STORMY LOVE, PREDESTINATION and PECHORIN the SAILOR

A Look at Lermontov and the Literary Digression

By Paul Sonne

The literary digression is the key to unlocking some of nineteenth century Russian literature’s finest moments. From Anna Karenina’s “dirty ice cream” psychosis, to Grushenka’s story of the onion in Brothers Karamazov, to Raskolnikov’s dream sequences in Crime and Punishment, we find in nineteenth century Russian classics the tendency for authors to weave crucial thematic elements into seemingly aberrant digressions. Such departures from the subject offer a space for the author to advance the narrative’s particular characterizations or motifs in a more abstract manner. In Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, Pechorin, the novel’s atypical protagonist, articulates a literary digression that speaks to his own character traits and to overarching themes in the narrative. More specifically, the digression brings to bear both Pechorin’s inability to accept calm love and the narrative’s recurring theme of predestination.

In the digression, which occurs at the end of the “Princess Mary” tale, Lermontov uses sea and storm imagery to represent the novel’s larger themes. After he repudiates any love for Princess Mary, Pechorin departs from the storyline into a soliloquy about his own nature. He likens his life to that of a “sailor born and bred on the deck of a pirate brig,” who is “used to storms and battles.” The sailor feels “bored and oppressed” when “cast out on the shore.” He peers into the horizon of the “misty” sea, yearning for the storms and ships that he has so artfully mastered during his upbringing. He finally sets his eyes upon “the longed-for sail, at first like the wing of a sea-gull, but gradually separating itself from the foam of the breakers.”

Pechorin’s penchant for the unpredictable “storm” of life and love, coupled with his inability to remain on stable “shore,” informs his actions throughout the novel. Pechorin refuses to be cast ashore into what he calls “permanent attachment, a pitiful habit of the heart.” He constantly mentions his “insatiable heart” and his “restless fancy” for “life’s storm.” Like the sailor who grew up among storms, Pechorin only wishes to partake in the tumult (of love); he never desires to settle permanently onto love’s peaceful shoreline. This is the very reason Pechorin disdains marriage; he says, “However much I may love a woman, if she lets me feel that I must marry her--farewell to love! My heart turns to stone.” Pechorin’s soul “knows that without storms, a constantly torrid sun will wither it.” The sun metaphorically represents the consistency that Pechorin so passionately evades. He characteristically hurts women because, to him, they are only willing providers of the stormy love he craves; he believes a person should pluck the woman’s soul, “and after inhaling one’s fill of it, one should throw it away on the road.” Thus, in Pechorin’s digression, the sailor waits, longing for the “sail” of a ship bouncing in a storm, a sail that shuns the stability of the shore and the sun.

The image of a ship’s “sail” masochistically reveling in the battle of a storm metaphorically characterizes the way Pechorin acts. Lermontov’s famous poem “The Sail,” published in 1832, eight years before the release of Hero of Our Time, illustrates a similar sail. The poem’s last couplet reads: “And yet for the storm, it begs, the rebel, / As if in the storm lurked calm and peace!” The poem’s “rebellious” sail is like the “rebellious” Pechorin, finding glory in the storm. In both Hero of Our Time and “The Sail,” Lermontov uses the image of the sun as a symbol of constancy and consistency--feelings that Pechorin and the sail wholeheartedly reject. One line of the poem reads, “The sun’s bright rays caress the seas.” In juxtaposing this sun to the fighting sail, Lermontov underscores the way the sail (and Pechorin for that matter) shuns the sun’s consistency. The sail’s imagery and connotations, as highlighted by Pechorin’s digression, shed light on Pechorin’s complex web of actions in Hero of Our Time--in many ways, we find that Pechorin’s complicated and often undesirable character stems from his inability to commit to consistency and his desire to brew a storm around his own actions.

Why would Lermontov choose the sail and the storm as images to represent Pechorin and his actions? The sail is the heart of the ship, and without the sail, the ship cannot function; without the sail, the ship cannot crash gloriously through the ocean’s waves. In some sense, the sail connotes necessity, and Pechorin’s desire for life’s storm develops into an unnerving necessity over the course of Hero of Our Time. We begin to wonder why Pechorin keeps acting in such a brutal manner, and a masochistic necessity of sorts becomes the most viable explanation. An indispensible part of the whole that has begun to rebel (i.e. the sail and the ship, respectively), pinpoints this explanation of Pechorin’s behavior.

Through the digression, Lermontov points not only to Pechorin’s rebellious character, but also to the novel“s recurring theme of fate and predestination. In the digression, Pechorin notes how the metaphorical sailor is “born and bred on the deck of a pirate brig”--that is to say, the sailor’s birth and breeding, in particular, have caused him to procure an unconventional love for chaos and a hatred for the normalcy of the shore. Pechorin’s characterization of the sailor’s birth speaks to his tendency to blame his actions on his own birth or childhood. After committing a bad act, Pechorin habitually says, “I am stupidly made.” He knows that he repeatedly makes others unhappy, and he says, “Whether it is my upbringing that made me thus or whether God created me so, I don’t know.” He never entertains the idea that he may actually control his own actions, and instead, he employs predestination, fate and ill birth as explanations for his flaws.

The question of who is to blame for Pechorin’s actions appears once again in the novel’s last chapter, aptly entitled “The Fatalist.” Lermontov does not provide a distinctive answer to the dilemma of predestination; instead he seems to invite the reader to judge for himself. The way one reads Pechorin’s character influences where he or she ultimately decides to place the blame, and Lermontov seems to encourage the unclear interplay between the way the reader understands Pechorin and the undefined locus of the novel’s blame.

What upon first glance may seem like a narrative non sequitur on Pechorin’s behalf turns out to be a digression that underscores two main themes in the novel, namely, Pechorin’s inability to accept stability and his tendency to attribute his flaws to fate. In the “Author’s Introduction,” Lermontov suggests that there exists in each of us a little bit of Pechorin. He implores the reader to judge: are Pechorin’s desires for stormy relations and his inclination to place blame for his actions upon others not characteristics of all Russians, and indeed all people? It would seem that the answer is an emphatic yes.

Quotations from Hero of Our Time are from Vladimir Nabokov’s translation, published by Ardis in 2002.

Quotations from “The Sail” are from Irina Zheleznova’s translation, published in Mikhail Lermontov: Selected Works, Progress Publishers, 1976.