This volume contains four things connected with a poem called Valerik.
It reproduces Lermontov's own watercolour, "The Battle at Valerik". It reproduces a second drawing by him, of an episode in the fighting. It reproduces a pencil portrait of Lermontov made from life in a tent by Count Palen, immediately after the battle — "perhaps his best portrait", the caption says. And it reproduces a photograph of the autograph manuscript of the poem in the poet's hand.
It does not contain the poem.
Valerik is not in the contents and not in the text. The only part of it that reaches the reader is six lines quoted inside the foreword — a foreword which says of those lines that they contain "more than a condemnation of war", that "Tolstoy's War and Peace stemmed from these words", and that the question they ask is, alongside Pushkin's legacy, the whole of what Lermontov left to Russian literature.
We have begun here because it is the plainest example this series has found of an apparatus pointing at something it has decided not to give you.
Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) was killed in a duel at Pyatigorsk at twenty-six. This Selected Works was issued by Progress in the Russian Classics Series, first printed in 1976 and reprinted in 1978. It carries his 1837 watercolour self-portrait, with a caption noting that until 1962 it was in a private collection and known only from copies.
The book is generous: a large selection of the lyric poetry, the narrative poems The Demon and Mtsyri, and the whole of A Hero of Our Time. The verse is translated poem by poem, chiefly by Avril Pyman and Irina Zheleznova, with the translator named under each title — a courtesy this series rarely extends. Pyman is worth knowing about: a British scholar of Russian symbolism and the biographer of Blok, who spent much of her working life in and around Russia. Her Lermontov is plain and unfussy and does not try to out-sing him.
The foreword, some four thousand words, is by Sergei Narovchatov — himself a poet, and at the time of this printing the editor of Novy Mir. It is translated by Pyman as well.
Narovchatov is candid about the politics of Lermontov's life in a way that should be said before anything critical.
He states that after "On the Death of the Poet" — the poem on Pushkin's killing that made Lermontov famous overnight and got him arrested — the Tsar's view was fixed:
For Nicholas I, however, Lermontov was a dangerous man better kept away from the capital. This time he was transferred to an infantry regiment almost permanently engaged on active service in the Caucasus. Lermontov immediately gained a reputation for reckless courage in the eyes of his fellow officers, but, in the Tsar's eyes, he remained a rebellious free-thinker who was in no case to be encouraged by promotion, decorations or leave.
That is accurate and unsentimental. A poet was posted to the most dangerous front available in the hope that it would solve him, was recommended for decorations by his commanders, and was refused them by the Tsar. Narovchatov says so.
He is also right about Valerik, and generous about it. Having quoted the closing lines — in Pyman's version —
"And with a secret, heartfelt sadness I thought: 'How pitiable is man, What does he lack! ... Clear shines the sky, Beneath the sky there's room to spare for All men. And yet unceasingly He wages fruitless war — why? Wherefore?'"
— he writes:
The great, eternal question Lermontov puts here contains more than a condemnation of war — it is a condemnation of all enmity among men.... Tolstoy's War and Peace stemmed from these words and it was not fortuitous that when he spoke of this question of Lermontov's he claimed that the whole 19th century had failed to solve it. The power of this "wherefore?" passed into Russian literature as a whole, into Russian thought. And if we speak of the Lermontov heritage alongside the Pushkin heritage in Russian literature, it lies precisely in this great "wherefore?"
That is real criticism, and it is not the language of a man discharging an obligation. Narovchatov believes it.
Which makes the omission stranger rather than more sinister, and we should be careful about the difference.
We do not know why Valerik is not in this book, and we are not going to pretend we do.
There are innocent explanations. It is a long narrative epistle in a conversational metre, the hardest kind of Russian verse to bring into English, and a selection has to stop somewhere. The volume is already carrying The Demon, Mtsyri and a full novel. No editor is obliged to print everything.
But an editor who prints the poet's painting of the battle, the poet's sketch of the fighting, the portrait drawn in the tent afterwards, and a photograph of the manuscript — while leaving out the text — has made a series of decisions that point in one direction and then stop. The reader is shown the poem as an object four times and never allowed to read it.
And there is a second absence that makes the first one harder to shrug off. In four thousand words about a poet who spent his adult life in Russia's war in the Caucasus and died there, Narovchatov's foreword mentions the Caucasus five times, exile four times, the duel three times — and the word mountaineer not once. Nor conquest, nor colonial, nor Shamil, the imam who led the resistance for a quarter of a century and whose war this was.
The Caucasus in this foreword is a landscape, a punishment posting and a place where a poet was in danger. It is not a country with people in it who were being conquered. And Valerik is precisely the poem in which those people appear — as men Lermontov's own company killed in a gully that, as he wrote in a letter reproduced in this very volume's captions, "smelt of blood for an hour after".
Before pressing the point about Valerik, fairness requires the opposite observation, and it is a strong one.
This book prints "On the Death of the Poet" in full — the poem Lermontov wrote in 1837 when Pushkin was killed, and the one that ended his career as a hussar of the Guard. It opens on Pushkin dead:
The poet is no more! He's fallen A slave to honour — Lead in his chest, for vengeance calling, The proud head bowed at last — he died!...
It turns on the society that let it happen — "Yet — are you blameless, you who banned / His free, brave talent out of spite" — and on d'Anthès, dismissed in four contemptuous lines as "this common émigré, / This fortune hunter, this upstart careerist, / This poor blind tool of destiny".
And then the sixteen lines Lermontov added afterwards, which were passed hand to hand in Petersburg, reached the Tsar, and got him arrested and posted to the Caucasus:
Who throng the throne, alert for gain — and gory As executioners who cloak their vile intent In robes of justice — so to slaughter Glory, Freedom and Genius, seeming innocent! But there's God's judgement, which fears not to wait; A dreadful Judgement that's not bought nor sold.... Nor all your black blood serve to wash away The poet's righteous blood.
A Progress edition of 1976 prints, without apology or hedging, a poem accusing the courtiers around the throne of being executioners in judges' robes and promising that their black blood will not wash out a poet's. Whatever this volume is, it is not squeamish about attacks on autocracy.
That is exactly why the missing poem is worth remarking on. The absence is not a general timidity about Lermontov's politics; the volume is bold about those. It is specific. The verse that indicts the court is here in full. The verse that asks what a Russian soldier is doing in a Chechen gully is represented by a photograph of its manuscript.
The volume also carries Mtsyri, and it belongs in the same argument.
Its epigraph is from the First Book of Kings: "I did but taste a little honey, and, lo, I must die."
It opens on a ruined monastery in Georgia, and then does something worth stopping over. Lermontov gives the annexation of Georgia in the official register — a Georgian tsar who "did of Russia gain / The patronage o'er his domain", after which
'Twas then God's love descended on The land, and Georgia bloomed, and gone Her old fears were and old suspense: Of friendly bayonets a fence Did, bristling, rise in her defence.
Friendly bayonets. And then, without a paragraph's pause, in the very next sentence:
A Russian General on his Way one day was, bound for Tiflis, A captive bearing there, a child
The imperial formula and the thing it produces, set one against the other in consecutive lines, with no comment between them. A child is taken prisoner by a Russian general, falls ill on the journey, and is left at the monastery, where he is raised as a monk. On the eve of taking his vows he escapes, spends three days trying to find the way back to his own country, fights a leopard, gets lost, and is found dying within sight of the monastery he fled. His last request is to be carried out into the garden where he can see the Caucasus.
It is one of the most beautiful narrative poems in Russian and it is, plainly, about what conquest does to a child: raised kindly by people who took him, unable either to belong to them or to find his way back. Lermontov wrote it in 1839, between postings to the war.
Narovchatov's foreword mentions it — he notes that Lermontov "completed and rewrote Mtsyri and The Demon, both begun almost in boyhood" — and treats it as a work of Romantic aspiration, which it also is. The captured child is not discussed as a captured child.
None of this should suggest the book conceals the colonial relation. It does not. It simply does not discuss it, while printing a novel in which it is the entire plot.
A Hero of Our Time opens with "Bela", and the mechanism of that story is a transaction. Azamat, a chieftain's son, wants Kazbich's horse, and offers what he has:
"'Listen!' said Azamat, his voice firm now. 'You see I am ready to do anything. I could steal my sister for you if you want. How she can dance and sing! ... If you want her, wait for me tomorrow night in the gorge where the stream flows; I shall go by with her on the way to the next village — and she'll be yours. Isn't Bela worth your steed?'"
Kazbich answers with a song about the relative worth of wives and horses:
"Wives by the dozen are purchased with gold, A mettlesome steed is worth riches untold"
And then Pechorin — the Russian officer, the hero of the title — overhears, and arranges the trade for himself. He gets the girl. He keeps her in a Russian fort. He wins her, tires of her within weeks, and she is killed by Kazbich in revenge for the horse.
Lermontov does not editorialise and does not need to. A bored Russian officer on garrison duty acquires a Circassian girl through a theft he has organised, and she dies of it. That is the war in a single novella, told by a serving officer of the occupying army, and it is the most unsparing thing written about Russian rule in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century.
The foreword discusses "Bela" as a study in Pechorin's psychology. So it is. It is also the other thing, and the reader will notice.
The rest of A Hero of Our Time is the anatomy of a man with great powers and nothing to spend them on — the type Russian criticism christened the superfluous man, and the direct ancestor of Turgenev's Rudin and Bazarov, both of whom appear elsewhere in this series.
Pechorin is not likeable and is not meant to be. He ruins people out of curiosity, records the ruin in a journal, and analyses himself with a precision that never once modifies his behaviour. Lermontov wrote a preface to the novel's second edition, after the first had been attacked, insisting that Pechorin was a composite of his generation's vices rather than a self-portrait. Readers disbelieved him then and have gone on disbelieving him since.
That preface is not in this volume either. It is a small omission beside the missing poem, but it points the same way: the piece of apparatus in which the author explains himself, and defends a hostile portrait of his own class and generation, has been left out, while a foreword explaining him to us has been put in. A reader who wants Lermontov's own account of what he thought he was doing will have to go elsewhere for it.
For our purposes the interest is structural. Pechorin has energy, intelligence, courage and no object. He is a man of the 1830s: after the Decembrists were hanged and exiled, before anything replaced them. Put him beside Bazarov, who had a philosophy and no movement, and you have the two halves of the same Russian problem thirty years apart — the first with nothing to think and the second with nothing to do.
The great "wherefore?", and the novel that earns it.
Read A Hero of Our Time for Bela and for the duel in "Princess Mary", which is the best-written duel in Russian literature and was rehearsed, five years early, for the author's own. Read the lyrics for "The Sail" and "My Native Land". Read Mtsyri for a boy who escapes a monastery to find his own people and cannot.
And when you reach the foreword's six lines of Valerik, note that you are holding a book which shows you the poet's painting of that battle and the manuscript of the poem, and stops. Then find the poem elsewhere — it is not hard to find — and read it whole. It asks the question this volume's own foreword says is Lermontov's entire bequest to Russian thought, and it asks it about a specific war, fought by the man holding the pen, against people whose names the foreword does not print.