real-time”
chronology for each of the novel’s stories is as follows: “Taman” is a border town on the Black
Sea between St. Petersburg and the Caucasus; the events of “Princess Mary” occur in Pyatigorsk
in the Russian Caucasus; “Bela” takes place in Chechnya; “The Fatalist” is located in a Cossack
settlement; “Maksim Maksimych” is on route from the Caucasus to Persia, where Pechorin
ultimately dies (Bagby 16-17). Additionally, the novel exists on three rhetorical levels:
“Pechorin’s biography (a fiction)” [“Bela” and “Maksim Makimich”], “traveler’s achronological
ordering of the text (a metafiction)” [Pechorin’s diary: “Taman,” “Princess Mary,” and “The
Fatalist”], “and Lermontov’s time beyond the novel (the metatext)” [A Hero of Our Time]
(Bagby 18).
“Bela” is the first tale of the novel, and the unnamed editor of the novel writes the story
after listening to Maksim Maksimich tell oral tales of his former military companion, Grigory
Alexandrovich Pechorin. Considered a “travel sketch and adventure novella,” (Mills Todd 142)
the story offers an outsider’s perspective on Pechorin’s adventures in the Caucasus.
10
In Russian formalism and narratology, fabula describes the plot of the story and syuzhet describes the
organizational structure of the story. Each chapter will begin with an overview of plot and structure to provide
context for the discussion to follow.
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Significantly, the editor/narrator’s role as a young, literary military man in the Caucasus
immediately connects him to Pechorin and invokes a romanticized reading of the novel’s hero.
The act of recording Pechorin’s adventures in a journal allows the narrator to pen Pechorin into
the heroic cast his Byronic façade begs.
Like the typical Byronic narrative, “Bela” places the hero into a foreign context where his
daring exploits unfold. Pechorin and his commanding officer, Maksim Maksimich, are stationed
with their regiment in the Northern Caucasus. The area is a foreign setting adjacent to Russia
filled with ethnic and religious minorities and tribes. When a local Muslim prince invites
Pechorin and Maksim Maksimich to a wedding, the prince’s daughter Bela immediately charms
Pechorin. However, Kazbich, who is simultaneously the stereotype for the violent Circassian
savage as well as the romanticized, wildly free Circassian hero, also has his eyes on the young
princess. Bela’s brother Azamat is so enamored with Kazbich’s famous horse, Karagoz, that he
offers to steal his own sister in exchange for the animal. Kazbich answers with the above quoted
song about the joy of freedom a horse offers over any woman, which continues: “Gold can
purchase you a foursome of wives, / But a spirited steed is a priceless possession: / He will not
be outstripped by the wind in the steppes, / He will never betray, he will never deceive”
(Lermontov 18). However, Azamat accepts when Pechorin offers to retrieve Kazbich’s horse for
him and trade for Bela. With Bela in his possession, Pechorin begins his games of manipulation
and Russification. His physical and mental manipulations of Bela fills the second half of the
story, until Pechorin’s final act of violence upon her leaves him to wallow in all consuming
boredom and self-loathing.
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Introduction to the Generic and Geographic Borders of Heroic Identity
As Byron places the hero of “The Giaour” (1813), a narrative poem in his series of
“Turkish Tales,” on an Orientalized landscape with Muslim characters, Lermontov furthers the
experiment of the Byronic hero by placing him in a foreign landscape occupied by Muslims, the
Northern Caucasus, and by inserting the Western hero into the geographically distant mind of the
Russian man. The Byronic hero and Pechorin share an affinity for adventure, a touch of sadism
mixed with humanity, and a dash of dandyism; both men also represent “an alleged capacity to
penetrate and would mould the environment to the will of the ‘manly’ conqueror” (Midgley
vii)—a gender division by which Pechorin will attempt to solidify his masculine Russian
identity. However, where Pechorin often seems a Byronic image, layers of Lermontov’s irony
reveal the complex identity born from attempting to wear an Orientalizing Western mask on a
landscape of ambiguous categorization. As Franco Moretti states in The Atlas of the European
Novel 1800-1900, “rhetoric is dependent upon space” and “A new space […] gives rise to a new
form—that gives rise to a new space” (Moretti 43, 197). According to Moretti’s view, the
importation of a genre or literary form into a new space necessarily implies the immediate
redefinition or rebirth of the genre and form into a new creation. Thus, Lermontov takes the
Romantic and Gothic genres from their Western stronghold and use their nation’s own
storytelling traditions and psychological bent to bridge the gap between East and West, birthing
something new in the division between binaries: East/West, community/individual, woman/man.
“Bela” questions the ability of the Byronic hero to act as a conquering masculine figure of ethnic
superiority within the Russian Caucasus. Pechorin’s particular claim to power comes from three
main sources: simply being a man, being ethnically Russian, and belonging to the aristocracy.
Pechorin’s ironic attempt to Russify the Circassian princess Bela with Byronic tools (a
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gentleman’s charm mixed with a demonic power complex) introduces the tensions between
genres, gender, and national identity in the new Russian hero.
Lermontov introduces the hero of Russia as an archetypally Romantic character better
suited to the gothic moors of England or sublime highlands of Scotland. Pechorin seems his
most hyper-fictionalized self in “Bela”: he is the dominating, individualistic, introspective,
manipulative, charismatic, rich in ennui, and the victorious Romantic individual upon a foreign
landscape. Despite the fact that this story does not occur first in Pechorin’s chronology, the
novel begins in its most foreign setting with the most Byronic version of its character, leaving
narrative space and inventive form to unravel the development of Pechorin’s characterization—a
characterization created through the layered lenses of Pechorin, narrator, author, and reader. The
events of “Bela” take place in the Northern, non-Russian Caucasus: a landscape as idealized and
other as Walter Scott’s Scottish highlands were to the English or Scottish from the lowlands.
“Bela” opens with a description of the Caucasus that mirrors Scott’s preoccupation with the
sublime in his Waverley novels11: “On all sides rise inaccessible mountains, reddish cliffs, hung
over with green ivy and crowned with clumps of plane trees; tawny precipices streaked with
washes, and far above, the golden fringe of the snows” (Lermontov 3). Consider Lermontov’s
language alongside Scott’s “land of romance” where “The rocks assumed a thousand peculiar
and varied forms. In one place a crag of huge size presented its gigantic bulk, as if to forbid the
passenger’s farther progress” (Scott). Thus, the nature of the Gothic seems to translate from a
British cultural geography to Lermontov’s landscape, where nature becomes a beautiful,
inaccessible threat to man, waiting to be challenged. While Lermontov’s Gothic depiction of the
11
Scott’s Waverley novels are first published in 1814 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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Caucasus offers a viable setting for a Romantic adventure, the introduction of his hero challenges
the translatability of Byron into a landscape Orientalized by Russia instead of England.
Vital to understanding the significance of Lermontov’s rapport between Western and
Russian genres is the way space translates and recreates genre within the liminal proximity of
borders. True to Byronic form, Lermontov places his hero in a geographical context outside his
societal upbringing, but for Lermontov, the proximity of the landscape to Russia proper is telling
of Pechorin’s split identity—a split manifest in his identification with Western fictional personas
versus the reality of his Russian upbringing and nationality. The narrator’s depiction of the
Northern Caucasus, or Chechnya, inhabited by the Russian military introduces the mobility of
the Russian hero and the propensity for the emerging Russian literary identity to translate
Western images and motifs into a Russian context.
Crucially, Lermontov introduces the Romantic and Gothic elements of his hero as a
disease, and yet these elements give literary language to the Eastern European landscape.
Lermontov’s Western allusions transforms the Russian Other into a new literary brother of the
Byronic hero and reimagines the nation’s identity through literary genres and archetypes.
Benеdict Anderson’s use of imagined communities to describe the invention and originality
present in the formation of national identity clarifies the creative process of forming a new
national literary community—especially considering the influence of preexisting nationalisms,
where each preexisting national community serves as an important link in this expanding chain
of signifiers. Тhe amalgamation of British and Russian literary forms follows the creative
process Anderson describes, helping the nineteenth century Russian writer reimagine Russia’s
liminal national identity: an identity simultaneously reflected by and emerging from nineteenth
century Russian literature. Anderson explains, the nation “is imagined because the members of
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even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear
of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion,” and the novel form enters
into the process of this creative national imagining. Novels, like A Hero of Our Time, offer an
image of that community through its hero and secondary characters, which condenses the
discussion of a national identity into shared figures and themes. Furthermore, in Lermontov’s
“Author’s Introduction” he claims that the novel is an attempt to diagnose the disease of
Romanticisms, like Byronism, and subsequently silence the Byronic hero’s influence in Russia.
However, he instills the masculine Romantic fantasy within a character so dynamic that the
many layers of Pechorin’s identity reflect the complex overlaps of genre and narrative form; this
layering of form and character creates a dynamic hero unique in his amalgamation of Western
and Russian identities. Pechorin, a Byronic echo, is the hero of Russia in 1840; he is a metaphor
for the split identity between preserving Russian culture and importing Western arts and ideas
that define Russia in the nineteenth century. Just as this geographical divide is evident in
Pechorin’s mental typography, Lermontov furthers the complicated relationship among location
and literary, national, and individual identities with his representation of travel and foreign space
as the stage for this generic battle for identity.
Locating the Byronic image in a Russian context is not a complete innovation by
Lermontov, but the way he questions the believability and adaptability of the Romantic hero in a
Russian milieu is novel. Lermontov follows the Russian tradition shaped by Pushkin when he
sets Gothic tropes in place in order to challenge them, “parodying the Gothic norms of Radcliffe,
Lewis, Maturin, Karamzin and Bestuzhev” (Simpson 54). As Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin set a
Russian precedent for social and Romantic satire with its hero inspired by the Byronic figure, his
1834 short story, “The Queen of Spades” exemplifies “a believable Gothic atmosphere” in the
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context of Russia’s “window to the west,” St. Petersburg (Simpson 54). “The Queen of Spades”
proves that Russia can fall under the umbrella of believable Gothic spaces or join the preexisting
Gothic universe. Lermontov’s work is less parody, as Simpson states, and more of a literary
social satire that reveals very real and threatening consequences. A Hero of Our Time also shows
the Gothic landscapes of Russia, but uses Romantic satire to reveal that having a suitable setting
does not make Russian characters inherently European; quite opposite, Lermontov’s characters
fail in their Western facades and their Romantic masks lead to their unhappiness. Pechorin’s
Romanticism changes from an enticing cocktail of Byronic conventions with a thrilling plot upon
foreign lands into a catalyst for death and indifference to life. At first, the novel is that titillating
adventure tale that every reader wants to escape into, but adventure does not fulfill the hero—
“his heart remained empty” (Lermontov 40) and “One half of my soul did not exist” (127).
Lermontov’s double edged critique of the Gothic hero manifests as Pechorin attempts to straddle
multiple binaries and retain individual power. The desire to belong to a community and to scorn
the society that judged him and nourished all the bad in him divides his sense of self; his belief in
this betrayal leads him to write in his diary, “If I considered myself to be better and more
powerful than anyone in the world, I would be happy” (123). Lermontov asks his readers to
“believe in the reality of a Pechorin,” so he can reveal the consequences of a society that
alienates a man into Byronhood (2). Pechorin is lonely in his power, because even when he
“gained unconquerable power over their [women’s] will and heart, with no effort at all” the
victory is singular, he shares no authentic love or feeling, and he forms no mutual community
(105).
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Navigating the Textual and Corporeal Landscapes of “Bela”
“Bela,” the first story of the novel, reveals the way Russian characters, including
Pechorin, define themselves against the inhabitants of Chechnya, or the Northern Caucasus.
Sergei Durylin explains the prevalent Russian viewpoint on the Northern Caucasus during the
first half of the nineteenth century:
In the 1830s, that the Caucasus should be conquered and annexed to Russia
became an unquestionable truth for the government, all political leaders, the
gentry, and the bourgeois […] Tsarist Russia, intruding into the depths of the
Caucasus, clashing with its many peoples, and giving no consideration to the
peculiarities of their history, nationality, or culture, strove to transform them into
a faceless, systematically exploited human mass of colonial possessions. (127)
Essentially, if Europe has the power to Orientalize Russia, then through Russia’s own
Orientalization of the Caucasus, Russians gain a national identity and power as dominant as that
in the West. Lermontov writes the Circassian natives through an Orientalizing gaze, which
brings his image of Russia into existence against Europe and reveals Russia as separate from a
mythicized East. 12 Therefore, as Edward Said explains, Orientalism is “one of the deepest and
most recurring images of the Other” and “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as
its contrasting image” (2-3). Lermontov exercises the Western practice of forming an Oriental
other to redefine Russia against the Caucasus. The Gothic is a prime tool to Orientalize
Circassians, because the process of Orientalization itself has roots in British Gothicism: the
Chechen or “‘Circassian’ in the usual sense of the word in the 1820s and 1830s is often understood to mean in
general all mountain peoples of the Northern Caucasus with whom the war was fought, just as ‘Tatar’ implies, in
general, all Caucasians of the Islamic region” (Durylin 131).
12
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omnipresent fear underlying Gothic narratives creates a space for communities to other
minorities or foreigners to bolster a mainstream national identity. For instance, Russian
characters marginalize minorities by pairing nationalities with disparaging stereotypes:
“Ossetians” with “brutes,” (4) “Asiatics” with “rascals,” (4) “Kabardans” and “Chechens” with
“robbers and paupers” (Lermontov 8). Genre and language become the tools through which
Lermontov casts a Western cloak over his first chapter, when he sets up his Russian community
in an Orientalized space.
Once Russian characters label minority groups with derogatory descriptions that Other
them, the central Russian figures begin to apply Western, fictional, generic epithets onto
Pechorin. First, they other the minorities, and then they gain access to the Western, Romantic
vocabulary of power. Maksim Maksimich infers Pechorin’s theoretical right to power by reading
him as one of the chosen “people to whom it is assigned, at their birth, to have all sorts of
extraordinary things happen to them” (11). The more characters who define him as
“extraordinary” (11) or a “hero” (98), as Maksim Maksimich and Princess Mary do, the more
power Pechorin has at his disposal. Pechorin performs on this Orientalized stage by
manipulating native women and men for his own entertainment and pleasure: Pechorin beguiles
Azamat into forfeiting his beautiful sister and Circassian princess, Bela, in exchange for the
Chechen fighter Kazbich’s legendary horse. Pechorin successfully commandeers the famous
horse, trades it for Bela, and Azamat disappears with the horse for good; however, Kazbich’s
vengeful rage manifests when he kills Bela’s father (3-49). Pechorin tricks locals as though they
were puppets and manipulates Bela as though she were no more than a dispensable amusement—
literally equating her worth to that of an animal: “she was beautiful: tall, slender, with black eyes
which resembled those of a mountain gazelle” (13). Pechorin describes Bela with the imagery of
Rose 21
untamed animals to highlight her wildness and foreignness, while dehumanizing her. His
animalistic description objectifies Bela as a woman and non-Russian. Pechorin constantly likens
Russian women of aristocratic breeding (as well as himself at one point) to tamed horses:
Grushnitski comments, “You talk of a pretty woman as of an English horse” (88) and Pechorin
writes, “breeding in women, as in horses, is a great thing” (73). Thus, Pechorin finds power in
his masculine and ethnic superiority over Bela, despite her local rank of “princess” (13). Told
from the perspective of the narrator, Pechorin’s actions in Chechnya reveal a shallow, archetypal
representation of the conqueror, the rake, and the Byronic hero. His animalistic imagery
solidifies his role as more elevated and civilized that the local Circassians. In “Bela,” Lermontov
introduces the high stakes of his warning in the introduction when Pechorin begins exercising his
power over others; the projection of the Romantic hero onto the Russian stage is a disease
manifest in Pechorin’s destructive power, seeking a cure. The caustic consequences of
Pechorin’s Romantic nature upon the Chechen landscape highlights the limitations of translating
a Western “hero” to an Eastern context, as well as the process of creating a new hero as genre
travels across space.
Pechorin’s perception of his masculinity and Lermontov’s emasculation of Englishness
lies at the heart of his critique of Westernizing Russian identity. In order to solidify the
masculine identity of a new Russian hero, Lermontov begins to break down the masculinity of
the Byronic hero. Byron’s characters, like Gulnare and Conrad in The Corsair, experience
differing “definitions of masculinity and femininity.” For instance, in Cheryl Fallon Giuliano’s
work on femininity in Byron’s Oriental tales, she writes, “Conrad is uncomfortable with the
slight androgynous leanings in his character. Whenever he feels a feminine softness rising in
him, he must mask it or deny it” (790). The Byronic hero’s struggle between maintaining gender
Rose 22
codes and exuding his characteristic misogyny finds its way into Lermontov’s characterization of
Pechorin. However, Lermontov connects Pechorin’s femininity to the influence of English
literature and culture upon the hero’s aristocratic upbringing—not Russian culture as a whole,
which thrives in the hyper-masculine adventure setting of the military encampment. For
example, when the narrator first sees Pechorin in the short chapter, “Maksim Maksimich,”
immediately following “Bela,” he interprets the physiognomy he already knows to characterize
both an aristocratic, educated man and a fearless soldier in the Caucasus. Our hero emerges from
an “English carriage,” (52) and the narrator describes the dichotomy of Pechorin’s appearance:
his “broad shoulders testified to a sturdy constitution which was suited to bear all the hardships
of a roving life” but he has “small aristocratic hands” with “thin,” “pale fingers” (Lermontov 56).
Even his “skin had a kind of feminine tenderness” (56). Thus, just as Pechorin speaks of the
importance of breeding in women, as in the breeding of horses, the circumstances of his own
high breeding associate him with a Western, feminizing education and attitude (73). Judith
Butler clarifies the relationship between power and a borrowed national/literary persona: the
subject of power is “bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and
names that are not of its own existence” in order to resist his own vulnerability to subjugation
(Butler 20). This process is especially crucial to Pechorin as he represents a new era of Russian
heroism. The elements of Western femininity in Pechorin’s new national image stand in
opposition to the former generation’s ideal of Russian manhood. Where Maksim Maksimich is a
beloved, archetypal portrayal of a Russian man, Pechorin introduces the new wave of “young
men of fashion” (Lermontov 62). Maksim Maksimich comes from the era of “unschooled old
fellows,” untainted by the influx of Western culture, and the solidarity of his national and
masculine identity stands as a foil for the inchoate Pechorin (62). The feminization of
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Englishness and its connection to aristocracy works to contain and appropriate this Western
contagion. Crucially, Pechorin’s masculine identity in “Bela” is the most absolute—perhaps
because Maksim Maksimich relays the story in his archetypally Russian male voice or, even
more interestingly, because the wild landscape of the military encampment provides a masculine
setting on which Pechorin can perform. Therefore, while the masculine/feminine dichotomy of
the Byronic hero is important to keep in mind, as the landscape of the novel changes and
Pechorin moves into a more aristocratic setting of Russian society in “Princess Mary,”
Lermontov’s conflation of Englishness and femininity becomes clearer. Ultimately, the sense of
Western influence as a feminizing source will become another layer in Pechorin’s Byronic
characterization just waiting to be peeled away.
Pechorin’s wavering identity between the English Byronic hero and the creation of a
modern Russian hero becomes apparent in “Bela,” as Chechnya’s foreign landscape witnesses
the hero’s dependence upon the national and gendered Other in his quest for individual power.
Lermontov takes fanciful Byronic elements and weaves them into a realist narrative and
Bildungsroman for the emerging Russian hero of nineteenth century fiction. Pechorin’s use of
conventionally Western, literary depictions of gender to entrench his identity in a Romantic and
Gothic narrative opens the door for inquiry into the Romantic hero’s sustainability in a uniquely
Russian narrative. For example, when Maksim Maksimich suggests returning Bela to her father,
Pechorin pits Maksim’s civilized Russian character against Bela’s Circassian “savage” father:
“you’re a kind man, aren’t you? Now, if we give his daughter back to that savage, he’ll either
slit her throat or sell her […] let me keep Bela, and you keep my sword” (24). First, Lermontov
exposes Pechorin’s hypocrisy derived from his position as the civilized man: Pechorin justifies
his crime against Bela and her family by attributing savage conventions of punishment to the
Rose 24
local people. Additionally, Pechorin invokes his masculine right over the economy of women,
with a sword symbolic of the phallus and masculine violence: Maksim may keep his sword in
exchange for Pechorin possessing Bela. However, his symbolic offer to relinquish the phallic
symbol in exchange for the commodification of Bela implies that once he obtains the object of
desire, he no longer needs to wield his masculine power. Therefore, the subject of power
(Pechorin) is “vulnerable to subjugation,” even in the act of subjugating others (Butler 20). By
revealing his need to have power over women, he exposes an insecurity and fear over others
gaining power over him. His seeming paradox becomes clear as Pechorin’s domination over
Bela’s will only drives him deeper into his all-consuming ennui.
Masculinity is a major theme in Hero—one that ties Pechorin to patriarchal themes in
Russian society as well as Romantic symbols of power. On one hand, Lermontov draws straight
from images of Western masculinity; Eric Gamer writes about how Walter Scott “seeks to make
the Gothic more masculine by investing it with military patriotism” (Lermontov 24). On the
other hand, despite Pechorin’s show at a masculine military identity, he is exiled to the
Caucasus—he does not bravely volunteer, and the only violence he performs is upon innocents
and comrades. His show of masculine power is more similar to Samuel Richardson’s Romantic
rake, Lovelace, who mercilessly acts upon his desire to possess Clarissa (Clarissa 1748);
similarly, Pechorin cannot resist the desire to “tame her [Bela]” in order to prove the prowess of
his will (24). His assertion of power over the national and gendered Other, Bela, exemplifies
Lermontov’s manipulation of the Gothic hero to reveal, as William Mills Todd argues, “the
conflicting views on polite society that were arising within Russian culture, its fragility,
exclusiveness, and potential for hypocrisy and self-delusion” (4). The more Pechorin seems
successful in his appropriation of Bela, containing and minimalizing the dichotomies between
Rose 25
their two worlds, the more apparent his deception becomes; his mask of genuine emotion
towards Bela fades into the self-delusion his society and education breeds. The closer he comes
to winning the manipulation game over Bela, the more potently his ennui returns to his Romantic
inclination. Thus, his performed masculinity upon the landscape of Bela’s body and identity
proves insufficient to fulfill his lust for power over others and self-assurance in his heroic
identity. Then, since the victory is never as rewarding as he desires, his final step is to dispose of
the conquered other.
He solidifies his patriarchal power by manipulating Bela into a Stockholm syndrome
induced love for him, which manifests when he “in jest” threatens to “punish himself” in battle
and she “threw herself on his neck” to stop him from leaving (Lermontov 27). He furthers the
hierarchy of Russian ethnic and national identity by dressing “her up like a doll” and caring for
her until “Her face and hands lost their tan” (35). Finally, Pechorin tests the limits of his
influence upon transforming Bela according to his aristocratic view of beauty and breeding by
coaxing Bela into “assimilating the words of others” and practicing the Russian language
(Bakhtin, Discourse 682). Here, the novel uncovers the leeching effect of the Romantic disease:
while the tan leaves Bela’s skin the Byronic hero sees the success in his ability to cultivate and
dominate a woman emblematic of foreign otherness and perceived inferiority, but this loss
symbolically continues into Pechorin’s vampire-like sucking away of her non-Russian identity
until she dissolves into nothingness. Byron’s Turkish tales reveal a similar Orientalization and
erasure of women; Byron describes the Muslim beauty, Leila, in The Giaour with language very
similar to Lermontov’s description of Bela: Leila’s eyes hold a “dark charm,” characteristic “of
the Gazelle” (250). Not only is she dehumanized in her foreignness, but Byron also writes of
Turkish beauties as “The lovely toy so fiercely sought / Hath lost its charm by being caught”
Rose 26
(249). Therefore, Pechorin exemplifies the masculine Byronism that only craves the chase for
females or femininity, but the capture brings feminine figures too close to the masculine will.
The hero then dissolves his ties to women to regain the freedom and independence of his
masculine mobility to adventure, illustrating “the inevitable physical destruction and spiritual
devastation triggered by adherence to masculine codes” (Guiliano 796). The destruction of the
female Other serves as sustenance for Pechorin’s ego throughout the novel; for instance, he
writes after seducing another woman (Princess Mary) into unrequited love: “She will spend a
sleepless night and will weep. This thought gives me boundless delight: there are moments when
I understand the vampire” (Lermontov 135). To obtain a sense of self-actualization in his
Romantic character, Pechorin destroys the female Other, but his act of destruction does not
metamorphose him into a Romantic original—instead it divulges the viral nature of his literary
persona as it literally kills others and makes his life “more empty day by day” (41).
The Final Failure of Assimilation
In Pechorin’s “assimilation” of Bela—an act of adding a member to a community in
order to prove the power of the individual within the whole—he reveals his consciousness of his
subjectivity to the collective. His attempt to imitate Byron involves being the ultimate
individual, but his desire to assimilate Bela to a Russian milieu reveals his identification with a
Russian community. This returns to his struggle between individuality and the community,
because he seduces women to prove his individual power, but in order to do so he becomes the
Romantic figure high society makes him out to be. Lermontov continuously deconstructs the
ability for Byronic individualism in a Russian society so centered on community. Each
successful attempt he makes at seduction only proves that the “gloomy” and “superior”
Romanticism that “the fashionable world” cultivates in him makes him a desirable member of
Rose 27
the community…that is, until he rejects love and crushes the prospect of any kind of future with
a woman (127). Pechorin manipulates Bela into believing he will be her husband, just as he does
with Princess Mary, but he writes in his diary, “However much I may love a woman, if she only
lets me feel that I must marry her—farewell to love!” (148). Furthermore, the discourse of
English society and literature, associated as the source of ennui in both Eugene Onegin and
Hero, infiltrates Pechorin’s Russian, fashionable society. Thus, Pechorin also schemes and
deceives to escape the ennui, which plagues him. The narrator reminds his reader that the
English “introduced the fashion of being bored” immediately after Pechorin explains how his
“soul has been impaired by the fashionable world” into an irreparable state of ennui, or the
extreme crisis of an existential boredom (41). In a review of the novel, published around its time
of release in 1840, S.P. Shevyrev writes about the Western upbringing of aristocratic Russian
society alluded to in “Bela” and revealed fully in the later chapter “Princess Mary”: “And the
main root of all evil is a Western upbringing alien to any sense of our [Russian] beliefs” (Bagby
158). Thus, there is truth in Lermontov’s warning to society, as mobile aristocrats like Pechorin
carry Romanticism’s potentially destructive powers in his wake.
The split in Pechorin’s discourse between individual/community and Western/Russian
begins when he defines individual power by his ability to take Bela from her geographical and
national context and place her within his own. Within his tent, amongst the Caucasus, he
imagines his own community defined by and against the Russian society and Western literatures,
which produce him, and the foreign land where he seeks freedom. However, the narrator’s
depiction of Pechorin as the Romantic hero is myth, because his individualized, imagined
community is transient—Bela’s demise is the first glimpse of the volatile wavering of
dichotomies that will come to define Pechorin’s identity. Pechorin’s agency in Bela’s death
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exhibits the extent to which a Romanticized existence destroys the lives of others and cannot
translate one form of existence into another preexisting form, but only something new. In other
words, despite the extent to which Pechorin masquerades Bela as a Russian woman, she does not
become a member of the community that produces him, but of the community he produces—the
imagined community where “the love of a wild girl was little better than that of a lady of rank”
(40). Therefore, when Pechorin leaves Bela alone, abandoning her as bait for the vengeful
Kazbich to steal, he disposes of the byproduct of his experiment with national superiority and
Western literary inspirations. His orchestration of Bela’s death by Kazbich’s hands reiterates the
narrator’s original assertion that “Circassians are a bunch of thieves,” while performing the
violent power of Russian national identity informed by literary tropes to create and destroy new
communities (45). In other words, instead of disposing of Bela with his own hands, he
orchestrates a situation that will label the Chechen Kazbich the villain, leaving the morally
“superior” Russian to remain the seemingly innocent hero. He is reasserting his ethnic
superiority, while masterminding a murder; given, Kazbich does in fact murder Bela, so these
men share the stage of masculine violence upon women. Therefore, as Pechorin “lifted his head
and laughed” after Bela’s death, Lermontov initiates the threat of the Byronic hero upon a
foreign landscape and sets the stage for the novel to turn inward (48). The final mark of his
impotency to fully dominate and appropriate Bela comes in her final hours: “She began to grieve
that she was not a Christian, and that in the next world her soul would not meet Pechorin’s soul”
but “at last she replied that she would die in the same faith in which she was born” (46).
Pechorin ruins her family, manipulates her appearance, and expression of identity, but he gains
no power over her spiritual conviction: he can have her life but not her soul. Despite not being
ethnically Russian, Bela displays the two qualities most central to the princess of Russian
Rose 29
folklore: “beauty and the strength of her soul” (Propp 202). The supernatural essence of the soul
transcends Byronic narratives and marks the change of generic tone that comes with the folkloric
dimension in the next section, “Taman.” Lermontov is writing the existence of an ethnically
superior, imperial Russia that has become Occidental in the wake of its Oriental conquests.
However, he poses the question of what kind of masculine figure will symbolize this new
Russian era and national identity. In “Bela,” Pechorin uses Byronic masculinity to base his
individual conquests on foreign soil, but whether he can escape the pitfalls of a feminizing
English influence is yet to emerge in the text. After the narrator gives an outside look at
Pechorin’s Romantic plague, he inserts Pechorin’s diary to explore whether or not the Byronic
figure is a façade or reaches the depths of Pechorin’s soul.
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Chapter 2: “Taman” and the Folkloric Showdown
“The peasant entered the little hut, and there was Baba Yaga, her head in front, a leg in
one corner, and the other in another. ‘I smell a Russian smell!’ said Yaga” (“Baba Yaga,” 32).
Fabula and Syuzhet of “Taman”
“Taman” is the third tale in A Hero of Our Time and is the beginning of Pechorin’s
personal travel notes. It is significant that, “Taman” is chronologically the first story in the
novel: while the reader experiences Pechorin in “Bela” and “Maksim Maksimich” through the
gaze of at least three narrators (Lermontov, Maksim Maksimich, and the unnamed narrator), this
story introduces Pechorin’s unique worldview and self-conceptualization. Although the “diary”
tales come from Pechorin’s mind and pen, the narration remains questionably reliable, because
Pechorin and the unnamed editor—formerly the narrator—characterize themselves as men of
letters (Barratt 23). Both men embark on their journeys with notebooks in hand, an education
that imbues them with “self-conscious literariness” (Barratt 24), and are prepared to translate
reality into fantastic tales. The narrator asks Maksim Maksimich for Pechorin’s journals, in
order to “do with them all I wish” and even “publish them in the gazettes” with the obvious
literary purpose he has for them. Therefore, the first two tales are told by one man seeking a
hero to fill his pages and the following tales depict Pechorin as he becomes the hero of his own
diary. The self-conscious and self-reflexive nature of the text inherently questions the
authenticity of the heroic identity. Because their acts of reading and writing life literally
translate to the creation of literature, they do not emphasize the experience of reality and the
viability of a real life Russian hero.
Lermontov takes the diary or travel journal, associated with “authentic access” to the
utmost interiority of the author, and produces a form by which the hero distances his true
Rose 31
feelings and identity from himself. Traditionally, the only audience ever intended for a diary is
its author, which makes the form ideal for “the quest of individuality, or self” so popular in the
Gothic and Romantic traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Paperno 563). On the
other hand, as a travel journal Pechorin’s diary also falls into a tradition whose popularity was
second only to the novel in the eighteenth century and which was meant to broaden the
conceptualization of the individual within a global context. Lermontov thus brings together two
similar literary forms divided by their corresponding focus on individual identity and national or
global identity; this dichotomy of form reflects how Pechorin pines for a community in Russia
while attempting to be a Romantic individual. Form is closely tied to irony for Lermontov, and
his additional use of folkloric language in this dual form creates a shroud of fantasy around
Pechorin’s perceived reality, distancing the hero’s narration from the reader. This inclusion of
Russian folklore is the truly unique layer Lermontov adds to his experimentation with genre and
form. Instead of the directness and realism often found in the diary or travel journal, Pechorin
gives layers of genre for the reader to peel away and find the man underneath: a man whose
identity forms in the contest between these layers of genre.
Pechorin’s journal begins with a whine of disdain for the first backdrop of his adventures
as a “military man on the move” (80); he writes, “Taman is the worst little town of all the
seacoast towns in Russia. I almost died of hunger there and, moreover, an attempt was made to
drown me” (Lermontov 65). The first words from the hero’s diary are ones of victimhood,
which foreshadow his misfortunes. Expecting a warm welcome for an “officer going on official
business” (65), Pechorin is escorted by a sergeant and corporal to the only hut available; this
cursed hut belongs to an old woman reminiscent of the witch from Russian folklore: Baba Yaga.
Her hut marks the border between worlds, and after she gives trials to her guests, she either
Rose 32
generously rewards or mortally punishes them. A young blind boy and an eighteen-year-old girl
attend this old crone. Intrigued by the blind boy’s ability “to run down the steep slope of the
shore,” Pechorin follows him as he delivers a mysterious bundle to the docks and meets the
young girl (68). Conscious of the fact Pechorin saw her dubious smuggling activity the night
before, the beautiful girl, who Pechorin constantly describes as “undine”13 or the Russian
rusalka, seductively invites Pechorin to meet her on the shore one night. As she lures him to a
boat and tries to drown him at sea, the blind boy steals all Pechorin’s possessions from the hut.
The girl overpowers Pechorin, leaving him dripping on the shore and watching helplessly as the
blind boy delivers Pechorin’s goods to fellow smugglers. Pechorin’s vulnerability in “Taman”
derives from the town’s liminal location on the border and seacoast of Russia. Located on the
line between East and West, the town invokes the spiritualized East in the form of characters
from Russian folklore against the rational West with the pretender Pechorin. This liminal space
is the arena for the Byronic Russian to face his heritage and the dangers of betraying them.
Questions of Genre and Geography: the British Gothic and the Russian Folktale
As a border town along the Black Sea, Taman is a prime location for a showdown
between the mysterious Gothic that hails from beyond the turbulent waters and the familiar
Russian folktale that accompanies the upbringing of many Russian children. The town’s liminal
space echoes the Russian fairy tale’s emphasis on space, which then determines the hero’s
actions. This liminal space facilitates a “morphological relationship” between genres (Propp
234), meaning that folklore and Romanticism can work together as transitional genres for the
formation of a new genre and Pechorin’s own transitional state of existence; he is between
13
Undine is a category of elemental creatures, most often women, associated with water. Anything from
nereides, limoniades, naiades and mermaids can be considered undines.
Rose 33
childhood and adulthood, St. Petersburg and his future post in the Caucasus, and his generic
language combines the fairy tale elements of Russian adolescence and the Gothic elements that
inform his conception of an adventurous future abroad. Therefore, “Taman” is essentially
Pechorin’s Bildungsroman, pieced together with characters from Russian folklore, Gothic
descriptions of landscape, and the widely popular form of travel notes. Pechorin’s use of
folkloric tropes marks his lingering connection with his Russian childhood and literary
upbringing, while glimpses of the Gothic in Taman’s landscape begin to uncover the genre
Pechorin uses to write himself into a heroic adulthood. For example, Pechorin describes his
haunting surroundings: “the moon had begun to cloth herself in clouds and above the sea a mist
had risen” (Lermontov 68). Then, Russian folklore enters the text to show the Byronic hero that
he is the other. While the Byronic hero is typically the “other” or outcast, Pechorin comes from
an aristocratic society that seeks to accept such Western archetypes and include them in their
national fold; Lermontov challenges this inclusion by participating in the othering of the Byronic
hero. By looking at Pechorin’s interactions with women we can see how the Byronic hero fails
to translate into a Russian context; the young mermaid-like maiden of “Taman,” or the rusalka,
is the folkloric femme fatal who disarms and destroys the credibility of the Byronic figure at the
threshold of Russia. Pechorin can use folklore terminology, because he is Russian, but the
folkloric characters are able to swindle and control him, because he is trying to be Western
during a time when Russia was still considered the “other” for many Europeans.
Pechorin’s folkloric characterization of Taman’s inhabitants reveals his desire to
understand his world in literary terms and reveals his connections to a uniquely Russian, national
reading identity. Pechorin’s Western literary education is quite specific to the Russian
aristocracy primarily located in big cities like St. Petersburg or Moscow, but the Russian folktale
Rose 34
places him in a universally Russian reading community. Thanks to the folktale’s oral tradition,
Russians of all classes grew up with these tales, making it a truly national, collective experience.
Although, no one attempted to make a complete written collection of these tales until Aleksandr
Afanas’ev complied written versions from 1855-1864—fifteen years after the first publishing of
Hero (Afans’ev 632). These tales were already widely known before they entered print culture,
which made them particularly accessible to the aristocracy. Anderson stresses the importance of
how “print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that
image to antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation” (44). While I agree with
Anderson, and believe Lermontov plays a key role in the literary nation building he describes,
the folktale unearths an even deeper connection to the idea of Russian nationhood within the oral
tradition preceding print. First, this oral tradition is significant to the novel, because oral
storytelling is active in the reader’s conceptualization of Pechorin: the narrator writes “Bela”
based on the oral accounts of Maksim Maksimich, a former commander of Pechorin. Then, most
importantly, it grounds Pechorin’s journal in the folktale, a literary tradition more ancient and
unique to the Russian tongue than the European genres he adopts.
Supernatural symbols and metaphors from Russian folklore fill the scenes of “Taman”
to appropriate a liminal setting into a national context. Immediately after Pechorin’s cry of
exhaustion, on the first page of the story, to “Take me somewhere […] Let it be the devil’s, but
lead me to the place,” we know he is approaching a dangerous threshold infused with
superstition and the supernatural (Lermontov 65). Franco Moretti discusses the way metaphors
become particularly frequent near borders: “Since metaphors use a ‘familiar field of reference,’
they also give form to the unknown: they contain it, and keep it somehow under control”
(Moretti 47). Initially, the folkloric language, which is the “familiar field of reference” for the
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Russian reader, gives form to the ominous figures of the unknown smugglers upon a Gothic
landscape of crashing waves and looming full moons. Then, the folkloric characters, serving as
metaphoric substitutions, give form to the literary and national unknown of the British Byronic
hero. The folkloric characterization of the fantastic Russian figures creates a national frame of
reference that makes them can stand in opposition to Pechorin’s mask of Western identity. This
generic frame of reference corresponds to the geographical frame of Taman upon the Black sea,
at the border of Russia. For instance, as the Western fairy tale tradition begins with invocations
of time (Once upon a time…), the Russian fairy tale is traditionally tied to space (In a certain
kingdom or In a certain state…) (Propp 151). Thus, the origins of a Russian national identity
shared through storytelling begins with the state and its boundaries. The journey of the hero or
heroine of the Russian fairy tale depends first on his or her geographic location, and then the plot
occurs according to the tropes characteristic of that landscape. Accordingly, when Pechorin sees
the haunted little hut, the location’s image immediately invokes Baba Yaga14(though unnamed as
such), just as the sea summons the rusalka, who I will discuss at length later in this chapter.
Where Pushkin significantly reveals the fairy tale as “remarkably adaptable” in his
pioneering work with Russian folklore15 (Chandler ix), Lermontov unites this adaptability and
national relatability, with questions of national and individual identity. He ultimately overlaps
folklore and Gothic symbols in a way that questions the literary language-of-power, and explores
which national language defines the “hero of our time.” Thus, he entwines folklore and the
Gothic to create a Bildungsroman, or even a Künstlerroman, in which Pechorin’s individual
maturation into a reader and writer of life parallels the development of Russian national identity.
14
Baba Yaga is the sinister witch of Russian folklore. She can be the cannibalistic crone, or the godmother figure to
the unfortunate step daughter. See page 9 for an in depth reading of this dynamic character.
15
Pushkin begins his experiments with recording Russian folktales and adapting them into verse around 1825. This
is 15 years before Hero is first published in 1840.
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Jed Esty also connects the Bildungsroman to nationalism: he “establishes the genre’s roots in
burgeoning nationalism based on an ideal of organic culture whose temporality and harmony
could be reflected in the developing personality at the core of the bildungsroman” (5). This
relation between the formations of hero and nation has specific geographic and temporal
boundaries, as the title suggests: a hero of our (Russia’s) time (nineteenth century). Temporal
and spatial relationships are inherently connected and become manifest through literature, as
Bakhtin explains with his work with the chronotope in The Dialogic Imagination, and this “time
space” connection is essential for the Bildungsroman, because the formation of a national
identity relies on its historical and geographic context (84). However, the text constantly invokes
the ironic nature of the title: Pechorin acts like a Romantic hero of England’s time. Unlike
Esty’s claim that nationalism is based on a harmony reflected by the Bildungsroman, I argue that
the complete lack of harmony in Pechorin’s struggle between a Western and Russian identity
inspires Russia’s burgeoning nationalism. In order to understand the temporal aspect of Russia’s
coming of age with a national literary tradition, it is important to consider Lermontov’s
predecessors. Before Lermontov, the same Russian authors experimenting with the Gothic genre
were also writing and recording folktales. Vladimir Propp points out the folkloric inspiration of
Nikolai Karamzin’s famous work “Poor Liza” as well as Pushkin’s act of redefining “the folktale
through another genre, namely, the long poem” (70). The “influence of witches, rusalki and dark
forests of traditional Russian fairy stories” convinced many Russian authors in the second half of
the eighteenth century “that Russia could provide the grist for the setting of a Gothic tale”
(Simpson 42). For example, Jane Costlow claims that “If Bela emerges from the genre of exotic,
‘Orientalizing’ tale, the heroine of “Taman” comes straight out of Gothic, those fictions
‘frightful and hideous’ that the “Author’s Introduction” suggests we willingly believe” (92-93).
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Although Costlow discusses the Gothic nature of “Taman,” along with genre’s underlying fear
and superstition, she does not expound upon the significance of the text’s foundation in Russian
folk tradition. In contrast, the tale, I argue does not simply display the Gothic plague Lermontov
warns against: it offers a formidable foe and potential remedy. Thus, for Lermontov the fairy
tale provides a viable gateway into the Russian Gothic: both weave elements of folklore and
realism in provocative ways, but the fairy tale anchors Gothic elements into a Russian literary
landscape.
The Russian fairy tale does not simply mediate the popularity of the British Gothic; it
consistently stands apart as uniquely Russian. Pushkin even writes of the Russian fairy tale in a
letter to his brother: “Here’s the Russian spirit, here it smells of Rus’” (Propp 50). 16 The folktale
provides the literary language and template most attached to the Russian soul: “folktales awaken
love for everything old-fashioned and truly Russian, as opposed to everything new and foreign”
(Propp 74). Thus, the burgeoning scholarly interest in the Russian folktale during the 1840s
(Propp 89) logically parallels the anxieties of Slavophiles, as mentioned in chapter one, over the
threat of Western ideals upon the Russian people. Slavophiles celebrate the sacredness of
Russian culture uncontaminated by Western influence, and the fairy tale maintains the Russian
spirit in Hero. David Gasperetti’s work on the rise of the Russian novel solidifies my
observation of the fairy tale’s ability to quell the Western literary storm in Russia: folklore “did
endow early Russian prose fiction with a heavy dose of native wit, wisdom, and whimsicality
that served as an effective antidote to the foreign-inspired literature of official culture” (47).17
Rus’ refers to the very first incarnation of the Russian nation with its capital in Kiev, or Kievan Rus’. This most
ancient name for Russia is first mentioned around the year 840 AD in our existing records (Pritsak 283).
-Also, Baba Yaga, the popular witch of Russian fairy tales, frequently exclaims, “I smell a Russian!” Pushkin’s
letter invokes her famous words, and points out the singularity of Russianness.
17
When Gasperetti refers to “official culture,” he is speaking of the aristocracy, or Russian gentry who opened their
arms to westernization in the 18th and 19th centuries. Pechorin belongs to this class of French speaking society folks
16
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The fairy tale, magic tale, or folktale offers a potential antidote to the Byronic plague Lermontov
is constantly playing with. Thus, it is important to interpret “Taman” as the active fusion of the
Russian fairy tale and British Gothic, while tracing how each genre manifests individual power
as a means of constructing a national, gendered, or heroic identity.
While Propp’s The Morphology of the Folktale (1928) largely discusses the global
phenomenon of the folktale and the way folk traditions of numerous countries share common
characters and themes, The Russian Folktale specifies the way “The everyday tale is not only
the most popular but also the most nationally specific type of tale” (231). Thus, I find it crucial
to mention the exact generic nature of “Taman” as befitting Propp’s categorization of the
novelistic tale or everyday tale. In this subset of the folktale “earthly people are the bearers of
evil” instead of actual “dragons, Kashchi, 18 Baba Yaga, and so on” (Propp 226). The fantastic
elements of fairy tales meet reality, and we encounter familiar characters up to their usual tricks,
but on a realistic landscape devoid of actual magic. Lermontov’s overlapping frames of genre
and narrative in A Hero of Our Time manipulate the language of the Byronic and folkloric to
unearth a deeper, more complex and conflicted Russian hero. The competition between
Pechorin’s Romantic and Folkloric worldviews reveal the complex identities that emerge from
his central characterization as a reader. The motifs from Russian fairy tales introduce the chasm
in our hero’s consciousness, making us wonder whether a Western hero can translate onto
Russian soil or if a Russian hero can translate himself into a Byronic hero.
who widely read English, French, and German literatures. I believe that Gasperetti particularly refers to English
literature when he says “foreign inspired literature,” because he goes on to write: “Russia was overwhelmed by such
a powerful wave of Anglomania that it prompted Novikov to write: ‘The English have replaced the French:
nowadays women and men are falling over themselves to imitate anything English’” (20).
18
Kashchi or Koshchey the Deathless is a skeletal villain, who can only be killed if the object containing his
mortality is destroyed. “His death lies in the tip of needle. This needle lies inside and egg. This egg lies inside a
duck. This duck lies inside the belly of a hare. And this hare lies inside a chest hidden at the top of a tall oak that
Koshchey watches over like the apple of his eye” (Chandler 64).
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Baba Yaga: the Guard between Worlds
Pechorin enters the Russian border town of Taman in a troika, a traditional Russian
carriage drawn by three horses, after three sleepless nights (Lermontov 65). Already, on the first
page of the tale, Pechorin invokes the “folkloric trebling,” (Forrester 426) or the symbolic
significance of threes that occurs in folktales around the world. Despite the seeming universality
of this trope, the sign of three has particular significance with the Russian folklore figure Baba
Yaga: the “crone face of the triune goddess (maiden, mother, crone)” (Forrester 425). For
Russian speakers, the name Baba Yaga is reminiscent of “babushka” or grandmother; however,
unlike the proper English grandmother who serves tea and cookies, babushka has connotations of
soft maternity as well as serious strength. Similarly, Baba Yaga is most likely the only witch
figure in world folk tradition that can play either the fairy godmother figure who rewards a
young girl for tending her home or the wicked cannibal who eats children. She exemplifies the
tradition of Russian characters divided between opposing identities; characters like Baba Yaga,
and even Pechorin, are defined in the grey areas of good and evil. While “the magic tales of all
European countries […] include dangerous witches,” the image of the ambivalent Baba Yaga “is
especially vivid and well developed” (Chandler xv). Thus, her figure furthers the theme of
doubling and binaries filling the novel and its characters, while offering a uniquely Russian
figure to pit against Pechorin.
Pechorin understands the beginning of his journey in fairy tale images, just as a child
learns the lessons they will need for adulthood through their nation’s folktales. Thus, his
superstitions and supernatural characterizations create a folklore-inspired Bildungsroman. As
Pechorin wearily searches for a place to stay the night, it appears that all the huts are occupied—
except for “an evil place” sitting “on the very edge of the sea” (Lermontov 65, 66). His
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adventure begins with a seemingly mystical challenge typical of the Russian fairy tale: in order
to continue his heroic journey and “set out for Gelendzhik” the next day, Pechorin must conquer
the obstacles set forth by the ominous hut (Lermontov 66). However, because Lermontov writes
in the tradition of the everyday tale, the supernatural lingers on the fringes while the characters
remain real people. Pechorin immediately invokes a superstitious belief in the supernatural once
he enters the hut and notes, “Not one ikon hung on the wall—a bad sign!” (Lermontov 67).
Despite the fact that Pechorin shows no real inclination towards religion during his adventures,
he is still wary and superstitious at the lack of religion in the crone’s hut. Typically, an icon
hung in the corner of every home in nineteenth century Russia, and this lack of religious
representation invokes a fear of demonic forces afoot. Additionally, beyond the iconless wall
lies the Black Sea, which geographically and symbolically represents a gateway between Russian
and Western Europe. Once Pechorin introduces the demonic and mysterious nature of his
entrance into Taman, the most interesting role of Baba Yaga becomes apparent: her role of the
gatekeeper between worlds.
The connection between Baba Yaga and borders or boundaries become evident as
Pechorin enters the hut: her hut “on the very edge of the sea” is the final landmark before
crossing the Black Sea to the foreign West. The landlady’s daughter ran “off across the sea with
a Tatar,” which further marks the hut as both the final stop before adventure across the sea and
an oppressive place from which to escape to freedom (Lermontov 66). Propp explains the old
crone’s archetypal role as gatekeeper: “Baba Yaga (‘old woman,’ ‘hag’) is the guard at the
border; she guards the entrance into that distant world. The entrance passes through her hut”
(157). Taman and Baba Yaga’s huts are metaphoric gates that mediate between narrative and
generic forms. According to the logic of the folktale, if Pechorin can survive his stay in the
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sinister hut, then he can move onto the next stage of his journey, become the hero of an
adventure, and continue on his critical path of identity formation. However, at this early point in
his journey, his superstition exposes the lingering naiveté of childhood, which makes him
vulnerable to these fairy tale-like characters. If Pechorin is to journey further into the wild,
fantastic world of the Caucasus, then he must successfully pass through the hut. Where Gothic
imagery helps to Orientalize the Caucasus in “Bela,” the folktale images of boundaries between
the real world and a fantastic world beyond further steeps the Caucasus in an Orientalizing
context against an Occidental Russia. Said explains the way “suppositions, associations, and
fictions appear to crowd the un-familiar space outside one’s own” (55). Thus, there is added
significance to the symbolic geography in Russian folklore: the other world is often across an
ocean or body of water (Taman sits on the Black Sea with the crone’s hut on the shore) or in the
mountains (“Bela” occurs in the mountains of Chechnya) (Propp 222). Valeria Sobol argues, “It
is the town’s geographic and cultural in-betweenness” that combines with the parallel inbetweenness of the novel’s form and the generic language of Pechorin’s worldview (68).
Therefore, the border town is the location for the origin of dividing the world into binary
opposition, and the crone’s hut marks the boundary between the ‘fantastical’ Orient and the
‘realistic’ Occident. However, since the boundary is geographic, ideological, and literary, these
borders also mark the division in Pechorin’s identity as the reader of stories versus the hero of
his own story. Just as the town is a border between East and West, Pechorin revels his own
identity within this division by telling his tale with Gothic and folkloric themes; for example, he
describes the young girl as “Goethe’s Mignon” (74) in a Western literary tradition but continues
to call her “undine” or rusalka in the Russian folk tradition (Lermontov 73). “Taman” introduces
a dynamic generic relationship, while connecting generic images to Pechorin’s process of
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expressing his individual and national identities as a fractured self in the attempt to become
Western.
The Blind Prophet
Although the blind boy is not necessarily a symbol from Russian folklore, his role is too
significant to ignore. His closest connection to Russian folklore is with the story “The Seer,”
where “‘a poor and improvident peasant man’ makes a living by stealing horses, cloth, and so on
and hiding them, after which he pretends to be a seer and shows people where to find what was
stolen (Propp 243). Like the boy, the Russian seer is associated with theft and trickery, but his
magic is fake and he is not blind. At first, it seems Pechorin wants to read the boy based on the
Russian seer: “There was born in my mind the suspicion that this blind lad was not as blind as it
seemed; in vain did I try to persuade myself that those white eyes could not be faked—and what
would have been the purpose?” (Lermontov 67). Once Pechorin abandons the notion of false
blindness or false magic (like the seer), he begins to characterize the boy in language befitting
the mythological blind prophet. Naturally, a blind boy capable of hearing a boat approach from
“fifteen miles” away, out of sight no matter how Pechorin “strained to make it out,” (69) is
reminiscent of blind prophets like Tiresias from Greek mythology: it’s as if the boy hears the
future. Pechorin only turns to a Western metaphor for the blind boy when folkloric tropes do not
sufficiently embody his character. However, since myths and folktales are historically
connected, and only differ by the sacred nature of myths versus the entertainment purpose of
folklore, a mythological archetype like the blind prophet may be included in conversation with
folklore tradition. Additionally, since the blind prophet is a mythological figure from ancient
Greece, his entrance into Russia makes him “a myth without social significance” and he becomes
folkloric (Propp 24). He has no social significance, because his figure is not held sacred in
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Russia as it would have been in ancient Greece. There is something supernatural about the boy’s
ability to hear or sense the natural world: “he walked so close to the water, that it looked as if
any moment a wave might seize him and carry him away” but “stepped from stone to stone” with
“assuredness” (68). Thus, Pechorin attributes Western folkloric powers to the boy, bringing
another Western genre, the Greek myth, into a Russian tale. Interestingly, the boy’s questionable
nationality—“the blind lad had spoken in the Ukrainian dialect, now he expressed himself in
perfect Russian”—allows him to straddle East and West by a generic common denominator:
folklore or the magic tale. He is a significant instance where Eastern and Western genres mix,
but like Pechorin (as another instance of generic mixture) “Taman” ultimately leaves the blind
boy stranded and alone.
The boy’s physical blindness and uncanny ability to see beyond others’ physical
perception sets him up as an interesting double or foil for Pechorin. Andrew Barratt notes that
every section of the book has to have “a male protagonist against whom Pechorin can, accurately
or otherwise, gauge his own qualities and strengths” (58). However, where Barratt points to the
smuggler boss Yanko as Pechorin’s double, I assert that the crafty and ultimately humbled blind
boy serves for a much more dynamic discussion. “Bela” provides the masculine and savage
Kazbich as Pechorin’s rival and double, but instead of a man whose masculinity is a threat to
Pechorin, “Taman” introduces a poor, blind orphan. The blind boy plays into the supernatural
elements at the borders of the chapter, which fill the Russian magic tale; the blind boy can
successfully navigate the natural world and see through it, but Pechorin remains blind “to what’s
around him, or to know himself” (Costlow 85). In “Taman,” Pechorin is blind to the fact that the
blind boy and young girl are taking advantage of and robbing him. What’s more, Pechorin relies
on literature to give him the vocabulary to define his life, but the heroes from his Western novels
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are only images for him to emulate and not become. For example, he references Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6) and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1825) to place himself in a
Romantic narrative with the rusalka, but her role as the Russian femme fatale defeats his desire
for Romanticism when she disarms him (Lermontov 74, 75). In fact, his preoccupation with
Byronic heroism blinds him from drawing on Russian heroes from his own nation’s folklore. He
alludes to folklore with the undine, old landlady, and blind boy but never with himself. The
blind boy relies on his natural abilities, particularly his hearing, to define the world, while
Pechorin insists on Western mimicry.
The boy’s physical affliction further discloses Pechorin’s childlike superstitions and
unveils the insecurities and weaknesses that lead Pechorin to don the Byronic mask. Firstly, the
blind boy’s natural reliance on hearing harkens back to the oral tradition of the Russian folktale.
The hero shares the same literary lexicon as a crippled boy who repulses him, because the oral
tradition of the fairy tale transcends sight as well as class; such a connection is demeaning and
disgraceful to the aristocratic hero. Pechorin writes, “I confess, I have a strong prejudice against
those who are blind, one-eyed, deaf, mute, legless, armless, hunchbacked, and so forth. I have
observed that there always exists some strange relationship between the appearance of man and
his soul, as if with the loss of a limb, the soul lost one of its senses” (Lermontov 67). Pechorin
perceives an inherent connection between physiognomy (and anatomy I general) and one’s soul,
which ties the physical world to the spiritual or the landscape to fantastic genres. He reveals a
need to categorize human deficiencies into fantastic tropes, like the blind prophet, to distance
himself from experiencing the same weaknesses. Pechorin uses such fantastic Western tropes to
distance himself from the grotesqueries of reality while contextualizing himself in a Western
narrative; the way in which Western allusions distance Pechorin from reality shows how a
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Western narrative is simply not a Russian reality. Pechorin experiences acute abjection as he
“began to examine the blind lad’s face,” (66) and while I do not ascribe to Freud’s connection
between anxieties over blindness with anxieties over castration, I do see a connection between
lack and emasculation (“The Uncanny”). Taman serves as an uncanny space, a Russian town
that does not quite resonate as home because of its liminal space on the border, and the boy’s
blindness heightens that uncanny sense of fantasy within Pechorin’s reality. Where the boy’s
lack is visible, Pechorin’s ennui hides within his subconscious. Again, as in Lermontov’s
introductory warning about “the disease” of Western heroism, he ties images of disease and
deformity into Pechorin’s quest for Byronhood (2); however, the disease’s connection to British
Romanticism increasingly becomes a virus upon Pechorin’s masculine identity. The narrator’s
conflation of Pechorin’s Englishness with femininity in the previous section (Pechorin has “small
aristocratic hands”), (56) is directly linked to the lack, or ennui in Pechorin’s soul. Here,
Western genre identification comes into play: Pechorin “defines himself by what he is not”
(Orwin 7) and by what his physical form can pass for. In other words, the corporeality of the
boy’s blindness makes him into a supernatural figure with a marred soul and Pechorin’s
handsome face, and English ennui seem to qualify him for the role of Byronic hero. However,
Russian figures continue to emasculate a heroic role meant to bolster his independence and
masculinity, because the uncanniness of figures like the blind boy reveals a sense of Russianness
that appears strange and incomplete to a Western pretender.
At the end of “Taman,” after the blind boy successfully steals from Pechorin and delivers
the goods to his smuggling boss Yanko, the smugglers abandon the boy upon the shore. As
Yanko sets off for “some other place,” Pechorin hears “something resembling a sob, and indeed,
the blind little fellow was crying” (Lermontov 79). Despite the fact that the Byronic hero is
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constantly beguiling and outsmarting others, and Pechorin fills this role successfully in “Bela,”
neither Pechorin nor the blind boy find success or community in Taman’s liminal boundaries. A
pivotal scene in the following chapter, “Princess Mary,” parallels the passage with the blind boy
crying. While I will withhold a close reading of “Princess Mary” for chapter three, the image of
the blind boy’s tears and his connection to Pechorin is important to keep in mind. For now, the
rusalka of “Taman” discloses Pechorin’s vulnerability in the hands of Russian women; she
undermines his Byronic masculinity and introduces women as the deconstructive force over
Pechorin’s identity.
Rusalka: the Match for the Vampire
Pechorin mythologizes the characters in Taman and surrounds his self-constructed
literary persona with an atmosphere of fantasy and heroism; this fantastic characterization
becomes critical for Pechorin to protect his masculine identity. When a young beauty first
catches his attention, she is meeting the blind boy by the shore, and he describes her as “a white
figure” (Lermontov 68). This description ties the young woman to Bela, because the feminine,
Russian adjective for white is “belaya.” Thus, Pechorin connects both women to his vision of
female beauty and its ties to purity. However, where “Bela” depicts Pechorin’s violent
appropriation of the oriental beauty, the magical elements of the female figure in “Taman”
subjects Pechorin to victimhood. After hearing her “bizarre” (72) song, Pechorin describes the
girl as “water nymph,” (72) “undine,” (73) and “mermaid” (Lermontov 78)—all harkening to the
figure from Russian folklore, rusalka. (Note that rusalka is the term Lermontov uses in the
original Russian version of the novel, so his allusion is intentional). Although this scene might
recall the sirens of The Odyssey for readers in the Western tradition, these motifs specifically
invoke the figure of the rusalka for readers more familiar with the Russian folklore tradition. In
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fact, the Greek siren was translated into the Russian “sirin” (Propp 291) who has the head and
chest of a beautiful woman and the body of a bird. However, unlike the siren, the rusalka has no
connotations with winged creatures who perch near the water, but is a being of the water, like a
mermaid. The young girl, no “more than eighteen” (74), lures him out to sea in order to seduce
and rob him, parallel to the traditional mission of rusalki; as Sibelan Forrester notes, “They
tempt men off the path, intending to drown them” (Forrester 425). The susceptibility of a male
adventurer to seduction might also recall Don Juan, the hero of Byron’s famous satirical poem,
in which he reverses the plot of the romantic legend and depicts the hero as easily seduced by
women. The connection between Pechorin’s vulnerability to women and Byron’s own
satirization of the Byronic womanizer into someone susceptible to female seduction in the figure
of Don Juan furthers the claim that Pechorin is unable to be a true Byronic hero but is a poor
satiric version. While Byronic narratives tend to be self-satirical, Lermontov uses satire to create
a new hero and national identity with the self-conscious literary persona of Pechorin.
Furthermore, Propp makes a special distinction about the rusalka that connects her to the
Russian consciousness on a different level than characters like Baba Yaga: the rusalka falls under
his category of folk prose called memorates, or folkloric images that were once religious entities
in early Russian culture.19 Propp makes this distinction to highlight the fact that water spirits
like the rusalka “are presented as reality and people are firmly convinced of their veracity” (24).
This is one reason why the rusalka is the only supernatural figure he labels by name in this
Propp clearly states that while memorates are “valuable ethnographic and folkloric material,” “Classifying
memorates as folktales is a widespread error” (25). However, I believe he bases this separation of memorate from
folktale on the memorate’s “religious content” versus the entertainment purpose of the folktale (24). Therefore, the
memorate relates to the religious nature of the myth, and Propp also claims that once a myth loses its social and
religious significance it becomes folklore” (24). Thus, if Propp is going to say the myth can become folktale once
people stop worshiping them, I will do the same for the memorate, and I feel confident including it in a section on
the Russian folktale.
19
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everyday tale, while the old crone is only likened to Baba Yaga by various symbols. Thus, while
authors like Pushkin place rusalki in their fairy tales, she is a remnant of “pre-Christian” religion,
giving her an even more ancient generic power than the form the traditional fairy tale takes
(Propp 26).
Where “Bela” displays the dangers of a Byronic masculinity upon marginalized women,
the rusalka figure challenges the Romantic persona of the novelistic Western male with a
folkloric Russian female. She is the only woman in the novel who is not a victim of Pechorin:
“The boat rocked, but I regained my balance, and a desperate struggle started between us; my
rage gave me strength, but I soon realized that, in agility, I was inferior to my adversary”
(Lermontov 77). She is “a sea creature who is the vampire’s match, capable of emasculating her
prey—psychically, if not physically” (Costlow 86). Furthermore, rusalki “are said to be the
spirits of girls who committed suicide out of disappointed love” (Forrester 425), and Pechorin is
the ultimate producer of disappointed love. Apart from the rusalka, he causes the death, mental
breakdown, and sorrow of the three women, who he involves himself with in the course of the
novel: Bela, Princess Mary, and Vera. Thus, the rusalka simultaneously connects Pechorin to his
Russian roots, as he uses traditional folklore terms to describe the world around him, and
distances himself from a Russian reality. Again, Pechorin never describes himself in folkloric
terms. Despite the fact that nothing truly supernatural actually occurs in the story, Pechorin uses
fantastic language from the Russian fairy tale tradition to arrange the inhabitants of this little
Russian town against him, the Byronic male. The first entry in his diary depicts a hero filled
with contradictions: his knowledge of Russian fairy tale tropes and characters includes him in a
Russian literary national identity, but by defining the smugglers exclusively in these terms, he
uses his own national language to other himself.
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The girl succeeds in tricking him, and his appropriation of mystic language sugarcoats the
reality of his embarrassing beguilement; after all, she is simply a young girl who makes him look
anything but heroic. Even before she lures him out to sea, she laughs at him and reveals his
ignorance over reality: he tries to gain power over her, when he says “I’ve found out that you
went down to the shore last night,” but she replies with laughter, “You’ve seen much, but you
know little” (Lermontov 75). By belittling Pechorin’s intellect, she emasculates him and brings
him down to the level of a child seeing the world for the first time without the tools for
understanding it. Furthermore, Taman is a Cossack settlement on the outer edge of Russia, and
while there is no mention of her accent, her “ethnicity is left indeterminate” (Sobol 71).
Therefore, she can simultaneously embody a specifically Russian femme fatal and reflect the
threat of foreign power into a Russian literary context. By using folkloric terms to identify a girl
with ambiguous nationality, he shifts traditional Russian symbols onto a possibly foreign
identity. He associates the girl with smugglers, representing the crossing of national borders and
highlighting the way antagonists from Russian fairy tales, like “thieves,” “may appear instantly”
and “no one knows from where” (Propp 154). Where Bela is an identifiable other, Pechorin’s
power over a woman of liminal nationality forms them into something as unknown as his own
identity. Pechorin stands on the boundary of his nation, and the split between his ability to
define himself within a Russian context or against an other becomes uncertain. The unnamed
narrator paints Pechorin’s Orientalization of the Caucasus as a fairly successful means of
solidifying his Western heroic identity. However, when Pechorin narrates his own “crossing of a
threshold” to reconcile his “otherness or inhumanity with the need for humanity or community,”
(Feldman 164) he Orientalizes others with the language of the very nation he seeks to fit into a
Western frame. By Orientalizing the people of Taman through folkloric language, he excludes
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himself from a Russian community, making himself an island among men in an attempt to be the
ultimate Romantic individual.
Pechorin’s use of language is crucial to understanding the difference between reality and
the construction of his Romantic persona through literary language. For instance, Pechorin’s
language transforms the girl from “undine” (73) at first sight to simply “eighteen-year-old girl”
(80) by the end of the chapter. When the girl is actively seducing Pechorin, she is “like a snake,”
a “she-devil” (Lermontov 76). Additionally, when she disarms Pechorin in the boat, he
characterizes her strength as “superhuman,” and “her serpent nature” withstood Pechorin’s
attempt to strangle her (77). Pechorin feels the need to infuse her with mystic, demonic
powers—how else would a young girl overtake the Byronic male who conquers the world? The
magic that infuses the original Russian literary tradition simultaneously fuses with the Gothic
themes of supernaturalism and defeats the violent wiles of the Byronic hero. She throws his
pistol into the water before tumbling him overboard as well, disarming and symbolically
castrating him. Once he reaches the shore, he watches as “that someone in white” wrings the
water from her hair (a classic image of the rusalka), meets the captain of the smugglers, and
awaits the blind lad who carries a sack filled with Pechorin’s possessions (78). Pechorin’s
emasculation brings him back down to reality as he wonders, “Really, would it not be absurd to
complain to the authorities that I had been robbed by a blind boy, and had almost been drowned
by an eighteen-year-old girl?” (80). After all, the Byronic hero is a supremely masculine figure,
and Pechorin has been robbed by a blind boy and seduced by a young girl. Significantly, the
rusalka is the only figure directly referred to in folkloric terminology. Pechorin does not label
these other characters in folkloric terms—he only describes them in their familiar folkloric
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imagery: the crone, the hut, evil spaces, and violent nature. Therefore, his focus on the rusalka
reflects his preoccupation with dominating young girls to solidify his masculine heroic identity.
Besides the Byronic hero, there is one folkloric character with Pechorin’s desired powers
to prey on women: the vampire. With Pechorin’s folkloric double as the vampire, he is the man
who tries to fill his ennui by sucking the life and love from women. In “Princess Mary,” he even
admits: “there are moments when I understand the vampire” (Lermontov 145). His association
with the vampire is another moment that incorporates his identification with the Gothic and
Russian literary traditions: the vampire is an original figure from Russian fairy tales, but as
folklore travels orally and other cultures create their own blood-sucking myths, the vampire also
becomes a popular figure in Western Gothic fiction.20 Thus, while he does not use folkloric
imagery to define himself with the other characters in “Taman,” he returns to his roots later in
“Princess Mary.” Again, there is a division between Pechorin’s origins and his desire to identify
with the West. In both senses, “The vampiric male draws sustenance from the nourishment of
women, not what women make of themselves […] but their raw materials: their emotional and
bodily life,” (Costlow 86). Therefore, from Bela to the rusalka and eventually Princess Mary, in
the following chapter, the Russian male and the Byronic hero rely on the domination of women
to solidify their identities. However, “Taman” proves that the Western, Gothic vampire cannot
compete on this ominous Eastern ground, because the rusalka successfully disarms Pechorin.
Ironically, Pechorin offers his sword to Maksim Maksimich in “Bela” to secure his possession of
the princess, and the rusalka in “Taman” throws Pechorin’s pistol in the water, while the blind
boy steals his “travelling box,” “sword chased with silver,” and “Dagestan dagger” (Lermontov
20
The vampire can be traced to the Proto-Slavic period (5th-9th century AD), which marks it as an ancient relic of
Slavic culture and language. For more on the Russian and Eastern European vampire see Oinas.
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80). Here, his weapons are a manifestation of his violent male potential and the phallic source of
his masculine identity. When the blind boy steals them, he leaves Pechorin weaponless, helpless,
and transforms him into the folkloric damsel in distress, instead of the valiant hero. By stripping
him of the symbols of his masculinity, the Russian image of the rusalka reminds the would be
Byron that he has no business in her waters.
The Failure of the Byronic Hero
Pechorin’s failure against the smugglers of Taman may be interpreted in a variety of
ways, but understanding his failure relies on tracing how Pechorin views success; however, his
ideal of success proves transient throughout the novel as his incarnations of Byronism flicker in
and out of power. First, like the seaside setting of Taman, bodies of water are often the setting of
Byronic heroism during maritime adventures and not failure. Pechorin initiates his struggle
between identifying as the ultimate independent man and longing for a sense of community in
“Bela.” In “Taman,” he fails as the Romantic male when he realizes, “I had been robbed by a
blind boy, and had almost been drowned by an eighteen-year-old girl” (Lermontov 80). His
Western persona continues to alienate him from other characters, as he is unable to belong to a
community of fellow outsiders, like this group of “honest smugglers” (79). Thus far, it seems
that Pechorin only makes enemies, and while his heroic persona may inspire the editor to print
his journals, it does not inspire communities or friendships. In one sense, Lermontov’s
deconstruction of Pechorin’s Western front reveals his imagining of a national belonging; when
the façade of the Romantic individual is gone, the desire for national belonging remain—a desire
only becoming visible in Pechorin’s use Russian folkloric language. Additionally, the critical
component of “Taman” is the stylized language Pechorin uses to cloak his embarrassment at
being swindled and bested by liminal characters. This need to hide within Gothicized style is a
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bright red flag to indicate that if Pechorin feels the need to hide, he is experiencing failure and
shame. Something very real is peeking through his hyper-fictionalized Romantic persona. Thus
far, Pechorin acts as though he can always read the plot of life and manipulate it in his favor,
especially when it comes to women, but the emergence of the snakelike “she-devil” (76) or
“mermaid” (78) of Taman discloses the fallibility of our hero and opens the discussion for more
unique substance beneath the fictional façade.
Even more so than the mountains of “Bela,” Taman’s liminal proximity of borders is a
prime setting for the translation and transfusion of genre across space. Interestingly, where
Pechorin was ruthless and powerful upon the foreign soil of Chechnya, this technically Russian
town holds threats in every corner: the Byronic figure is not welcome here. On the border, this
piece of Russia is imagined “as both inherently limited and sovereign,” because it remains in the
conceptualization of Russia and Russian nationalism (Anderson 6). Thus, there is space for
generic mixture, but the Russian genre remains dominant over the Romantic Byronism
represented by Pechorin. The Black Sea is both a passage way and barrier between lands.
Shadows shroud the town, and instead of the Gothic hero feeling comfortable in this scene from
a Gothic tale where “the full moon shone on the rush roof of my new abode” (66) and wretched
boats “would spring out of the abyss amid a burst of foam,” (70) Pechorin trusts no one and no
thing. Pechorin’s first diary entry gives a very different image of the hero than the narrator of
“Bela” gives; he is wary of a crippled young boy, superstitious of his blindness and the home’s
lack of icon, and gullible enough to fall into the girl’s trap and have the boy steal his possessions.
Despite Pechorin’s attempt to shroud his embarrassment in fantastic language and imagery,
“Taman” reminds us just how young Pechorin is in his early twenties, despite his claim of
becoming “skilled in the science of life” (Lermontov 127). In the end of this tale, he reasserts his
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masculine, heroic power as “a military man on the move, and holder, moreover, of a road-pass
issued to those on official business!” (80), but the image of his beguilement lingers. Again,
Pechorin is on the move, searching for a space where he can manage the dichotomy becoming
more visible as the novel progresses: the Pechorin who embodies the Romantic hero with
ruthless precision or the young Russian lad travelling and forming a sense of identity against the
world he encounters.
Lermontov artfully creates a novel of stories to propose “a hero of our time” as dynamic
as he is dangerous to a Russian identity forming against European literature in the nineteenth
century. “Bela” and “Taman” propose two Eastern landscapes for the Russian Byron to act upon
in his attempt to assert his masculine will over women, exercise his mobility and independence,
and fight off the originally English ennui that plagues his soul. According to the Lermontov
scholar Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, esteemed anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued that
“cultural change occurs via the ‘clash of interplay of two cultures’ that results not merely in ‘a
mechanical mixture’ of objects or traits but in ‘entirely new products’ reflecting ‘new cultural
realities’ that entail both ‘potentialities and dangers’” (3-4). A Hero of Our Time reveals the way
this process of cultural transfusion into a new reality applies to literary culture and national
identity as well. The novel asks, not simply how can the Byronic hero function in a landscape
foreign from his Western origins, but how can a man of alternative nationality translate the
British hero? Pechorin cannot, which is why “Taman” reveals his failure against those he
characterizes through mystifyingly magic terminology from Russian folklore. “Taman” plays a
significant role in revealing the Byronic hero’s utter impotency in an inherently Russian literary
context. Pechorin takes the British Gothic and Romantic hero, and by translating them into a
Russian landscape and context, he does not become them but embodies something new. If Hero
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is Russia’s first psychological novel, then Pechorin clears the path for all the unique, complex
Russian physiological heroes to follow. The journey to understanding how Pechorin’s Byronic
failure creates a new Russian hero begins with his emasculation and defeat by the young rusalka,
because his vulnerability reveals a humanity beneath the fictional façade. The following chapter
of the novel as well as this paper, “Princess Mary,” will further explain the way mixtures of
Western and Russian genre come together to challenge the realistic longevity of a Russian
Byron.
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Chapter 3: “Princess Mary” and Breaking Byron
“I thought my chest would burst; all my firmness, all my coolness vanished like smoke…”
(Lermontov 175).
Fabula and Syuzhet of “Princess Mary”
Immediately following “Taman,” “Princess Mary” is the fourth story and centerpiece of
the novel. Chronologically, the events of “Princess Mary” occur after “Taman” but before
“Bela.” Following these texts chronologically, and not by the order of stories in the novel, we
can follow the hero’s transformation into a Byronic lady-killer, both symbolically and literally.
From his defeat by the rusalka in “Taman” to his role in Bela’s death, Pechorin’s struggle to
embody a Western hero in a Russian context becomes increasingly dangerous for himself and
others. As the longest tale in the novel, we finally get the chance to delve further into Pechorin’s
psyche and witness his intrigues unfold in his diary. Despite the notion of the diary form as one
of uninhibited honesty, Pechorin’s nature as actor, reader, and writer causes his diary to become
a complex maze, carefully protecting moments of authenticity under a Byronic façade.
Leaving Taman, Pechorin enters Pyatigorsk, a spa town21 in the Russian Caucasus “at the
foot of Mount Mashuk” (Lermontov 81). Pyatigorsk, with its popular “Elizabeth Spring” hosts
proper Russian “spa society,” or a microcosm of Russian high society and military officers (82).
The town’s remote location in the Caucasus provides a wild, Gothic landscape separate from the
European streets of St. Petersburg, but it also hosts the urban aristocracy that casts the willing
21
The mountainous geography of the Northern Caucasus and their mineral springs created the perfect environment
for health spas. These famous Russian health resorts began in 1803. Due to the Russian strongholds and military
action in the Caucuses, as well as the expense of travelling to the spa towns, mainly wealthy Russian citizens and
military persons visited the area. Pyatigorsk’s resort was specifically for those suffering from “gastric diseases,
bone diseases, nervous diseases” (Piterski 2). For more on the history and current situation of Caucasian spa towns
see Piterski (1-10).
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Pechorin into his heroic mold. Thus, the “silver range of snowy summits” and “ampitheatrical
mountains” create the perfect stage for Pechorin to perform upon, and the visiting “dandies” of
the Russian aristocracy are his prime audience (81, 83).
In short, this section of Pechorin’s diary details his social and sexual exploits in spa
society. He meets up with a former lover, Vera, who is the only character to truly know
Pechorin and see the man beneath the carefully constructed Western façade. Despite all of
Pechorin’s scheming and deceiving to fill his ennui, he refers to Vera as “the only woman on
earth whom I could never bear to deceive” (106). Pechorin must draw attention away from their
secret relationship to protect her reputation as a married woman of high social standing.
Consequently, Vera suggests that he spend time with the young Princess Mary, a girl of high
rank from a family with an old noble bloodline, as her title implies, but not a literal royal.
However, the youthful and naïve soldier Grushnitski quickly falls for Princess Mary, and
Pechorin destroys Grushnitski’s chances with the Princess with his false yet flattering courtship.
Pechorin’s portrayal of puppet master over this society, especially over Mary, outrages
Grushnitski and his companions, leading to a duel between the novel’s hero and the young
soldier. Grushnitski and his friends conspire to set up the duel so that only Grushnitski’s pistol
will be loaded and Pechorin will be humiliated, but Pechorin overhears the plan, makes sure his
pistol is loaded properly, and kills the pitifully naïve Grushnitski. Following this dangerous
gamble of life and death, Vera leaves town with her husband, and we see Pechorin’s mask, so
carefully pieced together by the Romantic heroes of his favorite stories and solidified by the
West obsessed aristocracy, completely shatter.
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The Consciously Literary Hero
Before discussing the two women, Vera and Mary, who will serve as the focal points for
this chapter, I want to highlight Pechorin’s peculiarly modern and literarily self-conscious role of
hero. Unlike Byron’s heroes, whom “Others insist on treating…as actors in a drama, even
though they hold themselves aloof from conscious theatrical display,” Pechorin is fully
conscious of the power of his theatricality (Bone 61). Pechorin refers to the mountains of
Pyatigorsk as “ampitheatrical” because this setting is the scene for his most scandalous play yet
(Lermontov 81). In a distinct shift from the exotic tribes in “Bela” to the “ethnically
indeterminate and socially marginal smugglers” in “Taman,” Pechorin is finally at home socially
and ideologically in the Russian aristocracy of “Princess Mary” (Mills Todd 147). In this
setting, his heroic persona is able to rise to an authorial sense of power through his skilled
manipulation of Russian society and his authorial voice in his diary. He is able to manipulate
this audience, because they are the “educated western gentry,” versed in Western literature (Mills
Todd 26). Like Pechorin, members of the aristocratic spa society perform as readers and writers
of these Western literary codes: “In addition to imitating European fashion and speaking foreign
languages, young eighteenth century Russians from the gentry class imitated characters from
books translated from English, French, and German” (Orwin 17). Where the Byronic hero only
practices his Western power in foreign contexts, Pechorin thrives amongst a Russian audience
bred to play these Western roles—a community of practiced pretenders. Essentially, members of
the aristocracy were experienced readers, so they, like Pechorin, read life through the lens of
their fashionable Western novels. In this sense, he is certainly the hero of his time. However,
the duplicity of his playacting and the irony of his heroic title reveals the unique complexities of
the Russian hero against his Western counterpart. Through social mimicry of the Byronic hero,
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Pechorin reveals the unsustainability of Byronic characters in a Russian context; even Pechorin’s
successful emulations of Byron create social discord. Pechorin’s struggle to define himself with
or against foreign literature becomes the central trait to set apart a uniquely Russian nineteenth
century hero.
Ironically, Pechorin comments on and judges the consciously literary roles his fellow
characters play; he fills the Byronic role so naturally that he finds the foppishness and dandyism
of the other men unnatural and forced. Pechorin describes a passing bunch of men, “some
civilian, some military”: “they gamble and complain of ennui. They are dandies: as they dip
their wicker-encased glasses into the well of sulphurous water, they assume academic poses”
(Lermontov 83). Despite sharing a sense of ennui and dandyism with these men, Pechorin
defines them apart from himself. He may be the conscious actor and director, but he seems to
consider his heroic, Byronic charisma an inherent trait, unlike the other “melancholy groups”
visiting the spa (82). For example, he writes disdainfully of Grushnitski, “His object is to
become the hero of a novel. So often has he tried to convince others that he is a being not made
for this world and doomed to suffer in secret, that he has almost succeeded in convincing himself
of it” (Lermontov 85). Many critics simply read Grushnitski as a foil to Pechorin, like Grigoryan
who writes, “In the figure of Grushnitski the author has exposed the false romanticism of people
who willingly drape themselves in beautiful romantic garments, but who by their nature are alien
to true romanticism” (Grigoryan 61). The fact that Pechorin denounces the very qualities that
Grushnitski and he share is the key to understanding these men as doubles. The falseness of
Grushnitski’s Western front serves to illuminate the deception, including self-deception, of
Pechorin’s donned identity. The fact that Pechorin is a hero who must be carefully unraveled
illuminates the complexity that makes Pechorin unique to the Russian tradition; he is the hero of
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a novel, trying to live like the hero of a novel, because the social climate of the Russian
aristocracy in the nineteenth century called for the mimicry of Western heroes and themes. In
this metafictional sense, the implanted layers of foreign personas uncover his Russianness,
because these personas are Western heroes and having to wear them as a costume implies a
hidden truth or identity underneath. A Byronic hero is inherently a Western hero, because the
British Byron belongs to this tradition and creates him in this form. Although the Byronic hero
becomes foreign when he enters exotic settings, the Russian Byron is exotic within his own
homeland. His Western person allows people to other him, despite his national identity as
Russian, and the act of exoticizing compatriots threatens to destroy the possibility of a Russian
national identity. The Russian Byron contains the added complexity of mixing foreign identities
to translate heroism in a new national context.
The sense of Russian identity separate from this play of Western personas becomes
buried under starched collars and beaded gowns; here, the underground man is born. 22 The
underground man first comes into official being in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the
Underground (1864), but I believe Pechorin is an early prototype for this famously Russian
character. For this unique Russian protagonist, the “underground” is a metaphysical space of
intense contemplation and self-awareness. The underground man reveals the layers of human
character and consciousness. Thus, Pechorin is a landmark hero in the Russian tradition, because
his experimentation with heroism creates a self-conscious hero aware of his place in a literary
context. Pechorin bases his life on his interpretation of Romantic fiction, but the unavoidable
nature of his Russian reality causes his desire for a fictional, Romantic persona to clash with the
reality of everyday life. His conceptualization of heroism emerges from the metaphysical space
22
For more on the underground man and Notes from the Underground see Cornwell (255-256).
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of his literary self-awareness, seeps into his day-to-day life, and produces destructive
consequences in his Russian setting.
Despite the real and fatal stakes of his actions upon others, Pechorin is able to veil his
own reality in the guise of an artistic worldview; he treats life like a plot to be manipulated
instead of a reality with serious consequences. He longs for power over others so fervently that
he “is determined to present the action of ‘Princess Mary’ as if it were a play over which he has
complete control” (Barratt 69). When Werner, Pechorin’s best friend in the resort town, tells
him that Princess Mary assumes Grushnitski wears a soldier’s coat, because he has been demoted
for dueling, Pechorin cries out, “We have the beginning of a plot!” (Lermontov 95). Grushnitski
wears a soldier’s coat simply because he has a low rank, but her assumption of his involvement
in a duel adds to the heroic picture he attempts to paint of himself, so he would never correct her
false assumption. Always the skilled reader, Pechorin sees the seeds of an intrigue and plans on
putting his mark on the matter. Finding this “pleasant delusion” extremely amusing, Pechorin
continues, “The denouement of this comedy will be our concern. Fate is obviously taking care of
my not becoming bored” (95). Another man’s search for love, hindered by his own poor social
status, is comedic fodder for Pechorin instead of the makings of a Romantic plot. His desire to
quench his boredom takes precedence over Romantic tradition, making Pechorin different from a
typical Romantic hero. His British ennui leads him to commit scandals and embark on
adventures in an attempt to cure his Western ailment. However, his boredom transcends any plot
laid before him: he is increasingly incurable, so he fashions his own entertainment as hero and
author.
Pechorin casts many of the characters and scenes in literary terms to categorize his
acquaintances into familiar figures and manipulate them as characters instead of real people. He
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includes Werner in his scheming, so it is only fitting that he characterize Werner in literary
allusions, which parallel his own heroic persona: “Werner was of small stature, thin and frail like
a child. One of his legs was shorter than the other as in the case of Byron […] The younger men
dubbed him Mephistopheles” (92). Lermontov immediately introduces Pechorin’s devilish
nature and seemingly Byronic masculinity in his manipulation of Bela, so it comes as no shock
that Pechorin associates with a friend like Werner—another double for his perceived
characterization of himself. Werner even has a Western, German name despite being Russian,
which adds to the Pechorin’s comedy of fate. As Pechorin defines the world around him in the
very terms that come to mind for a reader characterizing Pechorin, the cracks of his own
constructed identity become visible. Holding Pechorin accountable for his consciously literary
worldview is the first step to understanding his heroism as carefully self-constructed, and not as
it is with the Byronic hero, an inherent characteristic. However, this does not mean that
Pechorin’s dual nature makes him any less intriguing than the diabolical heroes who came before
him. The difficult task of separating the Byronic actor from the man reveals a fascinating schism
between fantasy and reality that will greatly inform nineteenth century Russian fiction.
Princess Mary: Byronic Audience and Instigator
While numerous critics agree with Vissarion Belinsky’s famous 1840 review of the
novel, in which he states, “the female characters are the most weakly depicted of all,” (41) the
women of the novel actually, as weakly depicted as they might be, deconstruct Pechorin in a way
no carefully depicted male character can. From the beginning, Princess Mary is nothing more
than an amusement to stay Pechorin’s boredom, but this feigned relationship causes his
alienation from the rest of spa society and from his own Romantic mask. Initially, Pechorin’s
courtship of Princess Mary begins so he can resume his liaison with a past love, Vera. Pechorin
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writes, “I would get acquainted with the Ligovskoys and the young princess in order to divert
attention away from Vera. In this way, my plans have not been upset in the least, and I shall
have a merry time…” (Lermontov 105). The first time we see Pechorin taking orders from
another character, they are significantly from a woman. Considering his masculine and heroic
front, his submission to Vera’s will reveals his authentic care for her and disproves the ultimate
authority of the masculine will. However, he feels the need to iterate that his plot has not
changed at all: he is still the one in charge. His need to justify his power supports Barratt’s and
Briggs’s point that “for Pechorin, relationships between the sexes are conceived purely in terms
of power” (92). I would further argue that this perceived power dynamic is a tool to defend
himself from any real experience of disappointed love. He claims, “I never became the slave of
the women I loved. I have always gained unconquerable power over their will and heart, with no
effort at all,” but this quest for power isolates him from forming communities (Lermontov 105).
His lack of community uncovers the Byronic hero’s impotency in the project of forming a
Russian national identity. As Anderson explains, a nation is always imagined as a community,
because “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation
is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7). Although the aristocracy performs
in common Romantic tropes, these identities are foreign, forced, and exclusive. The more
Pechorin drops the Byronic mask, the more available and relatable his national identity becomes.
The instances in which Pechorin dost protest too much against forming communities with
women signal the influence these women have over his emotions and decisions.
Mary’s similar aristocratic education makes her the perfect recipient of Pechorin’s
Romantic disdain and flatteries, because she reads him in the Byronic codes he desires. Mary’s
mother brags about her, because “…she has great respect for the intelligence and the knowledge
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of her daughter, who has red Byron in English and knows algebra” (Lermontov 96). When the
old princess, Mary’s mother, starts to tell Pechorin’s Petersburg exploits (an “escapade” we
never learn more of but can assume caused his exile to military life in the Caucasus), “Her
daughter listened with curiosity. In her imagination, you became the hero of a novel in the latest
fashion. I did not contradict the old lady, though I was aware she was talking nonsense” (95).
Immediately Mary has been deceived in her understanding of Grushnitski, as a demoted officer,
and Pechorin through whatever “society gossip” the old princess shares (95). Here, we can see
the perpetuation of Romantic characters via high society circles. Significantly, Princess Mary
and her mother are from Moscow and Pechorin is from St. Petersburg, which pinpoints the urban
capitals as the epicenter for the spread of this Romantic disease. The aristocracy spreads
themselves over the countryside and into the Caucasus, bringing their Romantic, Westernized
notions with them. In a review of the novel from circa 1840, Shevyrev writes of the society in
“Princess Mary”: “The world is all a true copy of our lively and empty reality. It is one and the
same everywhere, both in St. Petersburg and Moscow and at the waters of Kislovodsk and Ems.
It spreads its empty idleness, slander, and petty passions everywhere” (Bagby 149). Even
reviewers of the day see the dangers of an empty life constructed through foreign molds for
gossip and slander. Naturally, “the young princess seems fond of discussing sentiments,
passions, and so forth,” because “Moscow young ladies have taken to higher education,” and
higher education at this time means the Romantics and Sentimentalists (96). Since the Russian
literary tradition was still in its adolescence with Lermontov, Russia’s first novelists “had to
make model readers for their works within those works” (Mills Todd 103). With Princess Mary,
Lermontov gives us a model Romantic reader but uses her to reveal the dangers of reading life
like a Romantic novel. Romanticism creates a fantastic sheen over reality and provides the
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empty promise that life is filled with danger, daring, and heroes. With the Romantic cloak
stripped away, the stark truth of Realism, or a faithful depiction of reality, illuminates the death
and destruction that a Romantic dream produces on this Russian stage. Thus, the characters who
conform to Romantic standards in this Russian society are the ones with the most at stake,
because when the Romantic fantasy shatters they will be stranded in their true Realist plots.
Projecting Romantic codes onto his reality causes Pechorin to distort the stakes of life
and death into mere ballroom fancies and comedic denouements. For instance, when Werner
offers to introduce Pechorin to Mary, Pechorin replies, “Does one introduce heroes? They never
meet their beloved other than in the act of saving her from certain death” (Lermontov 95).
Perhaps this is the proper way for a hero to save his beloved in a foreign land or wild terrain, but
Russian high society has translated this Caucasian landscape into a Russian spa. Therefore,
Pechorin must retranslate Byronic expectations into his aristocratic context. Finally, the
opportunity presents itself when the drunken Captain of the Dragoons wishes to dance with Mary
at a ball and Pechorin claims “the princess had long ago promised to dance the mazurka with
me” (114). Werner questions him, “Didn’t you intend not to make the princess’s acquaintance in
any other way than by saving her from certain death?” and Pechorin fires back, “I did better […]
I saved her from fainting at a ball” (116). Here we see a sharp contrast between his fatal
relationship with Bela and his rakish heroism with Mary. In a sense, both women are “easily
stolen and in the end easily won over by Pechorin’s gifts and grandstanding,” (Costlow 91) but
Princess Mary is a fellow player in the Byronic charade in a way Bela can never be. Once he
changes worlds from the ladies in rank of “Princess Mary” to the exotic girls of “Bela” the
fatality of our hero changes as well—Pechorin expresses his Byronic persona upon shifting
landscapes, which correspond to the landscapes of the novel’s women. His games and
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deceptions in the Caucasus of the Russian spa mark a point in time and space where Pechorin
still holds onto a sense of realism beneath the Romanticism. The sense of realism Pechorin
experiences in his Russian context is the generic seed for the growth of a modern Russian
national identity.
Vera is the light that illuminates the man beneath the Western mask, but Pechorin’s own
games with Mary reveal moments when he has to manipulate his emotions to solidify his
roleplaying. When Pechorin hears the rattle of Princess Mary’s carriage coming down the street
he admits, “my heart quivered […] Could it be that I’m in love? ...I’m so stupidly made that this
could be expected from me” (Lermontov 141). However, more often than questions of love,
Pechorin gives hyper-masculine suppressions of emotion and exclamations for power:
I am no longer capable myself of frenzy under the influence of passion: ambition
with me has been suppressed by circumstances, but it has manifested itself in
another form, since ambition is nothing else than thirst for power, and my main
pleasure—which is to subjugate to my will all that surrounds me, and to excite the
emotions of love, devotion, and fear in relation to me—is it not the main sign and
greatest triumph of power? (123)
In order to become a literary hero, Pechorin must write himself as one, but above we experience
his warping of heroism into nihilistic antiheroism devoid of true feeling. The unavoidable
question when it comes to anything Pechorin does or says is can we believe him? Strangely,
criticism, to my knowledge, has not given any notice to the number of times Pechorin remarks on
physical or “involuntary” responses to women. Given the frequency of these involuntary
reactions, I am prone to argue against taking Pechorin’s above proclamation for power at face
value. For example, Pechorin tells Mary, “I do not love you,” but he spends the following night
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sleepless and pondering his self-hatred: “I sometimes despise myself…Is this not why I despise
others?...I have become incapable of noble impulses. I am afraid of appearing laughable to
myself” (148). Pechorin’s inability to express authentic emotions in his play of heroic,
masculine stoicism reveals the way Byronic heroism is a caricature of masculinity. Showing
empathy to Princess Mary could potentially undercut the hero’s “masculine” values, so Pechorin
only reveals his empathy in the privacy of his room and diary. Somehow, Pechorin comes to
associate the ideal heroism with a sociopathic lack of empathy, but he has not successfully killed
the roots of his emotional being despite running from them.
Although Pechorin switches from the Gothic and folkloric mixture of “Taman” to the
ironic Romance of “Princess Mary,” his insecurities with Mary and women in general trigger
these supernatural themes to return. After he saves Mary from falling off her horse into a stream
and kisses her, she yells at him in tears, “Either you despise me, or love me very much!” (144).
Pechorin writes, “She will spend a sleepless night and will weep. This thought gives me
boundless delight: there are moments when I understand the vampire…” (145). Nabokov’s
footnote on “vampire” claims it as a reference to “The Vampire, a Tale,” which is an 1819
publication attributed to Byron and later credited to his physician, Dr. John William Polidori
(209). While this is certainly a potential inspiration for the reference, the vampire was also a
figure from Russian folklore before it entered the pages of Gothic and Romantic stories: “In
northern Russia, heretics appear after their deaths as evil bloodthirsty vampires” (Oinas 53). The
emphasis on heresy with the Russian vampire adds another layer of distance between Pechorin’s
Byronism and the possibility for a national Russian hero: his Western persona is a kind of heresy
to preserving a sense of national sacredness in a Russian identity. Additionally, Russian
vampires can “transform themselves” or “acquire another person’s face,” which reflects the way
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Pechorin adopts the Byronic mask. He is vampire, shape shifter, and threat to his countrymen.
This theme of changing faces is ancient in Russian folklore, and thus may be characterized as a
piece of literary heritage, but Pechorin’s decision to transform himself into a Western archetype
challenges this folkloric heritage with the Byronic plague.
Pechorin’s increasingly destructive and nihilistic heroism likens him more to the lifesucking villain than the Byronic hero he seems to emulate on the surface. Pechorin is certainly
the “gloomy, brooding figure” that was “Byron’s gift to masculinity,” (Bone 57) but he spreads
his gloom like a contagion instead of remaining an enigma. In this sense, the Romantic hero is
not a passage to freedom, as Byron intends, but a reminder that a society that celebrates
individual freedom ends up threatening the community at the heart of Russian culture and society
when it embraces the Byronic hero. Lermontov mimics Romantic language in order to
“undermine the norms and premises of the very works that serve as [his] models” (Gasperetti
161). Pechorin recognizes the beginnings of moral rot on his inside, but laughs, “And to think
that I am reputed to be a jolly good fellow and try to earn that reputation!” (Lermontov 145).
This proves the disconnect between the Western front that society, wanting to believe itself truly
composed of sophisticated and thrilling characters from Western novels, puts on. Pechorin, in
contrast, is so good at this role that even in a community of pretenders he stands apart, alienated
by his mastery of the Byronic role.
Returning to the freedom associated with the Byronic hero, Pechorin is adamant that he
“will not sell his freedom” in the act of marriage, but also wonders, “What good is it to me?”
(149). The quest for freedom only brings him loneliness, which heightens his ennui, so his
desperation for freedom does not actually come from Byronic inspiration. “It is a kind of innate
fear,” because an old woman told his fortune as a child, and predicted “‘death from a wicked
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wife’” (148). Thus, while Mary offers “for at least a time the illusion of joining human society,”
(Costlow 100) Pechorin has to push away any semblance of true emotion for the sake of a
superstitious self-preservation. Pechorin’s fear that women and marriage will be the death of
him dictates his seemingly Byronic quest for ‘masculine’ freedom. Susan Layton reads
Pechorin’s superstitious excuse about marriage as suppression of his own femininity: he is “a
man who wanders in fear, in flight not only from women but from his own femininity, his
emotional vulnerability, his need of affection” (Costlow100). Paradoxically, the high society
that raises him to embody Western masculinity and heroism is the same group that ostracizes
him for being too successful in his literature-inspired manipulations of others. The men in the
spa society see Pechorin’s successful game with Princess Mary and decide to defend
Grushnitski’s wounded pride when Pechorin replaces him as Mary’s suitor. Mary creates the
battleground for Pechorin to fight his Russian double, and this battle serves as the turning point
for the serious consequences of Pechorin’s playacting; the field changes from drawing room
gossip and flirtation to a battlefield.
The Duel: Deadliness beyond Dandyism
Despite Grushnitski’s real affection towards Princess Mary, Pechorin easily pushes him
aside as another pawn in his Romantic social game. Grushnitski feels slighted and embarrassed,
but his character is more flustered than vengeful. For instance, when Grushnitski tells his friends
that Pechorin spent the night in Mary’s private rooms (although he was really with Vera),
Pechorin walks in on the awkward accusation: “At this moment, he raised his eyes—I was
standing in the door opposite him—he flushed dreadfully” (Lermontov 154). The physical
reactions of the characters are most telling, since uncontrollable physical responses often
contradict the role they are trying to play. Despite being visibly embarrassed, with all eyes on
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him, Grushnitski assumes heroic composure. His companions, the Captain of Dragoons in
particular, want to make a fool of Pechorin since he so easily makes fools of them; they are the
collective that talks Grushnitski into challenging Pechorin to a duel, but with only Grushnitski’s
pistol loaded.
Before discussing the duel, it might be helpful to reexamine what Grushnitski reveals
about Pechorin. Although Pechorin is prone to defining people as literary characters, his
conceptualizations of his companions are often on point: when he first describes Grushnitski he
says, “Grushnitski has the reputation of an exceptionally brave man. I have seen him in action:
he brandishes his sword, he yells, he rushes forward with closed eyes. Somehow, this is not
Russian courage!” (85). Like Pechorin, the reputation of the man does not reflect his interiority.
Grushnitski goes along with his society of plotters, trying to fill the Western heroism that
inspires this young soldier, but “he rushes forward with closed eyes” on and off the battlefield
(85). Grushnitski and Pechorin are both young men trying to fill the single role of Romantic
hero, each blind to “what’s around him, or to know himself” (Costlow 85). For instance,
Pechorin acts blind to his own Byronic mask by judging Grushnitski for having non-Russian
courage; he exalts Russian courage, while planning his actions according to Western archetypes
of heroism and courage. Their blindness mirrors the lonely adolescent blind boy from “Taman,”
highlighting the immaturity of their playacting and the lonely end awaiting their game of
Western heroes. Lermontov fills the novel with doubling, but each of Pechorin’s doubles works
to unmask his heroism in different ways. The fatal showdown between Pechorin and Grushnitski,
who dress up as Romantic heroes, reveals how their blindness to the division between fantasy
and reality becomes fatal.
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At the beginning of “Princess Mary,” Pechorin tells Werner that, “The denouement of
[Grushnitski’s] comedy will be our concern,” but the night before the duel Pechorin’s journal is
far from comedic (Lermontov 95); his existential boredom and disdain for life surpasses the
gloomy and pensive Byronic hero and enters into the darkest corners of the soul. What is so
haunting about Pechorin’s journal entry the night before is the way that even facing potential
death, he continues to be the actor committed to his role. He writes, “Ah, Mr. Grushnitski! Your
mystification will not come off…We shall exchange parts: it is now I who will search your pale
face for signs of secret fear” (158). Pechorin considers the duel in terms of playing parts, still
acting to the death. Since Pechorin suppresses any potential feelings for Princess Mary, he is not
fighting to win her hand; after all, he fears marriage as the means to his demise. He accepts
Grushnitski’s challenge, because “it is Pechorin’s ‘heroic’ image which is at stake in the duel.
And for the sake of that image he is prepared to risk everything, even life itself” (Barratt 84).
The life of the Romantic image he creates becomes more important than his own life. Although
one might ask if the two are inseparable, my discussion of Vera in the next section demonstrates
that Pechorin can still separate himself from his Romantic performance, though not for long.
Pechorin reflects on the dismal life that his Romantic education produces: “How many times
have I played the part of an axe in the hands of fate! […] My love brought happiness to none,
because I never gave up anything for the sake of those whom I loved” (Lermontov 159).
Pechorin openly blames this inability to love on “the fashionable world,” who read in his face
“the signs of bad inclinations which were not there, but they were supposed to be there—and so
they came into existence” (127, 126-127). Although Pechorin’s words must be taken carefully,
when he expresses his tension between his identification with the stoic hero and a wounded boy
there rings a sense of true inner turmoil. Noting the physical manifestations of anxiety and fear
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beneath his heroic role, we find that “Sleep does not come” the night before the duel (158). He
knows he must rest for a steady hand, yet he cannot control his racing mind. The next day will
either continue his fated role as the executioner or prove the old fortuneteller wrong and leave
him dead at the hands of a fellow soldier, instead of a woman.
He becomes the man society wanted him to be, but his mastery of the Byronic character
leaves him “sufficiently bored” (158). In his sleepless state the night before the duel, he wonders
if death is not the final cure to this British ennui: “Well, what of it? If I am to die, I’ll die! The
loss to the world will not be large and, anyway, I myself am sufficiently bored” (158). Although
these words might come off as a scoff against death, the confession of his own perceived
insignificance reveals a major crack in his careful façade. The loss of a true hero is a tragic loss
to the world, so Pechorin’s brief show of self-consciousness highlights the human under the
fiction. Although self-criticism is a common trait for the Romantic hero, here Lermontov uses
this character trope to unhinge his hero’s adopted identity. Pechorin’s first defiant statement
against death aligns with Byron’s Childe Harold as an “energetic denial of the power of death,”
in Otto Rank’s words, (Newey 109) but he adds those qualifying words—what did I mean to the
world anyway? Pechorin sacrifices his “psychic wholeness” to “his ‘heroic’ persona” (Barratt
102). He even suspects the original part of his soul, untainted by the Romantic disease
perpetuated by his society, to have “withered away, it had evaporated, it had died” (Lermontov
125). While Pechorin’s psychic wholeness is divided between the young man coming of age and
the Byronic hero already bored with the world, the former piece of his soul has not disappeared
completely, and it reveals itself during the duel. His ability to question his fate and prepare to
fight for survival in the duel against Grushnitski proves the lingering desire to live through the
ennui, the lingering life in his soul.
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The temporal shift on the next page of the novel reintroduces Pechorin with his Byronic
mask reaffirmed in full. Before relating the events of the duel, Pechorin interjects a reflection on
his own diary, “now a month and a half” later (159): “I read over the last page: how funny! –I
expected to die: it was impossible” (160). Thus, we are to experience the retelling of the duel not
through the realistic Pechorin who experiences fear and self-doubt but the fantastic man who is
“impossible” to kill (160). The night before the duel, he reads The Scottish Puritan, and his act
of reading Walter Scott reminds us of the world he tries to translate onto Russian soil. 23
However, the metafiction of the novel’s hero reading Western novels to learn heroism is a stark
representation of Pechorin’s consciously constructed persona. We witness his creative process:
first, he reads, and then he interprets these Western texts to fit the context of his reality. Reading
Scott both reasserts his identity within a Romantic context and places him beyond the novel’s
hero as his reader and judge. Mills Todd claims that while the Scott novel might associate
Pechorin with its hero on the surface, the following duel will reveal Pechorin opposite to “the
novel’s ‘moderate hero’” (144). Pechorin does not exactly involve himself in the mimicry of
Western characters; instead, he takes inspiration from them and makes them extreme in his
Russian milieu. His renditions become exaggerated or caricature-like, which demonstrates their
inability to translate realistically in a Russian context. Pechorin meets Werner, his second for the
duel, with sharp wits and good humor: “Why are you so sad, doctor? Haven’t you seen people
off on their way to the next world with the greatest indifference, a hundred times before? […]
Isn’t the expectation of violent death, after all, a genuine illness?” (Lermontov 161). Even with
the chance of a fatal ending, Pechorin approaches the duel—a scene most potent in its violent
masculinity and rakishness—ready to die or kill for the sake of remaining the pinnacle of
The Scottish Puritan (Les Puritains d’Ecosse) is the French translation of Old Morality (1816) by Walter Scott
(Lermontov 209).
23
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Romantic masculinity in his Russian society. He already has the disease of Romanticism so
ingrained into his being that he can manage the illness of expected death as well; the two may
even be complementary diseases, since a true hero, willing to brave the most dangerous
adventures, must be prepared for death at any moment. The thrill of adventure outweighs the
risk of demise for the Romantic hero, because life without adventure produces the driest
boredom. Pechorin suppresses every fear and anxiety to maintain his mask; Werner feels his
“feverish” pulse and says in awe, “But nothing shows in your face” (166). Pechorin is ready to
face the one man who claims the same heroic position, and only one Byronic aspirant can
survive.
The duel is Pechorin’s opportunity to kill his Byronic double, eliminating the reminder
that his Romantic persona is an act and not his inherent nature, or die and find freedom from
ennui. In a show of compassion that Pechorin continuously claims to lack, he offers Grushnitski
an out: “Here are my terms: this very day you will publically retract your slander and will
apologize to me” (Lermontov 164). Since Grushnitski thinks he has Pechorin fooled with the
single loaded gun, he immediately rejects the offer, ready to defend his honor. As Jane Costlow
suggests, the novel can be read “as a central document in the testament of nineteenth-century
masculinity, representing the hussar code of hypertrophied honor and sexual rapacity” (86); in
the duel, we can see both the obsession for masculine sexual power and honor at play,
particularly as the sense of honor and sexual power are complete social constructions for
Pechorin. With violent, phallic symbols in hand, the men prepare their pistols to show whom
truly shoots the straightest. Ironically, Pechorin is defending his and Mary’s honor for a sexual
affair that never took place, but the insult of Grushnitski’s assumption is enough to fight to the
death. Once Grushnitski declines Pechorin’s possibly condescending show of mercy, Pechorin
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fatal victory becomes definite: along the “summit of that sheer cliff […] Each of us will take his
stand on the very edge of the shelf, and in this way even a light wound will be fatal” (Lermontov
165). Looking down upon the “mossgrown jags of rocks, cast down by storm and time”
Pechorin describes the wildness of the surrounding nature as a “tomb” (167). Neither Romantic
pretender is the champion over nature, nor over their own inner natures, but victims to both.
They have allowed the pressures of a literature-centric society to dictate the deadly defense of
their conceptions of honor.
The final moments of the duel reveal the dangerous disregard for life bred in the Russian
translation of this Romantic fantasy. Grushnitski wins the coin toss for the first shot, and
Pechorin does not reveal his knowledge of their ruse even then. He knows Grushnitski has three
options: shoot into the air, become a murderer, or expose his cowardly plan (167). Pechorin
wants to give Grushnitski every advantage to make sure the most deserving pretender comes out
of this alive…or possibly Pechorin really is fed up with the banality of life: “Perhaps, I wish to
be killed…” (169). Brushing off this admission, Pechorin faces the loaded gun. Grushnitski’s
knees shake, revealing the fear and guilt behind the cool mask he so longs to perfect. The bullet
grazes Pechorin’s knee, but he steps forward to avoid certain death. This is the moment when
the big talk of these imitation heroes issues irreversible crimes against one another. Pechorin can
see the smile in Grushnitski’s face, thinking he is safe, having attempted to kill an unarmed
man—Pechorin even asks one last time if Grushnitski will retract his slander, and his refusal
transforms Pechorin from a merciful man that wants to be loved to a vengeful, remorseless spirit.
Revealing his knowledge of their ruse, Pechorin requests that the men reload his pistol and
condemns his double to death. Grushnitski cries out: “Shoot! I despise myself and hate you. If
you do not kill me, I shall cut your throat in a dark alley. There is no room in this world for the
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two of us…” (171). Grushnitski’s final words divulge much about the transference of power
occurring between the two men. First, his murderous threat shows that he drops his heroic
façade the moment Pechorin uncovers his plot. Pechorin’s knowledge of his trickery and
cowardice disproves the authenticity of every fancifully spoken French phrase, every ball
attended, every battle fought. What’s more, as Grushnitski unintentionally suggests, there cannot
be two Romantic, enigmatic heroes at once; their coexistence reveals the falsity of one another’s
Byronic characters, so only one can claim the role and live it believably. Mirroring his and
Werner’s earlier conversation about planning the denouement of Grushnitski’s comedic plot,
Pechorin hauntingly says, “Finita la commedia!” after shooting Grushnitski off the cliff. Werner
turns away in horror. The comedy turns into a tragedy, and yet Pechorin simply shrugs his
shoulders. The duel simultaneously proves Pechorin’s Romanticism to be a donned persona and
demonstrates that he is the most fit to play the role. The traces of authenticity we see the night
before the duel retreat back within Pechorin after he ends the duel victorious.
While the duel marks Pechorin’s baptism into a life of bloodstained hands and, as the
editor presents him in “Bela,” a remorseless demeanor, the physical markers that undermine the
Byronic mask remain. Despite the careless shrug of the shoulders after killing Grushnitski, when
Pechorin notices his bloodstained body in the crevices of the cliff, “Involuntarily, I shut my
eyes” (Lermontov 171). This instinctual gesture of closing his eyes to the evil and grotesque in
the world recalls both the image of Grushnitski in battle and the lonely, orphaned blind boy in
“Taman.” Again, Pechorin is left alone, but not in the powerful, independent sense of the
Romantic hero. He is alone in his pain, because his life and the duel are parodies “of the Byronic
dandy, taking words for reality, and declamations for passion” (Kelly 192). He kills a man who
was once a friend, which further illuminates the ridiculousness of this Romantic façade. They do
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not fight the duel over any overtly serious betrayal or crime: Pechorin flirted with the girl, who
Grushnitski fell for in a matter of weeks. The duel reveals the absurdity of transforming
mundane situations and people into larger than life Romantic characters. The majority of critics
consider the novel a work of fictional Realism, yet Realism is the last genre on the characters’
minds. If anything, the novel follows the destruction of its hero’s identity until foreign tropes
consume him; Pechorin’s degradation into socially constructed literary mask is inspired by
Romanticism, but his pain, loneliness, and fatal consequences are all the most stark Realism. At
this juncture where the novel functions as a work of Realism and the characters internalize
Romantic tropes, fantastic realism comes into play: the plot expresses believable scenes from life
but there is an element of unlikely adventures and extreme instances of existence (like duels,
love affairs, and run ins with thieves). Lermontov’s critique of Romanticism does not end in
Realism but proposes a mixture of the two embedded in his hero’s psychological identification
between fantasy and reality. That said, the very real, physical moments when we see Pechorin’s
“involuntary” glance or his questions of love are the instances where the dynamically new
Russian hero emerges: the man finding himself in a new European context.
Vera: The Faithful Mistress
While I agree with Belinsky that Lermontov’s depiction of Vera is “especially vague and
ill-defined,” (Barratt 94) she remains the one character who consistently evokes authentic
emotion from Pechorin and seems to understand his dual nature. Her name literally translates as
“faith” in Russian but also has connotations of truth (“vyerniy” or “uveren”); Lermontov uses her
name to label her faithful role in revealing the truth of Pechorin’s character. As Pechorin’s
female counterpart, she challenges his donned character and emphatic masculinity. When
Pechorin sees Vera at the spa for the first time, he lets out one of his meaningfully “involuntary”
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cries, and shouts her name (Lermontov 103). Mirroring the way Pechorin keeps Bela inside to
lighten her skin in the first chapter, Vera immediately “grew pale” in response to him (103). On
the other hand, like the undine of “Taman,” Vera is the unconquerable female figure in
Pechorin’s life. She and Pechorin have a certain power over one another that constantly shifts
the balance of their relationship. At times she moves closer to the submissive Bela: she says to
Pechorin, “You know that I am your slave; I never was able to resist you…” (119). More often
than this submissive attitude, we see Vera dictating the course of Pechorin’s time in the spa
resort—a task he fervently claims control over. As mentioned, his entire relationship with the
Ligovskoys begins in order to pull attention away from Vera. Additionally, the plot with
Princess Mary consumes the majority of the chapter, which conceals his time with Vera from his
own diary. When Pechorin writes of Vera it is not to plan his next flattery or deception, only to
imagine her on his page: “What was Vera doing now, I wondered. I would have paid dearly to
press her hand at that moment” (109). Vera is the only woman to get under Pechorin’s skin
permanently, and her ability to bring his emotions to the surface marks her illumination of
Pechorin’s suppressed femininity. His heroic conceptualization of violent masculinity aligns
emotion and honesty with femininity: Vera breaks these barriers by inspiring his emotional
expression. Furthermore, the fact that they have been acquainted for years means that she has
witnessed Pechorin’s progression into the Byronic character he comes to imitate in the Caucasus.
She is the only remnant of Pechorin’s past in St. Petersburg and proof that Pechorin is capable of
loving someone other than himself.
While Grushnitski and Werner are the obvious doubles for Pechorin, considering Vera as
another double may illuminate the nature of Pechorin’s Romantic disease and highlight his
suppressed femininity. Vera comes to the spa, because she is “very ill,” suffering from what
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Pechorin thinks may be consumption (105). In a similar fashion to Pechorin’s British ennui and
Romantic fanaticism, Vera suffers from “a completely non-Russian disease” or “fievre lente”
(105). Vera’s disease is physical and Pechorin’s metaphysical, but both illnesses are Western
and potentially fatal. Additionally, “fievre lente” or “slow fever” describes the way Western
influences slowly drain the singularity out of Russian identity for Pechorin, Vera, and their
Westernized Russian aristocracy (105). Furthermore, Pechorin is able to love Vera with
authentic and unsuppressed emotion, because she is already married, making Pechorin’s feared
marriage prophesy impossible. However, his love can only take place in private, which happens
to be the one place he can also escape the Romantic expectations of Russian high society. His
ability to love without fear comes from “the Vera who promises him the true self-knowledge he
craves” (Barratt 100). Pritchett claims, “knock the Byronic mask off his face and there will stand
an empty actor,” but beneath that mask is the man who can feel and express himself apart from
the Byronic role society has chosen for him (272). This emphasis on Pechorin’s internal self is
the mark of Russian psychological realism and the beginning of fantastic realism. In one sense,
Pechorin willfully takes on the Byronic role according to socio-cultural values; however, if we
choose to believe his claim, that society read in his face, “the signs of bad inclinations which
were not there, but they were supposed to be there—and so they came into existence” (126-127),
then we can see society’s hand in bringing out a measure of the Miltonic Satan in him. Vera
calls Pechorin out when he begins to use his practiced dandyism with her, “Oh, I beseech you, do
not torment me as before with empty doubts and feigned coldness” (119). The sense of her own
mortality frees her from the gullible nature of Princess Mary; Vera has no time for pretense and
this honesty gives Pechorin an opportunity to shed his mask before her. Pechorin knows that
“she is the only woman who has completely understood me with all my petty weaknesses and
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wicked passions” (120). Mary and Bela reveal the ability to fall for Pechorin’s Byronic front,
but Vera sees beyond the passions inspired by the mask to an authentic core.
Pechorin claims that he would consider himself happy if he were “better and more
powerful than anyone in the world,” but his interactions with Vera reveal happiness from a more
vulnerable and emotional source (123). Barratt and Briggs note, “For all his apparent openness,
Pechorin is singularly incapable of stating the truth about himself directly” (73). While this is
mostly true, he is, however, able to reveal the truth about his character through instinctual
gestures. For example, in a surprisingly romantic moment, Pechorin tells the dramatic tale of his
and Vera’s love: “So vividly did I picture my tenderness, my anxiety, my transports, in such an
advantageous light did I present her” that Vera forgives his earlier flirtation with Princess Mary
(Lermontov 131). He makes this social gesture to cheer up the obviously gloomy Vera, which
highlights the compassion hiding beneath the stoic heroic role. As the meaning of her Russian
name implies, Vera has faith in Pechorin, despite the evil she sees within him, and exposes the
truth of his nature. Pechorin thinks he has to don the Byronic character to become enigmatic.
Nonetheless, when Vera is forced to leave town with her husband, she expresses her final
sentiments towards Pechorin’s character:
…there is something special about your nature, peculiar to you alone, something
proud and mysterious. In your voice, whatever you may be saying, there is
unconquerable power. None is able to desire so incessantly to be loved; in none is
evil so attractive; the gaze of none promises such bliss; none can be so genuinely
unhappy as you, because none tries so hard to convince himself of the contrary.
(173)
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This could easily sound like the reading of a Romantic hero, if not for the significant way Vera
has already proven her ability to see beyond Pechorin’s falseness. She sees a singular
authenticity emerging from a derivative literary imitation. Thus, unveiling the Byronic mask
leaves a dynamic character, lost between impulses of good and evil (certainly a Romantic trait
but also relevant of human character in general—a realistic hero is neither completely good nor
evil). Vera’s description of Pechorin is the most concise explanation of Pechorin as the hero of
the novel and of his time. He represents a generation of young men capable of great heroics but
confined by societal expectations and a preference for Romantic literature. Unfortunately, after
proving Pechorin’s ability to love without generic confines, he kills Grushnitski—reaffirming his
fatal heroism—and Vera’s husband forces them to leave town.
Pechorin’s reaction to Vera’s absence is his final expression of the man beneath the
mask, his final show of the vulnerability of real humanity. As soon as Pechorin reads Vera’s
farewell letter and her final wish that he not marry Princess Mary—a desire he never had—
Pechorin jumps on his Circassian horse “like a madman” (174). He rides after the long departed
Vera until his horse “crashed onto the ground” and died moments later (175). Again, Pechorin is
alone without freedom and without Vera, and though he tries to proceed on foot, his legs collapse
and he “fell on the wet grass and began crying like a child” (175). Reflecting back to the image
of the lonely blind boy sobbing on the dock of Taman as his fellow smugglers sail away,
Pechorin’s connection to the vulnerable blind boy comes full circle. Lermontov likens the loss
of community to the loss of sight, which can be read as a psychoanalytic castration (Freud, “The
Uncanny”). In the novel, individualism results in isolation and emasculation—a strong warning
against embodying the individualistic Byronic hero in Russia when these are the violent
consequences. Both are orphans in the world, abandoned by those that provide their only hope
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for love and understanding. Crucially, both are left devoid of community, and “No man can be
an island in Russia” (Orwin 6). The pretend Romantic hero does not find independence in his
isolation from others; instead, after Pechorin completely isolates himself by killing Grushnitski
and losing Vera he reverts to his most basic, childlike state. He cries for all he has destroyed:
“his own ability to love” and “the possibility of Faith” (or literally the possibility of Vera)
(Costlow 98). His tears represent the broken soul raised to play the executioner’s axe in his life
of tragic Romantic satire. Certainly, the hero who loses the only woman he loves is typical of a
Byronic narrative; Childe Harold experiences such disappointed love:
For he through sin’s labrynth had run,
Nor made atonement when he did amiss,
Had sighed to many though he loved but one,
And that loved one, alas! could ne’er be his. (Hough 101) 24
However, Byron’s Childe Harold stands apart from his lover by his “sin” and her
characterization as one “so chaste” (Hough 101). When Pechorin loses Vera he loses an equal, a
counterpart; she recognizes Pechorin’s sins, and they share in their sinful nature. He does not
control her, seduce her, or spoil her as Childe Harold “spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste”
(101). Furthermore, Pechorin’s consequential self-destruction from Vera’s absence is an element
Lermontov adds to separate the Russian hero. His tears do not reveal the Miltonic Satan so
prevalent in the Byronic figure but, instead, show the child at the start of his Bildungsroman,
trying to conquer a world that rejects him. These are imperative distinctions functioning to
identify Russian Romanticism, and its focus on irony and realism, as a genre apart from its
Childe Harold, from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) is the first manifestation of the Byronic
hero. For more on Byron and his works see Hough (97-121), Drummond, or Bone.
24
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Western predecessor. When he returns to Kislovodsk the next morning, he throws himself on his
bed and sleeps “the sleep of Napoleon after Waterloo” (Lermontov 176). He wins the fatal
match against Grushnitski, but losing Vera and his chance to love without a mask is his ultimate
defeat, because this loss proves the impotency of the Romantic male hero.
Conclusion: More than a Mask
A close reading of “Princess Mary” provides a study of Pechorin in his customary
habitat: the drawing rooms and balls of the Russian aristocracy. While Pechorin plays the
Romantic role that every young Petersburg or Moscow girl dreams of from her Western
education, he finds no fulfillment in his execution of the role. Just as the word execution
ironically signifies filling a role to perfection and a justifiable killing, the Romantic semantics of
Pechorin life pull his identity in two directions. Despite the story’s location in the middle of the
novel, “Princess Mary” offers the social context and foundation for the character Pechorin dons.
The aristocracy wants “isolated, single, and unique” men like the heroes from Greek and British
Romances (Bakhtin, Dialogic 101), but Lermontov chooses to probe the psychological
consequences of such playacting. Donna Tussing Orwin goes so far as to claim, “The self as
Russians conceived it is not an individualist one” (6). While, this claim seems like a bold
blanketing statement for an entire nation, we can find truth to it in the novel. Part of the reason
why Pechorin’s successful embodiment of the Byronic hero isolates him from his fellow officers
and Vera, is because becoming Byronic excludes him from a Russian community. When he
drops his dandy persona with Vera, he gets to experience a community with her, but these
instances are fleeting and few. Thus, Lermontov uses Pechorin to expose the dark side of “the
individualism that Romanticism often valued” (Orwin 6). Lermontov calls this dark side a
Rose 84
“disease” (Lermontov 2), Pechorin labels it ennui, and the novel defines the man who struggles
with the complexity of a foreign model within the Russian soul as a hero of our time.
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Conclusion: Locating the Hero and Defining “Our Time”
“I entered that life after having already lived it through in my mind, and I became bored and
disgusted, like one who would read a poor imitation of a book that he has long known”
(Lermontov 189).
Pechorin’s literary identity, formed through his aristocratic upbringing and exposure to
Western novels, is perhaps the greatest influence on his life in the Caucasus. His adventurous
life in the military does not cure his ennui, because adventure fiction cements his worldview and
life becomes “a poor imitation of a book” (Lermontov 189). Pechorin’s years of reading Gothic
and Romantic fictions teach him to categorize and understand life according to Western themes,
and so the plot of his life seems predetermined. The mysteries of existence seem to disappear
from reality, which he reads in a fictional framework. The act of creating the realism of his
everyday like with an extraordinary Gothic structure simultaneously entrenches him in incurable
ennui and defines him as the hero of Russia during the time of a burgeoning Russian literary
tradition. In his 1840 review of the novel, S.P. Shevyrev writes: In the West “he is a hero of the
real world, while for us he is only a hero of fantasy, and in this sense a hero of our time” (Bagby
160). Although I would argue against the Byronic hero as a Western reality, I agree that
Pechorin’s penchant for fantasy is his defining characteristic as the hero of nineteenth century
Russia. His sense of fantasy in everyday life is the very imaginative property necessary for the
formation of nations and national identity (Anderson); while he seems to use his literary
imagination to resist his Russian nationality, he ultimately imagines a new Russian hero and
nationalism in his self-conceptualization between Eastern and Western genres. His inclination
towards fantasy is the spark that forms the many layers of his identity, because he constructs his
identity from a mixture of the everyday realism of life in Russia and the fantasy of Gothic and
Romantic texts. Despite Pechorin’s frequently convincing portrayal of the Byronic hero with
Rose 86
characters like Bela and Princess Mary, his diary reveals an identity beneath his Romantic
imitation. Pechorin’s failure to embody a Western hero in a Russian context does not mean that
the hero of our time is a false Western imitation. Quite the opposite, Pechorin’s struggle to
define his identity in the split between Russian and Western genres reveals “our time” as a time
of identity formation and nation building with a literary consciousness.
The destructive consequences of Western individualism in a Russian hero reveal the need
for a communal, national Russian identity. This national identity begins to form through the act
of reading and writing—a process that Pechorin demonstrates first hand. If nineteenth century
Russia was to become a community of readers instead of a nation filled with Romantic
individualists, authors like Lermontov needed to show the ability to take the Romantic narrative,
bring it to a Russian context, and watch the strengths and weaknesses of this translation unfold.
Lermontov introduces this task by challenging Romanticism as a “disease” in his “Author’s
Introduction” (2). The geographic space of this translation and infection is significant, because
as Franco Moretti explains, “only a country that was both inside and outside Europe—i.e., only
Russia—could call into question Western culture, and subject it (with Dostoevsky) to genuine
‘experiments’” (32). Just as Pechorin’s identity forms between Western and Russian literary
contexts, Russia also exists as a liminal space between Europe and Asia. Thus, the hero’s
Bildungsroman is tied to the coming-of-age story of modern Russia and its formation in fiction.
While Dostoevsky is certainly influential in Russian literature’s challenge to Western culture, I
argue that Lermontov and his heroic template serve as crucial predecessors to the nineteenth
century Russian authors who follow him. Pechorin’s character creates a template for defining
Russian national identity through a metafictional experience of life; considering that Pechorin’s
identity emerges from the gap between fiction and reality, we can see the aptness of his
Rose 87
metafictional template for a nation constantly defined by its the liminal geography.
Manipulating genres like the British Gothic and Russian fairy tale allows Lermontov to accept
the influence Western literature has on Russian life, while validating a Russian identity in
opposition to the West.
Although Russia remains ingrained in its patriarchal roots like much of Western Europe,
Lermontov’s use of women as deconstructive forces over Pechorin’s Byronic mask provides a
unique opposition to Romanticism’s gendered heroism. Even though Pechorin’s masculinity is a
central theme in the novel and the Russian hero—like the Romantic hero—is male, Bela, the
rusalka, Princess Mary, and Vera all tear away pieces of the Byronic veil. The masculinity of the
Western hero cannot stand up to the penetrating gaze of the Russian woman. Here, the creation
of identity begins and the mimicry of Western genre ends for Pechorin and Lermontov. I find
women’s illuminating role a significant commentary on the weakness of the Western hero and
evidence of Lermontov’s belief in the capability of a more potently masculine Russian heroism.
His focus on masculine heroism both places the novel in a European tradition, while setting the
new Russian literary tradition apart in its extreme experiences of literary conditions.
Considering the proliferation of nineteenth-century male heroes who follow Pechorin,
creating a uniquely Russian tradition, and Dostoevsky’s trademark fantastic realism, which
mirrors the literary consciousness and gravidity of Pechorin’s story, we can locate Lermontov as
a defining voice for his nation and his time. As the first hero in Russian psychological realism,
Pechorin introduces the introspective, metafictional hero who constantly mediates his position
between reality and fiction. Literature is the greatest inspiration for this self-conscious hero: he
lives his artistic medium through his literarily conscious heroism. In the years during
Lermontov’s writing and then following his death, Nikolai Gogol also concerned his fictional
Rose 88
works and heroes with the infiltration of Gothicism into Russia; his Petersburg Tales (18351842) illuminates the streets of St. Petersburg with the looming presence of the fantastic: “The
devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks” (272). While
Gogol’s protagonists often find themselves in literal fantasy, from runaway noses (“The Nose”)
to magical wish-granting paintings (“The Portrait”), they also navigate the space between
mimicry, creation, and the seeming madness in-between like Pechorin does: “everything in holy
Russia is infected with imitation” (Gogol 405). Aside from the hero’s conscious struggle
between imitation and originality, the sense of a hero’s interiority preceding his external action is
the defining quality of the Russian psychological novel and the key to the formation of later
nineteenth century heroes, or antiheroes. For example, Dostoevsky’s protagonists Raskolnikov
(Crime and Punishment, 1866), Stavrogin (Demons, 1872), and Ivan Karamazov (The Brothers
Karamazov, 1880) all exemplify the intelligent, literary hero made dangerous by his
preoccupation with the line between fiction and reality. In fact, the root of Raskolnikov’s name
signifies “schism”: the schism between fiction and reality, salvation and damnation, East and
West, and all the dichotomies that complicate the Russian hero, beginning with Pechorin.
Pechorin epitomizes the man finding himself between physical and metaphysical words, and
literature proves the most apt stage for this national project.
Lermontov created a heroic template that made a massive impact on the literary
landscape of nineteenth century Russia. He provided readers with a kindred spirit attempting to
navigate his identity in the liminality of Russian life and nationality—seeking the self amidst
competing genres, geographies, and genders. Lermontov constructed a hero seeking for selfactualization and the literary language through which to define him; through Pechorin,
Lermontov provides nineteenth century readers with a fellow reader trying to write life as
Rose 89
fascinating as his beloved Romantic novels and learning the hard way that life is not fiction but
fiction can inform life.
Rose 90
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