Consider the peculiarities of the narrative structure of Geroi nashego vremeni and its significance for the readers understanding of the protagonist.
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Consider the peculiarities of the narrative structure of Geroi nashego vremeni and its significance for the reader’s understanding of the protagonist.
Lermontov’s ‘novel’, a cycle of short stories amounting to the portrait of Pechorin, a man supposedly representative of his Zeitgeist, is notable for the central role its narrative structure plays in the reader’s apprehension of its main character. The breaking up of the novel into short stories allows Lermontov to exploit elements of different genres to expose the inadequacies of any of these in realising the character fully psychologically. The narrative perspectives of first the travel writer, then Maksim Maksimych, then Pechorin himself are employed to posit the reader at various ‘distances’ from Pechorin; the demands and constraints of genre and social perspective create contradictions which reflect the contradictions of the protagonist, and the splicing of events perspectivally and chronologically allows the expression of the juxtapositions within Pechorin’s character even as, in combining realism with romanticism and psychology with parody, it replicates those juxtapositions across thematic and intentional levels.
As Bagby argues, the portrait of Pechorin is not simply ‘a’ result of the novel, but the “the novel’s constructive principle”, and this means that the narrative structure itself must have an effect on how we evaluate that portrait, and, one would hope, would have been intended as such as well. It will be argued here that the siuzhet of the novel has its effect in two main ways: through the use of narrative voice and through the non-chronological order that allows contrasts to be drawn more easily.
The book begins with the travel-writer, who retells the story told to him by Maksim Maksimych. His narrative pretensions and intentions are obvious both implicitly, in the strict adherence of the opening paragraphs to travelogue genre cliché, and explicitly, in the narrator’s admissions that he sought to obtain a certain kind of story – the kind suitable for the writings of a traveller and with all the exotic Caucasian elements that were popular at the time – from Maksim Maksimych: “I wanted terribly to extract some little story from him – a desire characteristic of all those who travel and write.” Maksim Maksimych’s narrative perspective – his expectations and evaluations of the type and significance of the story he has to tell – are clearly opposed to the travel writer’s, however. It is at the very beginning, then, we find our first tension and the first illustration of narrative conflict. Maksim Maksimych’s perspective, too, and the extent to which we can use it to come to an adequate understanding of Pechorin, is thrown into question in turn, as in the next story, Maksim Maksimych, the eponymous character seems to misjudge him entirely. The travel-writer becomes the unfiltered narrator, although he continues to couch his account with his literary aims and pseudo-detached, inadequate standpoint; but Maksim’s reliability collapses. His unfettered joy at the prospect of seeing Pechorin again contrasts horribly with Pechorin’s utter indifference in return; his callous attitude does not chime with Maksim’s characterisation of their relationship thus: “[we] were once the best of friends”. When Pechorin does not bother to come immediately to see him Maksim becomes equally as upset as he was once joyful, and the travel writer observes that “an hour ago he had been sure that Pechorin would come running at the mention of his name”. The reader is thus left with a problem: all the beliefs that have hitherto been collecting about Pechorin derive from now very obviously fractured and discredited perspectives; the cliché of strict genre writing wrapped up the sentimentalism of one-sided friendship also, perhaps, depicted in Princess Mary (with Pechorin’s use of Grushnitsky). Indeed, one may argue that Maksim’s simplicity is simply absolutely inadequate for articulating and relaying the complexities of a psychologically complete person – not that Maksim is psychologically incomplete – his reaction, evaluation of Pechorin upon his departure here amounts to a series of platitudes about the nature of friendship, fate and such: “Yes, I always knew he was a fickle friend, on whom you couldn’t depend... And really, it’s a shame, he shall come to a bad end... there’s no escaping it!” This utterance itself, however, anticipates Pechorin’s own later ruminations on fate during Princess Mary and The Fatalist, and thus Maksim himself provides a counterpoint of honest simplicity for Pechorin’s ‘staged’ and paradoxically revealing complexity (in, for example, his ‘confession’ to Mary).
