Word: pushkins
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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...
...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...
...Hero" is Mikhail Lermontov, a literary contemporary of Pushkin who was much affected by Pushkin's life, his work, and particularly by the circumstances of the duel in which Pushkin is killed. The action of the play moves back and forth from Lermontov's own life and his more-or-less conscious attempts at emulating Pushkin to the life of Gregory Pechorin, Lermontov's idealized self and the protagonist of his novel, which bears the same title as the play...
...overcome the staging problems, Burt and Shea have come up with a number of tricks, some more successful than others. The film clips of the Decembrists being busted and Pushkin being shot, and Bekhmetyev's slide-show for the Czar, ease the action over places where words would have been too bulky. Similarly, the projected title for every scene is of great aid in following a very complicated plot...
...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...