“A hero of our time” by Lermontov


This book is about beautiful women and how to seduce them.

I know, that “A Hero of our Time”, Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov’s masterpiece is lauded as a major milestone in Russian literary development and that Lermontov is credited of making a bridge between the neoclassical and Romantic literature, that he accurately painted the “superfluous generation” and that he, as a pioneer, tentatively tried his hand at the psychological development of characters.

All true, but still for me, “A Hero of our Time” written in 1840, is a soldiers boasting yarn of how to seduce women. More than that, with the hero, Pechorin, being a Russian variant of the Byron-esque hero and a “Front-schwein” (an officer luckily), don’t expect too much nice subtleties, romantic frivolities or “happily – ever –after” scenes:



"Mon Chèr, je méprise les femmes pour ne pas les aimer car autrement la vie serait un mélodrame trop ridicule"

To cause another person suffering or joy, isn't that the sweetest food of our pride?

Pechorin is very much the fictional alter ego of the writer Lermontov. He too comes from a wealthy Petersburg family and is a trained army officer in the Russian army. He too, just like Lermontov, is sent away to the southern provinces of Russia, in the Caucasus to help subduing the locals.

Back in the 1840’s, the area of Dagestan and neighbouring Chechnya is as much the ass-hole of mother Russia as it is today. But the region is strategically so important and crammed with oil, that the Russian empire must keep a hold on it. The local warlords, with the exception of the collaborating “Princes” want to get the army of the Czar out. Yes, right, just like today!

Still, the dramatic settings of the mountain ranges of the Caucasus must be splendid. Lermontov’s descriptions show the awe, the isolated visitors must have felt when travelling trough that splendid mountain range, its dramatic backdrops and its sublime vistas. It brings to mind the beauty of that other region of eternal conflict, Afghanistan, described by (the other) Byron, Chatwin and why not Michener.

The impressive mountain range and the contact with the threatening locals does two things: it highlights the loneliness of the hero but also splits the hero in two and forces him into introspection.

The “hero” of the title is obviously used in an ironic way. Pechorin has all it takes to be a hero, but according to Lermontov, he, like many other young man of his generation is not given the space, the opportunity for great deeds.

Apart from the occasional skirmishes with the local guerrilla mobs a.k.a. freedom fighters, Pechorin is wasting away his youthful manhood in the emptiness of Dagestan. What distractions are available to our young officer in the wasteland of Dagestan? Hunt wild boars? Drink? Write Poetry? Play cards or gamble? All that, yes but there is of course also the chasing after the occasional girls! And “Girls” is what this book is all about.

Like the four Queens in the Whist card games these officers occasionally play, Lermontov describes four women in the different chapters of his book, each representing another kind of beauty. There is to start with exotic beautiful Bela, daughter of a Dagestan “ Prince”, followed by the mysterious – femme fatale – the Russalka from Taman. There is “Princess Mary”, a Russian Socialite lost in a Spa –town in the Caucasian Mountains and last but not least, there is the faithful Vera.

Lermontov presents these four women in four “cas de figures”, four examples of encounters with women and frames these stories between two short anecdotes where the universal laws steering live and love are briefly developed: the role of destiny, “la fatalité” and the temporality of our feelings.

Pechorin, in the beginning of the story, remembers an old woman, who when he was a child, told his fortune. She predicted that he would die at the hands of an evil woman.

But who is that “femme fatale”? And which one is the Queen of Hearts?

1) Bela: going native

Bela, the sixteen year old beautiful daughter of an Islamic Dagestan “ Prince “is abducted on Pechorin’s request, exchanged against a stolen horse, delivered hand and feet bound, head shrouded in a veil, locked up like a wild animal and then literally tamed with food and gifts.

The taming takes time and Pechorin is warned:

You don’t know Circassian girls…They are not at all like Georgian girls, or the Tartar girls from beyond the Caucasus-not at all. They have their own rules. They are brought up otherwise.

Beautiful Bela will only give in, when the “Hero” threatens to abandon her and to return her to her destroyed family (father killed, brother gone) that her abduction initially caused.

Rape does not always imply physical violence.

Pechorin is attracted by her beauty but is not really bewitched by her. Being a slav himself, he seems to be immune to that disturbing magic emanating from her eyes ( black eyes like a hill chamois, that cast a look straight into your soul ). Hundred years later, this beautiful asian girl, will turn into a literary archtype and prefigure that Slavic femme fatale which will so bother Western- European modernist, writers like Eliot, Yeats and Hesse. I see Bela as the precursor of Mann’s Clavdia Chauchat with those haunting “Kirghiz eyes” and those strong cheekbones which gives her her “wolf – like”features. Incidently Thomas Mann too, influenced by Lermontov, made her come from Dagestan and Chauchat does not only mean “hot pussy” but also hints to vague Caucasian origins.

The affair started dramatically and thus should end dramatically. Once he had her, Pechorin, gets less and less interested in Bela who withers away alone, secluded. Pechorin is not their to defend her, when one roguish local tries to steal her. She is freed but fatally wounded.

Pechorin does nurse the girl while she is slowly and painfully dying but is absolutely silent afterwards.

One wonders what the piercing eyes of Bela uncovered in Pechorin’s soul.

2) The “Russalka” from Taman : going nowhere

If there is a “femme fatale” in Lermontov’s book, and that in a literally sense, it is the demonic water nymph Pechorin encounters in the seaside town of Taman. The mysterious eighteen-year-old girl actually tries to drown Pechorin for his efforts to make a pass at her.

Even tough Pechorin, does not find her a beauty, he is completely enraptured by her slightly loony appearance:

“ I have definitely never seen a girl like her. She was far from being a beauty, but then I have prejudices with regard to beauty too. There was a look of breeding to her… breeding in women, as in horses, is of great matter… “

He goes on:

“Her figure had an unusual suppleness to it, she had a particular inclination of the head; she had long light-brown hair, a sort of golden tint to the slightly sun-tanned skin on her neck and her shoulders, and an especially straight nose. All this enchanted me.”

And on:

“ I read something wild and suspicious in her oblique gaze, and there was something indeterminate in her smile but such is the strength of prejudice: her straight nose had carried me from my senses. I imagined that I had found Goethe’s Mignon, the marvellous creation of his German imagination”

Pechorin is falling. And falling hard.

Pechorin has discovered that the girl participates in a smuggling operation with her friend, a Crimean Tatar, a boatman from Kerchi. One night, to submit her to his will, he threatens to divulge her secret operation to the authorities. The “Russalka” is not in the least impressed, but counterattacks with a kiss – a moist and fiery kiss- and lures un-expecting Pechorin into a boat. After disarming him in a hot embrace, she tries to push Pechorin (who cannot swim) out of the boat and into the dark waters. She nearly succeeds, but Pechorin in a last effort, escapes her deadly embrace and throws her into the water.

His last vision of her, when he gladly realizes she made it to the beach, sounds like the aftermath of a steaming love scene:

 (She was)… squeezing sea foam from her long hair. Her wet slip outlined her lithe figure and raised breasts.”

How is that for psychological development?

3) Princess Mary: going upwards

In the next chapter, we find Pechorin in the mountain spa resort of Pyatigorsk. The “haute bourgeoisie” and the aristocracy are flocking to the healing springs that erupt from the mountain. It is an ideal flirting ground and meeting place of the “mistresses of the water”. On his first walk, Pechorin meets an acquaintance, the twenty-year-old cadet Grushnitsky, who greets him like an old friend but of whom Pechorine feels “ that one day we shall bump into each other on a narrow road and it will end badly for one of us”.

Pechorin is here on familiar ground and he perfectly masters the wooing and seducing as it is played in the Caucasian Russophile “ high society”. ( It is the longest chapter )

Hanging around, he and Grushnitsky, soon enough see their next victim.

The second lady wore a high-necked dress in gris de perles, with a light silk fichu twisted around her lithe neck. Little boots du couleur puce were tightened at her ankle, and her lean little foot was so sweet that even those uninitiated into the secrets of beauty would unfailingly have exclaimed “ah” – even only in surprise. Her light but noble gait contained something virginal about it that escaped definition, but it was decipherable to the gaze. When she walked past us, an indescribable aroma wafted from her, the kind that emanates sometimes from the letter of a beloved lady.

Enters Mary, daughter of Princess Ligovsky

This Princess Mary is very pretty, I ( Pechorin ) said to him. “ She has such velvet eyes- yes, velvet…Her lower and upper eyelashes are so long that the rays of the sun don’t reflect in her pupils. I love eyes that have no reflection; they are so soft, it’s as though they stroke you…However, it seems that everything about her face is pretty… but now, are her teeth white ? This is very important!


“You speak about pretty ladies as though they’re English horses” said Grushnitsky with indignation.

Pechorin in his successful seduction of pretty Mary causes even more havoc, than with Bela. He upsets and humiliates the Ligovsky family and their entourage, and in a twisted return of fate, shoots young Grushnitsky in a dramatic duel scene.

4) Vera: going steady

During the Ligovsky episode, Pechorin meets his old lover Vera again. The attentive reader understands that here true love is at work. Pechorin could easily elope with her and find peace in his relationship with her.

Alas, Pechorin has the Princess’s daughter on his mind and when finally the world around him collapses after the tragic death of his opponent and he turns back to Vera, she has disappeared.
Married Vera has confessed her love for Pechorin to her husband and as she leaves, Pyatigorsk tries to catch her back. Unfortunately his exhausted horse collapses under him and Pechorin fails to retrieve the one genuine love of his heart.

And maybe for the sake of Vera and true Love it is better so.

So what about that “premonition”?

I don’t know if the insult, that was the cause of writer Lermontov’s duel with his opponent Martynov, was about an affair of the Heart, a beautiful but cruel girl, challenging two young men against each other, but I like to think so. Lermontov foreseeing his own death, through the eyes of his own creation, does it get any eerier than that?


illustration : Jean - Léon Gerome : Circassian woman

Kuchuk Hanem

( From Wikipedia )

Kuchuk Hanem was a famed beauty and Ghawazee dancer of Esna, mentioned in two unrelated nineteenth-century accounts of travel to Egypt, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert and the American adventurer George William Curtis.

Kuchuk Hanem became a key figure and symbol in Flaubert's Orientalist accounts of the East. The orientalist themes that pervade his work depended heavily on his experiences in Egypt and his likely sexual liaison with Kuchuk Hanem. Dancers in two of his novellas, Herodias and Temptation of Saint Anthony, evoke a woman dancer who performs scenes from Salome and the Queen of Sheba. Both of these dances were standards of the repertoire of dancers of this period, especially a dance step known as "the bee" or "the wasp," with the dancer standing musing in a pensive posture until a buzzing insect flies into her clothing and she "flees" in terror, dancing rapidly, and removing articles of clothing in the manner of a provocative strip-tease. Later, Kuchuk Hanem was the subject of a poem by Louis Bouilhet, inspired by Flaubert's accounts from letters. Louise Colet, a one time of mistress of Flaubert, is said to have sought out the aging dancer on a trip to Egypt at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal, in order to report back to Flaubert the ravages that time had wrought on the woman he so admired.
It seems certain that she was also an influence for George William Curtis, suggesting that she was one of the most sought-after entertainers in Upper Egypt during the colonial period. Comparisons of the two narratives demonstrate a house with a courtyard, a stairway in poor repair leading to an upper room furnished with two divans, a young female attendant named Zeneb, an old man playing a rebaba, and an old woman who kept time on the tar (a tambourine-like drum).
"Kuchuk hanem" is not a proper name at all: it actually means "little lady" in Turkish and might be a term of endearment applied to a child, a lover, or a famous dancer. It remains unclear if this was a name chosen by the woman to represent herself to the colonial tourists, or if this is a careless, shorthand name used by the writers to describe her. Regardless, the sensationalized, eroticized presence of Kuchuk Hanem within the literature of this period underscores early misrepresentations of nonwestern women in the imagination of the West.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee’s Booker – winning “Disgrace” is a fluently written novel, which a hasty reader can easily gobble up in less than one day. The content on the contrary will linger for days and keep one pondering over the tragedy that occurs to father and daughter Lurie on their isolated South African farm.
The horrible fait-divers which doubles –up as a political and moral allegory of the “situation” in South Africa emphasizes in the extreme the immense problems the young nation has to cope with in its post-apartheid decade.

As David Lurie akwardly tries to help his daughter Lucie to recuperate the shreds of her life after her traumatic experience, he says :

“.. it is time for you to face up your choices. Either you stay on in a house full of ugly memories and go on brooding on what had happened to you, or you put the whole episode behind you and start a new chapter elsewhere.Those, as I see it, are the alternatives”.

Coetzee, who had been at "the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement” made his choice, three years after the publication of “Disgrace” by effectively starting a new chapter in Adelaide, Australia. The reason he said at the time, was the South African lax attitude to crime. He inverted later his statement by saying that he did actually not flee his native country but fell in love with Australia.

I will not go in a detailed review, as there are excellent one's to be found on the net, but I will halt a moment at the situation and the position of the different characters at the end of the book. They could give an idea of Coetzee’s vision on what might happen in the near future. Obviously the white “ Patrias” David Lurie, representing the South Africa of white dominance has fallen in disgrace. He has abused his moral power in an affair with a student, taken responsibility for it, but failed to make a public apology and for that reason he has been sacked from his job as a university professor. He goes to stay with his daughter who has chosen for a “barren” lesbian relationship but now lives alone on a farm in the countryside. Lurie is not capable to protect his daughter when her farm is invaded and she is raped by three black punks. Petrus, a black neighbour farmer, symbol of a certain part of the native population who does try to build a decent future, knows the perpatrators of the crime – they are even family – but does not intervene, judge or even help. He does however claim to David Lurie, that he will protect his white neighbour, but together with the father, the reader doubts if his capable of doing it or even if he is sincere.

The child, Lucie is bearing from the rape, and which she decided to keep and love, will be a halfblood conceived in violence. Its future is doubtfull and it will probably neither be accepted by the white nor by the black community. But, most disturbing off all, is the presence of the vicious adolescent, who was one of the three thugs who attacked the Luries, and who under the protection of Petrus still roams around the house.

If Lucie stands for the situation of the young generation of whites in present South – Africa, their future looks really bleak.

Obviously Coetzee heeded his own warnings.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

The image of an Istanbul covered with snow has intrigued me since I read Orhan Pamuk's "My name is red"
On a trip to the city on the bosphorus, some weeks ago, I saw the fascinating pictures made by the celebrated Turkish cinematographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan. They capture well the setting of Pamuk's marvelous book. The visually haunting movies and photographs of Ceylan are well worth a look

Rites of passage by William Golding

“In the not too ample volume of man’s knowledge of Man, let this sentence be inserted: Men can die of shame.”


Edmund Talbot, an educated young man from the British upper class and the main narrator in Golding’s “Rites of Passage”, must have had Diderot’s famous opening lines from “le Fataliste” in mind, when scribbling on the virgin pages of his journal:

“The place: on board the ship at last. The year: you know it. The date ? Surely what matters is that it is the first day of my passage to the other side of the world…”

We are in the beginning of the 19th century. The Napoleonic wars are coming to an end and young Talbot has joined a heterogeneous crowd of émigrés on board of an old decommissioned warship, for a long voyage to Australia where he is up to become an important man in the administration.
Talbot has promised his Godfather and sponsor to keep a detailed journal and although he very consciously begins with a detailed narration of what happens around him, the gale that awaits them at the entrance of the Gulf of Biscay and the ensuing “mal de mer” rapidly mocks his good intentions. Edmund starts messing up the dates in his journal, totally loses his sense of time and awkwardly tries to maintain his aristocratic “aplomb” on the heaving and tilted deck awash with overcoming seas.

But he is not alone in his suffering. The uncomfortable progress of the ship beating its way through the storm mirrors the emotional upheaval of all Talbots co-passengers.
Through his observations, we recognize in Talbot the typical naïve, albeit engaging young man from a higher class, observing with a detached and aloof superiority the microcosm around him but at the same time totally estranged from reality, from all practical things and the normal ways of the world. For instance when he discovers the small stinking hutch in which he will have to live the next months, he insists to see the Captain to request a change of lodging. Of course the Captain has absolutely no time for him as the reader half expects.

Melvyn Bragg in Punch thought it Golding’s “most accessible’ novel since Lord of the Flies but it is much more than that. The “rites” first 100 pages are very entertaining indeed and at times surprisingly funny. Surprising, because wit and humor are not exactly the trade mark of our normally “glumly serious writer”

Rites of Passage, published in 1980 earned Golding his Booker prize, barely beating Anthony Burgess’s masterpiece “Earthly Powers”. One critic saw in it “the work of the master at the full stretch of his age and wisdom”. The 69 year old author was surfing on a wave of fame and recognition, which would cumulate three years later in the Nobel Prize.
Still, it took the seasoned writer quiet a lot of work to finish his book and it necessitated four full drafts before Golding finally consented to send it to Faber & Faber.
Edmund, our friendly narrator resembles those typical heroes of German “bildung romans”, not much different in his ways from Mann’s Hans Castorp or Goethe’s Wilhem Meister, young men about to experience such life-lessons as to bring them to a higher level of understanding of life and humans actions.

And so it is with Talbot.

Occurrences linked to the death of the reverend Colley, a fellow passenger, following “shameful actions” during the equator - crossing ritual, make up a horrific rite of passage which Talbot’s unconsciously passes.

Unconsciously, because Edmund, who is just lightly implicated in the affair leading to Colley’s mysterious “death of shame”, does feel responsible for not intervening into the chain of events but curiously misses to see the moral implications of the administrative cover – up requested by the Captain. Colley, to whom Talbot spoke only once, seemed to be on a lonely crusade to recover the respect from Captain Anderson and his officers. (He has been publicly humiliated in an incident on the afterdeck)

The moral responsibility, which Talbot will acquire from this “nasty” experience still has to sink in and he too after experiencing his “rite of passage” will carry his ”burden of shame”. Ironically, the alert reader can suspect that conspiring in this hypocritical attitude, to protect members of his social class, will give Talbot the moral edge to tackle the difficulties of his upcoming task as a higher civil servant.
For even if the “moral education” has to be understood in a “a contrario” sense, a “Bildung” – experience it certainly is.
Structurally complex, Rites of passage, is done very much “à la Golding”.

Narrated first through Edmund’s journal addressing a peripheral personage, then followed by Colley’s letter to his sister, rephrasing and inverting the pages of Talbot’s journal, shifting abruptly the narrative point of view, this complex structure brings the reader to a whole new level of understanding and a deeper insight in the occurrences of what was first described in Talbot’s journal.

This inverted perspective cleverly urges the reader to sit up and give attention.
The letter which ends at the Parson’s death is followed by an interrogation with which the reader tries, unsuccessfully, to fill up the blanks in the understanding of what has happened (actually it brings even more confusion). The interrogation is promptly closed, when the enquiry unexpectedly risks implicating some officers.
The book ends in some simmering gossip and a few afterthoughts trying to make sense of it all.
This structure of this progressive insight is very successful in giving the reader a deeper understanding of the unfolding truths.
Adding to the complexity, Golding spices his story with some loose ends, unexplained or half explained acts, conversations or personages. The mysterious purser, for instance, controlling his debtors from the heart of the ship does not belong to the story but adds to the general feeling that “things happen” in the shades of this old war ship.

There is in fact, an entire subculture on the ship -- the crew and "the emigrants" -- that the reader is barely exposed to, since neither Edmund nor Reverend Colley would mix with them. One exception is Wheeler, Talbot’s self appointed valet and provider of the soothing opium, who is murdered for unexplained reasons by unidentified fellow crewmen, officers or why not…passengers.
Not only is the structure of the book very much what we expect from Golding, but so are the themes which are, according to his biographer, James Carey, the one’s that most preoccupied him during his life.

A first theme is of course that of “Shame” and how it defines who we are.

How can the field of tension between our own perception of an experience and the perceived opinion of others about that same experience, lead not only to a feeling of shame but even to someone dying of shame? Golding shows us the complex mechanisms behind our behavior and emphasizes how human they are. Alas!

Obviously all characters living on the middle deck (and being of the middleclass) are carrying their “burden of shame” and their identity is largely defined by it. It is as if these middleclass passengers are hoping to leave their identities behind them in their voyage to a new world. They hide their humble origins, their immoral occupations, their childhood horrors, the fact that they need to work to make a living and that they sleep with each other. They hide their sexual preferences, their lost battle to alcohol and their vacillating faith in the Almighty.
Only Talbot, seems to carry a childish innocence at the beginning of the voyage. Still he has to go through his rite of passage and we suspect that he too, if he makes it to the antipodes, will have experienced things he regrets and feels ashamed of and that it could define part of his identity. I understand it as such: according to Golding, people are defined by what they do and what they don’t do. Shame or pride linger after the deeds have been internally analyzed and appreciated against the morality or expectations of one’s social class.
According to his biographer, Golding, remained "revoltingly" dependent on what people thought of him and his work. Through his life, the author was coping with a nasty inferiority complex and self-depreciating attitude.
We know that Golding’s early encounter with the academic establishment and the glass ceiling of the social classes left an indelible stain on his character. Maybe alcohol abuse, violence and flight were Golding’s only options to cope with his issues. Unfortunately after a brief spell of a liberating feeling, shame caught him back the next day like the backwash of a wave.
Carey, who had access to Golding most private notes like his dream diary points out that Golding had the occasional – innocent – homosexual fantasies, but that it bothered him and made him question his sexual nature. Much of what happens in the forecastle to the Parson and the ensuing sense of shame comes right from the desires or un-desires of Golding himself.
Another interesting theme is the analysis of responsibility in what happens to reverend Colley. Colley is an unattractive character. His over-eager attempts at friendship, his religious zeal and his personality turn him into an outcast from the moment he sets foot on deck.
For Talbot the parson is a bit like a stray dog. He pities him but the other hand he refrains to show him sympathy because he realizes that the parson, will stick to him like a drowning man pulling his rescuer down. And the parson is too vile a character to be associated with, taking into account the difference of social class.

The only one who could have saved the parson is Captain Anderson. But his despise of the robe in general and Colley in particular, sets an example to officers and crew alike and the reverend becomes a target for abuse. The Captain has the social status to reverse the flow of things but does not assume the responsibility which goes with it.

We are often not aware when having power over other persons (as teachers, managers, parents, role models), what damage we can do by uttering opinionated biased statements or acting in inconsiderate ways.
In the end, one image lingers. The image of a dead man, slowly sinking through that vast and uncaring void of liquid darkness, death because people with authority did not take their responsibility and others refrained from doing the right thing, hampered as they were by their social weakness and their self inflicted shame