Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
| Format | US | UK |
|---|
In A Hero of Our Time, I think Lermontov is expressing the rage and boredom of young people of his generation with the stultifying atmosphere of bureaucracy and control in Russia at the time. Tsar Nikolai completely missed the point and thought that the rather boring stooge Maxim Maximych was the hero of our time and not Pechorin.
The Russian experience of the Caucasus is clearly central to books on the region. Your next choice is Nabokov’s translation of A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov.
Lermontov wrote this novella directly after the unsuccessful Decembrist revolt against Tsar Nikolai I in 1825 which led to savage repression and resentment amongst young members of the intelligentsia who lost the ability to express themselves in any way. Many troublesome young intellectuals were punished by being sent to the Caucasus, which turned out to be a much freer environment for writers. Having offended the Tsar with his poem ‘On the Death of a Poet’, which was seen as an attack on Russian society, accusing it of being complicit in Pushkin’s death, Lermontov was himself sent to the Caucasus in 1837.
In A Hero of Our Time, I think Lermontov is expressing the rage and boredom of young people of his generation with the stultifying atmosphere of bureaucracy and control in Russia at the time. Parallels have been drawn between Lermontov and Pechorin but I think we can see Pechorin as more of an everyman for his generation. Tsar Nikolai completely missed the point and thought that the rather boring stooge Maxim Maximych was the hero of our time and not Pechorin. It’s a short book and is structurally very interesting, and I really recommend the Nabokov translation.
Read full interview
Oliver Bullough is Caucasus editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and former Reuters correspondent in Moscow. His book Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus is published by Allen Lane. He talks about the brutal oppression of the Circassians under the Tsars and says they pretty much vanished after the Russian invasion of the 1860s. The Russians gave them a choice to move north of the mountains and settle as peasants under Russian law or leave. I think they were quite surprised when a million or so Circassians chose to leave, but about a third of this group died in the course of the exodus. These events have since been recognised to be the first genocide of the modern age and I think the parallels with the Armenian genocide of 50 years later are clear.
