ABSTRACT
Lermontov, the poet of a new generation, spoke to it with an authority allowed half grudgingly in Pushkin. The failure of the Decembrist conspiracy in 1825 bred a more explicit indignation, a heavier despair, than Pushkin had uttered; thinking men were more self-engrossed, at odds with society, bitter, impatient. Lermontov reflected this temper in his lyric poetry, which is often personal and accusing; but his work of profoundest effect was a prose novel, A Hero of Our Own Time. Like Pushkin, he fashions a prose responsive to many voices; and he achieves the same positive but impersonal style in his narrative. Tolstoy’s Cossacks and such impressions of military life as The Wood Cutters deepen and refine the renderings of it that Lermontov had already made. For the foreign reader at large he signifies less in his own right than as the precursor of Tolstoy-sensuous, keen-eyed and sympathetic towards the plain soldier.
