The Promise of Mikhail Lermontov
The Making of Modern Russia
by Denise M. Henderson
November, 2002
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Denise Marguerite Dempsey Henderson, a long-time associate of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., was struck and killed in a hit-and-run accident in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 15, 2003. For over 20 years, Mrs. Henderson helped man the Russia/Eastern Europe desk of Executive Intelligence Review, as well as undertaking other editorial assignments, including Editorial Assistant of Fidelio magazine. This article, on the political and cultural significance of Russia’s Mikhail Lermontov, was drafted in November 2002. Preparation for publication has been aided by Denise’s colleague and friend Rachel Douglas, who provided assistance with the translations and editorial details, as well as supplying the boxed background material.
Suppose you found yourself in a society where the accepted way of doing things was no longer sufficient? Suppose that, with the loss of key individuals in your society, a crisis which could affect the survival of your nation was fast approaching, and you were one among the few, willing to say that there had to be a change, as soon as possible, in how things got done?
Suppose also that many of your co-thinkers or potential collaborators had been assassinated or rendered ineffective by enemy operations? Could you then, still, not merely say what you knew to be true, but act on the ideas which you knew could move the existing context into a completely new and much more fruitful direction?
This was the situation in which the 23-year-old poet Mikhail Lermontov found himself in 1837, when Alexander Pushkin was murdered in a duel. For by then, not only Pushkin, but also Alexander Griboyedov, the Russian emissary to Iran and author of the play Woe from Wit, had been murdered: Pushkin in a duel he shouldn’t have fought, and Griboyedov along with the rest of the embassy staff at the Russian embassy in Iran (then Persia) by an enraged mob.
Lermontov, despite this, and under these conditions, in his poetry and essays wrote about the dearth of consistent, clear leadership in Russia under Tsar Nicholas I, echoing many of Pushkin’s themes and continuing the development of the Russian language and Russian poetry. Lermontov also reflected the influence of the German Classical tradition on Russia, through his study of the writings of Schiller and Heine, as well as by translating their works into Russian.
Mikhail Lermontov was born in 1814, fifteen years after Pushkin. He found himself in a Russia where the political situation had largely deteriorated, thanks to the rigidities of Nicholas I and many of the Tsar’s closest advisers, including the cruel Minister of War, General Alexei Arakcheyev, and the anti-republican Foreign Minister Nesselrode, along with the salon of Madame Nesselrode. The Russian Army in the Caucasus, where Lermontov was to spend most of his military service, found itself engaged in a brutal, protracted guerrilla war. On the one hand, the local population had been encouraged by various leaders to fight to the death, while on the other, the Russian Commander, General Yermolov, in response, had begun to pursue a slash-and-burn policy that demoralized the Russian officer corps that had hoped for liberalization and change after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.
Lermontov was steeped in the Classics from an early age, and this led him to develop his ability to assimilate several languages, including Latin, Greek, French, German, and English. Lermontov also read everything by Pushkin that he could get his hands on. Although Lermontov and Pushkin attended many of the same theaters, ballets, and so forth, they never met. However, Pushkin, having received some unedited poems by Lermontov, told his friend, the musician Glinka, “These are the sparkling proofs of a very great talent!”
A striking example of Lermontov’s youthful creativity is his assimilation of the poetry of Friedrich Schiller. The 15-year-old Lermontov both translated Schiller’s “The Glove” and then, having read and understood the concept behind Schiller’s “The Diver”— that doing what is demanded of you by the powers-that-be, can be deadly—, transformed it into his own idea.
The Glove: A Tale
by Friedrich Schiller
Before his lion-court,
Impatient for the sport,
King Francis sat one day;
The peers of his realm sat around,
And in balcony high from the ground
Sat the ladies in beauteous array.
And when with his finger he beckoned,
The gate opened wide in a second,--
And in, with deliberate tread,
Enters a lion dread,
And looks around
Yet utters no sound;
Then long he yawns
And shakes his mane,
And, stretching each limb,
Down lies he again.
Again signs the king,--
The next gate open flies,
And, lo! with a wild spring,
A tiger out hies.
When the lion he sees, loudly roars he about,
And a terrible circle his tail traces out.
Protruding his tongue, past the lion he walks,
And, snarling with rage, round him warily stalks:
Then, growling anew,
On one side lies down too.
Again signs the king,--
And two gates open fly,
And, lo! with one spring,
Two leopards out hie.
On the tiger they rush, for the fight nothing loth,
But he with his paws seizes hold of them both.
And the lion, with roaring, gets up,--then all's still;
The fierce beasts stalk around, madly thirsting to kill.
From the balcony raised high above
A fair hand lets fall down a glove
Into the lists, where 'tis seen
The lion and tiger between.
To the knight, Sir Delorges, in tone of jest,
Then speaks young Cunigund fair;
"Sir Knight, if the love that thou feel'st in thy breast
Is as warm as thou'rt wont at each moment to swear,
Pick up, I pray thee, the glove that lies there!"
And the knight, in a moment, with dauntless tread,
Jumps into the lists, nor seeks to linger,
And, from out the midst of those monsters dread,
Picks up the glove with a daring finger.
And the knights and ladies of high degree
With wonder and horror the action see,
While he quietly brings in his hand the glove,
The praise of his courage each mouth employs;
Meanwhile, with a tender look of love,
The promise to him of coming joys,
Fair Cunigund welcomes him back to his place.
But he threw the glove point-blank in her face:
"Lady, no thanks from thee I'll receive!"
And that selfsame hour he took his leave.
Schiller’s “The Glove,” is about a would-be enchantress at the court, who is not successful in ensnaring the knight, her prey. Lermontov’s translation of “The Glove” is a full translation from German into Russian of Schiller’s original poem, which mocks those who would cater to the fashions of the court. In it, a knight risks his life by entering the cage of a tiger at a tournament to retrieve a lady’s glove.
“And from the monstrous middle racing,” writes Schiller, “Grabs he the glove now with finger daring. . . .”
What happens next, however, takes the court completely by surprise.
Then from every mouth his praises shower,
But to one the loving glance most dear—
Which promises him his bliss is near—
Receives he from Cunigund’s tower.
And he throws in her face the glove he’s got:
“Your thanks, Lady, I want that not.”
And he leaves her that very hour!
(translation by Marianna Wertz)
View of Mt. Kreshora from the gorge near Kobi, the Caucasus. Drawing by M. Lermontov.
Will you, poet, who is mocked, reawake!
Or, will you never avenge against those who spurn—
From the golden scabbard unsheathe your blade,
Covered with the rust of scorn?
-- from ‘The Poet,’ 1838
In other words, the knight walks away from the established customs and the “way things are done,” without a second glance. He refuses to be a plaything of the oligarchy.
The Diver
by Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805)
translated by J. C. Mangan
“BARON or vassal, is any so bold
As to plunge in yon gulf and follow
Through chamber and cave this beaker of gold,
Which already the waters whirlingly swallow?
Who retrieves the prize from the horrid abyss
Shall keep it: the gold and the glory be his!”
So spake the King, and incontinent flung
From the cliff that, gigantic and steep,
High over Charybdis’s whirlpool hung,
A glittering winecup down in the deep;
And again he asked, “Is there one so brave
As to plunge for the gold in the dangerous wave?”
And the knights and the knaves all answerless hear
The challenging words of the speaker;
And some glance downwards with looks of fear,
And none are ambitious of winning the beaker.
And a third time the King his question urges,—
“Dares none, then, breast the menacing surges?”
But the silence lasts unbroken and long;
When a Page, fair-featured and soft,
Steps forth from the shuddering vassal-throng,
And his mantle and girdle already are doffed,
And the groups of nobles and damosels nigh,
Envisage the youth with a wondering eye.
He dreadlessly moves to the gaunt crag’s brow,
And measures the drear depth under;
But the waters Charybdis had swallowed she now
Regurgitates bellowing back in thunder,
And the foam, with a stunning and horrible sound,
Breaks its hoar way through the waves around.
And it seethes and roars, it welters and boils,
As when water is showered upon fire;
And skyward the spray agonizingly toils,
And flood over flood sweeps higher and higher,
Upheaving, downrolling, tumultuously,
As though the abyss would bring forth a young sea.
But the terrible turmoil at last is over;
And down through the whirlpool’s well
A yawning blackness ye may discover,
Profound as the passage to central Hell;
And the waves, under many a struggle and spasm,
Are sucked in afresh by the gorge of the chasm.
And now, ere the din re-thunders, the youth
Invokes the great name of God;
And blended shrieks of horror and ruth
Burst forth as he plunges headlong unawed:
And down he descends through the watery bed,
And the waves boom over his sinking head.
But though for a while they have ceased their swell,
They roar in the hollows beneath,
And from mouth to mouth goes round the farewell,—
“Brave-spirited youth, good night in death!”
And louder and louder the roarings grow,
While with trembling all eyes are directed below.
Now, wert thou even, O monarch! to fling
Thy crown in the angry abyss,
And exclaim, “Who recovers the crown shall be king!”
The guerdon were powerless to tempt me, I wis;
For what in Charybdis’s caverns dwells
No chronicle penned of mortal tells.
Full many a vessel beyond repeal
Lies low in that gulf to-day,
And the shattered masts and the drifting keel
Alone tell the tale of the swooper’s prey.
But hark!—with a noise like the howling of storms,
Again the wild water the surface deforms!
And it hisses and rages, it welters and boils,
As when water is spurted on fire,
And skyward the spray agonizingly toils,
And wave over wave beats higher and higher,
While the foam, with a stunning and horrible sound,
Breaks its white way through the waters around.
When lo! ere as yet the billowy war
Loud raging beneath is o’er,
An arm and a neck are distinguished afar,
And a swimmer is seen to make for the shore,
And hardily buffeting surge and breaker,
He springs upon land with the golden beaker.
And lengthened and deep is the breath he draws
As he hails the bright face of the sun;
And a murmur goes round of delight and applause,—
He lives!—he is safe!—he has conquered and won!
He has mastered Charybdis’s perilous wave!
He has rescued his life and his prize from the grave!
Now, bearing the booty triumphantly,
At the foot of the throne he falls,
And he proffers his trophy on bended knee;
And the King to his beautiful daughter calls,
Who fills with red wine the golden cup,
While the gallant stripling again stands up.
“All hail to the King! Rejoice, ye who breathe
Wheresoever Earth’s gales are driven!
For ghastly and drear is the region beneath;
And let man beware how he tempts high Heaven!
Let him never essay to uncurtain to light
What destiny shrouds in horror and night!
“The maelstrom dragged me down in its course;
When, forth from the cleft of a rock,
A torrent outrushed with tremendous force,
And met me anew with deadening shock;
And I felt my brain swim and my senses reel
As the double-flood whirled me round like a wheel.
“But the God I had cried to answered me
When my destiny darkliest frowned,
And he showed me a reef of rocks in the sea,
Whereunto I clung, and there I found
On a coral jag the goblet of gold,
Which else to the lowermost crypt had rolled.
“And the gloom through measureless toises under
Was all as a purple haze;
And though sound was none in these realms of wonder,
I shuddered when under my shrinking gaze
That wilderness lay developed where wander
The dragon and dog-fish and sea-salamander.
“And I saw the huge kraken and magnified snake
And the thornback and ravening shark
Their way through the dismal waters take,
While the hammer-fish wallowed below in the dark,
And the river-horse rose from his lair beneath,
And grinned through the grate of his spiky teeth.
“And there I hung, aghast and dismayed,
Among skeleton larvæ, the only
Soul conscious of life—despairing of aid
In that vastness untrodden and lonely.
Not a human voice,—not an earthly sound,—
But silence, and water, and monsters around.
“Soon one of these monsters approached me, and plied
His hundred feelers to drag
Me down through the darkness; when, springing aside,
I abandoned my hold of the coral crag,
And the maelstrom grasped me with arms of strength,
And upwhirled and upbore me to daylight at length.”
Then spake to the Page the marvelling King,
“The golden cup is thine own,
But—I promise thee further this jewelled ring
That beams with a priceless hyacinth-stone,
Shouldst thou dive once more and discover for me
The mysteries shrined in the cells of the sea.”
Now the King’s fair daughter was touched and grieved,
And she fell at her father’s feet,—
“O father, enough what the youth has achieved!
Expose not his life anew, I entreat!
If this your heart’s longing you cannot well tame,
There are surely knights here who will rival his fame.”
But the King hurled downwards the golden cup,
And he spake, as it sank in the wave,
“Now, shouldst thou a second time bring it me up,
As my knight, and the bravest of all my brave,
Thou shall sit at my nuptial banquet, and she
Who pleads for thee thus thy wedded shall be!”
Then the blood to the youth’s hot temples rushes,
And his eyes on the maiden are cast,
And he sees her at first overspread with blushes,
And then growing pale and sinking aghast.
So, vowing to win so glorious a crown,
For Life or for Death he again plunges down.
The far-sounding din returns amain,
And the foam is alive as before,
And all eyes are bent downward. In vain, in vain,—
The billows indeed re-dash and re-roar.
But while ages shall roll and those billows shall thunder,
That youth shall sleep under!
In “Ballad,” Lermontov used Schiller’s “The Diver” as his source, but cut out the king as instigator of the diver’s ill-fated journey. Instead, he focusses on the idea of the enchantress who views her “dear friend” as a plaything. The poem was probably written in 1829, the same year Lermontov translated “The Glove.” In “Ballad,” Lermontov took further in Russian the rhymed couplet form which Pushkin had sometimes used, but which Heine to a greater degree had been developing in the German language [SEE Box, page 56].
Ballad
Sits a beauteous maiden above the sea,
And to her friend doth say, with a plea
“Deliver the necklet, it’s down in the drink,
Today into the whirlpool did it sink!
“And thus shalt thou show me thy love!”
Wildly boiled the young man’s blood,
And his mind, unwilling, the charge embracing,
At once into the foamy abyss he’s racing.
From the abyss doth fly the pearl spray,
And the waves course about, and swirl, and play,
And again they beat as the shore they near,
Here do they return the friend so dear.
O Fortune! He lives, to the cliff doth he cling,
In his hand is the necklet, but how sad doth he seem.
He is afraid to believe his tired legs,
The water streams from his locks down his neck.
“Say, whether I do not love thee or do,
For the beautiful pearls my life I spared not,
“As thou said, it had fallen into the black deep
It did lie down under the coral reef—
“Take it!” And he with a sad gaze turned
To the one for whom his own life he spurned.
Came the answer: “O my youth, O dear one!
If thou love, down to the coral go yet again.”
The daring youth, with hopeless soul,
To find coral, or his finish, down dove.
From the abyss doth fly the pearl spray,
And the waves course about, and swirl, and play,
And again do they beat o’er the shore,
But the dear one return not evermore.
(translation by the author)
Tragically, at the crucial moment, Lermontov himself failed to escape the trap which had been set for him. For, once he had written his poem, “Death of A Poet” about Pushkin’s murder, and its postscript, written with the knowledge of who was behind the calumnies that led to Pushkin’s duel and death, Lermontov allowed himself to be ensnared by those in the Russian court and establishment who did not want there to be any successor to the freedom-loving Pushkin, and as a result he was shot dead in a duel in the Caucasus in 1841—four years after Pushkin’s own death in a duel. [1]
Pushkin’s Russian Revolution
When Mikhail Lermontov came on the scene, Russian’s master poet, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), was still alive to work his magic. As he composed the greatest works of Russian poetry and launched the development of literary prose, Pushkin transformed the Russian language, and Russia. His beautiful language is the core of literate Russian to this day.
A national hero and a universal genius, Pushkin embodied the Classical idea in Russia. He was the soul of the Classical movement in Russian culture, which he sparked and advanced and helped to organize. The subjects of Pushkin’s writing are the eternal ideas—truth, beauty, justice, mercy, love, freedom, commitment to a mission of doing good. Employing Classical verse forms in combination with the spoken language of the people, Pushkin insisted that the “popular” (narodny) quality of a language will flower when it is elevated to express profound ideas.
Exploring the paradoxes of leadership in Russian history, Pushkin pioneered Classical tragedy in the Russian language, with his drama Boris Godunov and his studies of Tsar Peter the Great. He was a master of the acerbic epigram, aimed at political or cultural foes. He was one of the great story-tellers of all time.
Never far from politics, Pushkin had close friends among the young officers of the Decembrist movement, whose uprising was crushed in 1825. He was no mere rebel, however, but sought ways to influence Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825-1854) in the direction of peaceful reform, centered on education. Pushkin’s murder by Georges d’Anthes in a duel was the project of a powerful clique of foreign-connected oligarchs, who ran much of Russian policy in the period after the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Who Was Mikhail Lermontov?
Mikhail Lermontov, or “Mishka” as he was known as a child, was born in 1814, in Penza, a village to the southeast of Moscow. His grandmother, Elizabeth Alexeyevna Arsenyeva (née Stolypina), who was the major landholder in Pskov, had opposed the marriage of her daughter “beneath her station” to a Russian Army officer, Yuri Petrovich Lermontov, and did everything she could to break up the marriage by whispering in her daughter’s ear what a bad match Yuri was for her.
Mishka thus grew up in a household permeated by strife. At first, there was the growing conflict, incited by Elizabeth Alexeyevna, between his father, Yuri Petrovich, and Maria Mikhailovna, his mother, who suffered from tuberculosis. Mishka seems to have cared about both his parents, and actually wrote a poem to his deceased mother in 1834, which, according to an entry in his diary, is based on the remembrance he had of his mother singing to him when he was three years old.
“The Angel,” describes the individual who cannot forget the music of the heavenly spheres.
The Angel
An angel flew in the midnight sky,
And sang a lullaby;
And all around, the stars and the moon,
Heeded that holy song.
He sang of the blessedness of the innocent,
’Neath Eden’s tents,
About the great God he sang,
And his praise was unfeigned.
A young soul he held in his hands,
For the world of tears and sadness,
And the sound of his song in the young soul
Remained—without words, but whole.
And for a long time on earth that soul stayed,
But never could he trade
Heaven’s music, soaring,
For the songs of earth so boring.
With his parents estranged by the time he was three, Mikhail began suffering bouts of nerves. Maria Lermontova soon discovered that music, the playing of the old songs, the “ingenious cavalcade of notes,” as biographer Henri Troyat calls it, calmed her son’s nerves.
At his mother’s death, Lermontov’s grandmother took charge of Mishka’s person and education. The domineering Elizabeth Alexeyevna, taking advantage of Yuri’s grief and the fact that he was in debt, drove him out of his own son’s life. At the same time, Lermontov’s grandmother wound up getting him the best tutors and the best education she could afford, including music lessons, lessons in French, the language of the Russian aristocracy, as well as in Greek, and in painting.
Elizabeth Alexeyevna ensured that her grandson’s health, which was poor when he was a child, was looked after. He visited the Caucasus twice during his childhood, once when he was six and again at the age of 10. He and his grandmother, along with their retinue, went to his aunt’s estate in Georgia, where it was hoped the fresh air and the spas would improve Mishka’s condition.
Lermontov would later remember the excitement of the long trip from Pskov to the Georgian Caucasus, which has often been compared as a frontier to the Wild West of the United States.
At the age of 10, on the second visit, he also perused his aunt’s library, which contained the works of the French (Rousseau, Voltaire), as well as the German poets Schiller and Goethe.
In 1825, Lermontov’s family, like many Russian aristocratic families, was personally affected by the Decembrist uprising of officers in St. Petersburg [SEE Box, page 48]. The uprising, sparked by the accession of Nicholas I to the throne, was suppressed, and the officers who led it were arrested. Lermontov’s great uncle, General Dmitri Stolypin—the grandfather of the famous Russian reformer Pyotr A. Stolypin—was sympathetic to the Decembrists and a friend of Decembrist leader Pavel Pestel, who was hanged for his role in the plot.
Lermontov had been given a broad education, both in the Classics and in French Romantic ideas, by private tutors in his grandmother’s home. At the age of 15, he attended the Moscow University Boarding School for Young Men, also known as the Moscow Noble Pension, a private pension in Moscow that focussed on the Classics (a pension being the equivalent of a private preparatory school in the United States). Tsar Nicholas I, having personally visited the school with the head of the Third Department (the secret police), Count Alexander Benkendorf, pronounced the school too liberal. Its professors were ordered to curtail the curriculum.
Because the German Classical movement was radiating outward into Russia, even Moscow, the home of the more traditional Russian elites who were wedded to the landed aristocracy and serfdom, began to see a renaissance in its educational institutions and its cultural outlook. Lermontov benefited both from the Moscow Noble Pension, in which he was enrolled in 1829, and from public performances of Schiller and Shakespeare, even bad or truncated ones. In letters to his aunt, Lermontov roundly criticized a performance of Hamlet, explaining to her that key passages from the original had been consciously omitted.
Throughout his teens, Lermontov continued to compose original poetry and to translate. In 1831, he was enrolled at Moscow University. But, as the first semester proceeded, the cholera epidemic, which had spread from Asia into Russia and would sweep through Poland as well, hit Moscow. Students from the University were enlisted in the fight to stop the spread of the disease, in concert with students from the University’s Department of Medicine. Classes would not resume until the beginning of 1832.
Once classes resumed, Lermontov and his friends, who had participated in beating back the cholera, found it difficult to readjust to the stultified university life, in which anything that smacked of non-autocratic ideas was suppressed. Lermontov and his friends became known as the “Joyous Band.” The group was drawn to ideas of a constitutional state, in which serfdom would be abolished, and where there would be universal education.
Most of the faculty of Moscow University was steeped in a commitment to serfdom and all that this implied for economics, as well as in Tsar Nicholas’s doctrine—actually the doctrine of Nesselrode and the worst oligarchical elements of Imperial Russia in this period—of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” For Nicholas, nationality referred to the Russian as a Great Russian. This was the period when Russia played the role of gendarme of Europe, assigned to it by the masters of power politics— Capodistra, Metternich, Castlereagh—at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, as well as pursuing imperial designs of its own.
In 1831, Lermontov and his friends had already had one encounter with Malov, their professor of Roman law, described as extremely obtuse. On March 16, 1831, they shut down his lecture with hissing, refusing to allow him to continue.
While this incident almost got them sent into the army as common soldiers, Malov was dissuaded from pursuing charges. In a Professor Pobedenostsev’s class, Lermontov responded that his teachers knew nothing, and that rather, he was educating himself from his personal library, which contained much more recent materials in foreign languages. In class after class, Lermontov continued to challenge the authority of professors, who were teaching from outdated materials, and who were attempting to enforce Nicholas’s doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. While Lermontov and his Joyous Band may not have had a fully thought-out solution, they had before them the example of the Decembrists, the “first revolutionaries.” And they knew that their education was narrow and ideological.
The Turbulent Russian Army
The Russian Army, in which Lermontov served, and about which he wrote, policed the borders of an Empire in the period of the Holy Alliance. The troops were conscripted into virtually life-long service (terms of 25 years, and longer), but the officer corps was the locus of considerable free-thinking. From the ranks of Russian Army leaders came patriotic reforms, as well as a fair share of hotheads with Jacobin leanings. Both elements were present in the famous Decembrist uprising of 1825.
Tsar Alexander I died on Nov. 19 (Old Style), 1825 in Taganrog. It was not generally known that his next oldest brother, Governor-General of Warsaw Constantine, had renounced the throne, and a third brother, Nicholas, was the heir. Military units swore allegiance to Constantine, who, however, refused to come to St. Petersburg. On Dec. 14, the Northern Society of young noblemen and officers, veterans of the Great Patriotic War against Napoleon, took advantage of the interregnum to stage a revolt against the incoming Tsar Nicholas I. On the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, a day-long standoff, punctuated by the assassination of two government officials, ended in an hour of cannon fire. Scores of the soldiers summoned by the insurgents died, and the Decembrist leaders were arrested. Five ring-leaders were hanged in 1826, including the poet Kondrati Ryleyev. Others were exiled to Siberia for life.
The mission and the fate of the Decembrists preoccupied Russia’s intellectuals and writers, beginning with the friend of many of them, Alexander Pushkin. It loomed large for the generation of Lermontov, who was 10 years old in 1825. The youthful Lermontov took his army commission in 1834.