Word: lermontovs
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...Mikhail Lermontov, the central character, is ten years younger than Pushkin and a great admirer of his. Like much but not all that is in the play, these facts correspond to historical reality. Both men are major figures in Russian literature and lived in the first part of the nineteenth century. The first part of the play shows Pushkin's involvement with the Decembrist uprising of 1825, an attempted revolution in which the intellectuals tried to gain more control by placing their own candidate for Czar on the throne rather than Nicholas I, and Lermontov's "radicalization" or at least...
...second part of the play is a masquerade, a play within a play, in which Lermontov, the young girl he wants to marry, the older woman who is his mistress, and her husband, become the characters of a story that Lermontov writes partly as an escape from his sorrow over Pushkin's death, which he attributes, with some justice, to the evil of the court. This story is taken from the novel by Lermontov from which the title of the play comes...
HOWEVER, at the point where the shift of action is potentially most confusing, where Lermontov transfers himself into Pechorin and begins the novel, the staging could have afforded to have been slightly more obvious. Lermontov could have directed the stage-hands in their placement of props, as he did somewhat in later scene changes, and in so doing more firmly and clearly establish his new position as the director of events and the master of fates. As it is, the realization of what Lermontov is about, and why it is so important to him, dawns upon you a little...
...when it finally does, the question that has been forming in your mind--why Shea decided to write about Lermontov and not Pushkin--begins to dissipate. Of course Lermontov is a tinhorn, a two-bit mock-up of Pushkin, a caricature of a radical artist who is grotesque rather than tragic (though, by some trick, he becomes almost tragic in the end). That is precisely the point; Pushkin was above revolution, though he was a friend of revolutionaries. He saw through it. Lermontov was beneath revolution; he was merely bored, dissatisfied with things the way they were for some vague...
...have no Pushkins. In fact, we have very few revolutionaries. What Harvard has succeeded in producing in amazing numbers is Lermontovs, tinhorns with bullhorns, revolutionaries for the hell of it, motivated not by issues (though social ills are as real now as they were in Imperial Russia) but by guilt and boredom. They should see this play; they should see Lermontov's affectations, his need to sidestep reality and play back events as he would rather have seen them, his relentless desire to make a martyr of himself. They should see--but only if they have the honesty...