While Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s debt to writers such as Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol has
been well studied, his complex attitude toward Mikhail Lermontov has received
much less attention. For much of his
life, Dostoevsky viewed Lermontov with a certain degree of mistrustful
appreciation. He admired the writer’s
talents (particularly in poetry), but he was put off by what he saw as a streak
of nastiness he instilled in his character Grigory Pechorin from A Hero of
Our Time (1841), as well as the fawning imitation this figure inspired in
Russian society after publication of the novel.
Although one can find scattered references to Lermontov in Dostoevsky’s
work, it is in his Notes from the Underground (1864) that Dostoevsky
created his most fascinating engagement with the Pechorin prototype, albeit in
a subtle, almost hidden fashion. Once we
become aware of the Pechorin subtext, however, we may be surprised by the
extent to which it suffuses the entire portrait of Dostoevsky’s famous
narrator-protagonist. Over the course of
the novel, and particularly in its second half, Dostoevsky showed how his
tortured protagonist of the 1860s would emulate (consciously or unconsciously),
and then fail at the very activities in which his 1840s predecessor had such
memorable (if lamentable) success. These
episodes range from the character’s self-conscious relationships with a single
friend and multiple adversaries to his conflicted and cruel treatment of a
trusting woman. Through his use of the pervasive Pechorin echoes, Dostoevsky
strove to debunk the previous generation’s intense (and misguided, in
Dostoevsky’s view) fascination with Romantic hero archetype popularized by Lord
Byron and embodied in the figure of Grigory Pechorin. In this fashion
Dostoevsky remade one of the most distinctive heroes in Russian literature into
a scandalous anti-hero.
