Volume 5, Number 3 · September 16, 1965
A Russian Romantic
By Helen Muchnic
A Lermontov Reader
edited and translated by Guy Daniels
Macmillan, 303 pp., $7.50
Russian literature, passing rapidly from Classicism to Realism, never had a romantic period comparable to those of France, England and Germany, but it has had its Romantic poets and the greatest of these is Lermontov. He was born in 1814, when Pushkin was fifteen years old, and he died in 1841, four years after Pushkin, and like him, killed in a duel. Fearless and outspoken, reckless and idealistic, he was always angry and he died young, which makes him understandable and appealing to our own tempestuous world. It is these qualities, certainly, that have attracted Mr. Daniels; and yet it is not bitterness and rebelliousness, but something else, that made him the poet he was: a feeling for the music of words, a sharp sense for the pictorial details of line, motion, and color, and an unsentimental capacity for introspection. He wrote some of the most melodious lyrics in the Russian language. Some of its most striking descriptions, and one of the world's finest psychological novels, A Hero of Our Time, by which he is almost exclusively known in the West. But he was also the author of a good deal of blatant rhetoric, passionate, unpolished verse, and several stilted, poorly constructed plays and melodramatic stories—inferior compositions, which he himself recognized as such and did not want to publish. Unlike Pushkin, he was not endowed with a perfect ear and an absolute sense of rightness, but he aimed at perfection and had he lived longer, would doubtless have established the canon of his work.
Review, 1461 words
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