A Hero of Our Time

by Mikhail Lermontov

All was calm in heaven and on earth, calm as within the heart of a man at the moment of morning prayer;

A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become as children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.

in simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.

“Yes, sir, you can even grow accustomed to the whistling of a bullet, that is to say, accustomed to concealing the involuntary thumping of your heart.”

“Of course, if it comes to that, it is agreeable; but only just because the heart beats more violently.

The horses were exhausted; we were freezing; the snowstorm droned with ever-increasing violence, exactly like the storms of our own northern land, only its wild melodies were sadder and more melancholy. “O Exile,” I thought, “thou art weeping for thy wide, free steppes! There mayest thou unfold thy cold wings, but here thou art stifled and confined, like an eagle beating his wings, with a shriek, against the grating of his iron cage!”

LISTEN, Maksim Maksimych,’ said Pechorin. ‘Mine is an unfortunate disposition; whether it is the result of my upbringing or whether it is innate—I know not. I only know this, that if I am the cause of unhappiness in others I myself am no less unhappy.

I began to read, to study—but sciences also became utterly wearisome to me. I saw that neither fame nor happiness depends on them in the least, because the happiest people are the uneducated, and fame is good fortune, to attain which you have only to be smart.

Whether I am a fool or a villain I know not; but this is certain, I am also most deserving of pity—perhaps more than she. My soul has been spoiled by the world, my imagination is unquiet, my heart insatiate. To me everything is of little moment. I become as easily accustomed to grief as to joy, and my life grows emptier day by day. One expedient only is left to me—travel.

I replied that there were a good many people who used the same sort of language, that, probably, there might even be some who spoke in all sincerity; that disillusionment, moreover, like all other vogues, having had its beginning in the higher strata of society, had descended to the lower, where it was being worn threadbare, and that, now, those who were really and truly bored strove to conceal their misfortune as if it were a vice.

The latter was drunk, but he came, examined the wound, and announced that she could not live more than a day. He was mistaken, though.” “She recovered?” I asked the staff-captain, seizing him by the arm, and involuntarily rejoicing. “No,” he replied, “but the doctor was so far mistaken that she lived two days longer.”

In the first place, they never laughed when he laughed. Have you not happened, yourself, to notice the same peculiarity in certain people?... It is a sign either of an evil disposition or of deep and constant grief.

Sad it is to see when a young man loses his best hopes and dreams, when from before his eyes is withdrawn the rose-hued veil through which he has looked upon the deeds and feelings of mankind; although there is the hope that the old illusions will be replaced by new ones, none the less evanescent, but, on the other hand, none the less sweet.

Do what you will, the heart hardens and the soul shrinks in upon itself.

The history of a man’s soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egoistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment.

We almost always excuse that which we understand.

I confess that I have a violent prejudice against all blind, one-eyed, deaf, dumb, legless, armless, hunchbacked, and such-like people. I have observed that there is always a certain strange connection between a man’s exterior and his soul; as, if when the body loses a limb, the soul also loses some power of feeling.

Breeding in women, as in horses, is a great thing: a discovery, the credit of which belongs to young France. It—that is to say, breeding, not young France—is chiefly to be detected in the gait, in the hands and feet; the nose, in particular, is of the greatest significance. In Russia a straight nose is rarer than a small foot.

“Well, what then? Where things won’t be better, they will be worse; and from bad to good again is not far.”

But, on the other hand, what strength of will was lent them by the conviction that the entire heavens, with their innumerable habitants, were looking at them with a sympathy, unalterable, though mute!... And we, their miserable descendants, roaming over the earth, without faith, without pride, without enjoyment, and without terror—except that involuntary awe which makes the heart shrink at the thought of the inevitable end—we are no longer capable of great sacrifices, either for the good of mankind or even for our own happiness, because we know the impossibility of such happiness; and, just as our ancestors used to fling themselves from one delusion to another, we pass indifferently from doubt to doubt, without possessing, as they did, either hope or even that vague though, at the same time, keen enjoyment which the soul encounters at every struggle with mankind or with destiny.

In my early youth I was a dreamer; I loved to hug to my bosom the images—now gloomy, now rainbowhued—which my restless and eager imagination drew for me. And what is there left to me of all these? Only such weariness as might be felt after a battle by night with a phantom—only a confused memory full of regrets. In that vain contest I have exhausted the warmth of soul and firmness of will indispensable to an active life. I have entered upon that life after having already lived through it in thought, and it has become wearisome and nauseous to me, as the reading of a bad imitation of a book is to one who has long been familiar with the original.

I have made it a rule not to reject anything decisively and not to trust anything blindly, I cast metaphysics aside and began to look at what was beneath my feet.

And how often is a deception of the senses or an error of the reason accepted as a conviction!... I prefer to doubt everything. Such a disposition is no bar to decision of character; on the contrary, so far as I am concerned, I always advance more boldly when I do not know what is awaiting me. You see, nothing can happen worse than death—and from death there is no escape.

Blithe is life in such a land! A feeling akin to rapture is diffused through all my veins. The air is pure and fresh, like the kiss of a child; the sun is bright, the sky is blue—what more could one possibly wish for? What need, in such a place as this, of passions, desires, regrets?

I was lying, but I wanted to exasperate him. I have an innate passion for contradiction—my whole life has been nothing but a series of melancholy and vain contradictions of heart or reason.

We must give women their due: they possess an instinct for spiritual beauty, for which reason, possibly, men such as Werner love women so passionately.

Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although frequently neither acknowledges the fact to himself.

Oh, vanity! Thou art the lever with which Archimedes was to lift the earthly sphere!...

“Perhaps,” I reflected, “it is for that very reason that you have loved me; joys are forgotten, but sorrows never”...

Amusing!... Yes, I have already passed that period of spiritual life when happiness alone is sought, when the heart feels the urgent necessity of violently and passionately loving somebody. Now my only wish is to be loved, and that by very few. I even think that I would be content with one constant attachment. A wretched habit of the heart!...

Whatever griefs oppress my heart, whatever disquietudes torture my thoughts—all are dispersed in a moment; my soul becomes at ease; the fatigue of the body vanquishes the disturbance of the mind.

Women! Women! Who can understand them? Their smiles contradict their glances, their words promise and allure, but the tone of their voice repels... At one time they grasp and divine in a moment our most secret thoughts, at another they cannot understand the clearest hints...

However, there is no such difficulty in this case! Consequently, my present feeling is not that restless craving for love which torments us in the early days of our youth, flinging us from one woman to another until we find one who cannot endure us. And then begins our constancy—that sincere, unending passion which may be expressed mathematically by a line falling from a point into space—the secret of that endlessness lying only in the impossibility of attaining the aim, that is to say, the end.

Or, is it the result of that ugly, but invincible, feeling which causes us to destroy the sweet illusions of our neighbour in order to have the petty satisfaction of saying to him, when, in despair, he asks what he is to believe: “My friend, the same thing happened to me, and you see, nevertheless, that I dine, sup, and sleep very peacefully, and I shall, I hope, know how to die without tears and lamentations.”

Were I to consider myself the best, the most powerful man in the world, I should be happy; were all to love me, I should find within me inexhaustible springs of love. Evil begets evil; the first suffering gives us the conception of the satisfaction of torturing another. The idea of evil cannot enter the mind without arousing a desire to put it actually into practice. “Ideas are organic entities,” someone has said. The very fact of their birth endows them with form, and that form is action. He in whose brain the most ideas are born accomplishes the most. From that cause a genius, chained to an official desk, must die or go mad, just as it often happens that a man of powerful constitution, and at the same time of sedentary life and simple habits, dies of an apoplectic stroke.

Passions are naught but ideas in their first development; they are an attribute of the youth of the heart, and foolish is he who thinks that he will be agitated by them all his life.

I was gloomy—other children merry and talkative; I felt myself higher than they—I was rated lower: I grew envious. I was prepared to love the whole world—no one understood me: I learned to hate. My colourless youth flowed by in conflict with myself and the world; fearing ridicule, I buried my best feelings in the depths of my heart, and there they died. I spoke the truth—I was not believed: I began to deceive.

Having acquired a thorough knowledge of the world and the springs of society, I grew skilled in the science of life; and I saw how others without skill were happy, enjoying gratuitously the advantages which I so unweariedly sought. Then despair was born within my breast—not that despair which is cured at the muzzle of a pistol, but the cold, powerless despair concealed beneath the mask of amiability and a good-natured smile. I became a moral cripple. One half of my soul ceased to exist; it dried up, evaporated, died, and I cut it off and cast it from me. The other half moved and lived—at the service of all; but it remained unobserved, because no one knew that the half which had perished had ever existed.

A muslin sleeve is a weak protection, and an electric spark was running from my arm to hers. Almost all passions have their beginning in that way, and frequently we are very much deceived in thinking that a woman loves us for our moral and physical merits; of course, these prepare and predispose the heart for the reception of the holy flame, but for all that it is the first touch that decides the matter.

“Can it be possible,” I thought, “that my sole mission on earth is to destroy the hopes of others?

That was a blow which Grushnitski could not bear: like all boys, he has pretensions to being an old man; he thinks that the deep traces of passions upon his countenance take the place of the lines scored by Time.

“Why did you hope? To desire and to strive after something—that I can understand! But who ever hopes?”

I am very glad; I love enemies, though not in the Christian sense. They amuse me, stir my blood. To be always on one’s guard, to catch every glance, the meaning of every word, to guess intentions, to crush conspiracies, to pretend to be deceived and suddenly with one blow to overthrow the whole immense and laboriously constructed edifice of cunning and design—that is what I call life.

Love is like fire—if not fed it dies out. Perchance, jealousy will accomplish what my entreaties have failed to do.

There is nothing more paradoxical than the female mind; it is difficult to convince a woman of anything; they have to be led into convincing themselves. The order of the proofs by which they demolish their prejudices is most original; to learn their dialectic it is necessary to overthrow in your own mind every scholastic rule of logic.

Ever since poets have written and women have read them (for which the poets should be most deeply grateful) women have been called angels so many times that, in very truth, in their simplicity of soul, they have believed the compliment, forgetting that, for money, the same poets have glorified Nero as a demigod...

“A mind which coldly hath observed, A heart which bears the stamp of woe.”

“So soon as you approach,” he said, “from all directions terrors, such as I pray Heaven may preserve us from, will take wing at you: duty, pride, decorum, public opinion, ridicule, contempt... You must simply go straight on without looking at them; gradually the monsters disappear, and, before you, opens a bright and quiet glade, in the midst of which blooms the green myrtle. On the other hand, woe to you if, at the first steps, your heart trembles and you turn back!”

I SOMETIMES despise myself... Is not that the reason why I despise others also?... I have grown incapable of noble impulses; I am afraid of appearing ridiculous to myself.

Well? If I must die, I must! The loss to the world will not be great; and I myself am already downright weary of everything. I am like a guest at a ball, who yawns but does not go home to bed, simply because his carriage has not come for him. But now the carriage is here... Good-bye!...