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James Wood on Lermontov, LRB
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In LRB 32.3 (11Feb), James Wood considers a new translation of Lermontov's _A Hero of Our Time_ (online subscriber only), mentioning Nabokov only en parenthessant:
"Natasha Randall’s English, in her new translation, has exactly the right degree of loose velocity – this sounds like someone taking notes, patching it together as he goes along and unable to make up his mind. (Nabokov’s version, the best-known older translation, is a bit more demure than Randall’s, less savage.)"
However, there is much more of interest in the essay, not only in Lermontov's relation to Pushkin and to his protagonist, but in issues that are suggestive of grounds for Nabokov's appreciation, though Wood considers only Dostoevsky's in the main; what follows are extracts from Wood, I hope within the bounds of fair use, that should make this commonality of concerns if not conclusions evident:
"The reader is quickly aware of two qualities: the 25-year-old Lermontov is a fabulously gifted storyteller (Pechorin kidnaps us, as well as Bela), and an extremely sophisticated ironist [...] writing allegories about the unfathomable – about readability – [...] sarcastically omniscient. Lermontov [...] deliberately makes his traveller one of the novel’s unreliable narrators, and awards him [...] contradictory gestures of control and anxiety. This narrator, and especially the second storyteller, Maxim Maximych, constantly demonise the unpredictable otherness of the Caucasian natives, while passing off as almost familiar the unpredictable otherness of Pechorin. The motives of a bandit like Kazbich are seen as illogical and malevolent, [...] while the motives of a Pechorin may be unknowable but are gloriously beyond judgment: ‘That’s what sort of person he was – unfathomable!’ [...] [H]e becomes no less unfathomable, partly because Lermontov cleverly fractures his portrait: the first two sections are narrated by the nameless traveller (and by the blunter second narrator, Maxim Maximych); the last three sections are narrated by Pechorin, whose diaries have fallen into the hands of Maxim Maximych, who gives them to the traveller. There is not a reliable storyteller among them. With varying degrees of sophistication, all three men are victims of romantic grandiosity; a deliberate literariness infests the book, as it does Eugene Onegin. Characters take their cues from romantic fashions [...] On the one hand, the narrator is a confident 19th-century analyst, conventionally reading the body as a moral map: a man who does not swing his arms is clearly secretive. On the other, he does not want us to set any store by such observations. He is also frank about his role as a maker who touches things up: he is obviously painting a romantic ‘portrait’.
"Dostoevsky’s great passion for Pushkin seems odd – they are such different writers – until one considers that, literary nationalism aside, what he probably liked about Eugene Onegin was its utter absence of rational motive. There is no good reason for Onegin to reject Tatiana, and no good reason for him to flirt with Olga, and no good reason for him to kill Lensky, or to fall in love, at the end, with Tatiana. The great absences of the poem allowed Dostoevsky, I assume, to project onto it his own complicated system of egotism and abasement. Pushkin used the brevity of narrative verse to enforce this motivational opacity; Lermontov, enormously influenced by Pushkin, but working in a more capacious and explanatory form, deliberately excised information about his hero. [...] Mikhail Lermontov is almost as opaque as Pechorin. He seems to have worked hard at making his brief life a furious enigma, written up by Lermontov. [...] Lermontov’s contemporaries found him slippery. [...] But its author seemed to lack political seriousness. He was more interested in Dada-like pranks and hoaxes than in ideological action – more Dolokhov, the duellist in War and Peace, than Levin. [...] He revered Pushkin, and perhaps shared Pushkin’s romantic tendency to see his life as a fatal fragment.
"So he may well have been describing himself when he created Pechorin, as Turgenev thought, but that doesn’t really get us anywhere. Pechorin, as enigmatic as Lermontov, has been filled with meaning by influential readers [19th-century radicals like Belinsky, Herzen] [...] Less ideologically, others have read Pechorin as the first ‘superfluous man’, a disaffected romantic who sees through everything but who is too aimless and enervated to turn his ability to see into radical action; or as a precursor of Flaubert’s erotic flâneur, Frédéric Moreau, or of Dostoevsky’s more savagely alienated Underground Man. Insofar as Pechorin is now a canonical 19th-century romantic antihero, with fragments of Mr Darcy, Julien Sorel and Eugene Onegin lodged in him, probably all these different readings have intermittent validity. What is most striking nowadays, as Randall points out in her acute introduction, is the way Lermontov cunningly forecloses the possibility of terminal readings. Pechorin is constantly creating himself; he is an act of provisional theatre. He is a great analyst of his own twisted motives, but his analysis rarely succeeds in casting any illumination[;] The man who mocks Grushnitsky for wanting to be the hero of a novel often sees his own role in literary terms – as a novelistic character, or better still, as a controlling author. He boasts that his greatest pleasure is ‘to subject everyone around me to my will’, but almost in the same breath presents himself as no more than fate’s grim servant. He sees through the romantic posturing of Grushnitsky, with his dandyish greatcoat, but praises his own romantic dandyism [...]
"Of course, if it were just a matter of sorting through Pechorin’s most flagrant contradictions, his unreadability would turn out to be legible, just ironically so. But Pechorin is unfathomable because he is really a romantic parodist. He mocks Grushnitsky’s dandyism, and then reserves the right to flaunt his own, because Grushnitsky believes in it while he does not. He ridicules the idea of Grushnitsky confessing to some village girl that he is going to the Caucasus to seek death, but later in the novel stages his own bogus ‘confession’, making Princess Mary cry by prattling on about how difficult his childhood was, and the ‘despair’ that has lodged in his chest. In the course of this piece of theatre, it should be noted, Pechorin also thumbs his nose at the earnest and sympathetic political readings of critics like Belinsky and Herzen [...] but this war against romantic affectation is itself affected and romantic, and is anyway being prosecuted amid the antique chivalric machinery of the duel. Parody, as Dostoevsky acutely understood, is an act of admiration as much as of disdain, and perhaps the best way of understanding Pechorin’s distorted histrionics is by way of Dostoevsky’s dialectic of assertion and abasement."
[end extract] and perhaps Nabokov's way of understanding parody is to be preferred, and may also illuminate his disdain for Dusty ...
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