Михаил Лермонтов - A Hero of Our Time [New Translation]

And, maybe, I will die tomorrow!… And not one being on this earth will have ever understood me totally. Some thought of me as worse, some as better, than I actually am… Some will say “he was a good fellow,” others will say I was a swine. Both one and the other would be wrong. Given this, does it seem worth the effort to live? And yet, you live, out of curiosity, always wanting something new… Amusing and vexing!

It is already a month and a half now since I arrived at Fortress N——. Maxim Maximych has gone hunting… I am alone. I am sitting at the window. Gray storm clouds have covered the mountains down to their foothills. The sun, through the mist, looks like a yellow stain. It’s cold. The wind is whistling and shaking the shutters… How boring! I will take up writing my diaries again, which was interrupted by many strange events.

As I re-read this last page: funny! I thought I would die. This was impossible. I had not yet drained the cup of suffering, and now feel that I have a long while still to live.

How clearly and sharply these past events flood back to my memory! Not one line, not one hue, has been wiped away by time!

I remember that for the duration of the night preceding the duel, I didn’t sleep a minute. I couldn’t write for long: a mysterious anxiety possessed me. For an hour I walked around my room, then I sat down and opened the novel by Walter Scott that had been lying on the table. Since it was Old Mortality, I read it at the start with strain, and then I sank into reveries, carried away by the magical flight of imagination… Do they recompense the Scottish bard in the next world for each gratifying minute that his book gives?

Finally the day dawned. My nerves had become calm. I looked at myself in the mirror: a dull pallor had spread over my face, preserving the traces of agonizing insomnia. But my eyes, though encircled with brown shadows, shone proudly and inexorably. I remained content with myself.

Having ordered the horses to be saddled, I dressed and ran down to the bathhouse. Plunging into the cold bubblings of the Narzan, I felt my bodily and spiritual strengths returning. I left the baths fresh and bright, as though I were preparing for a ball. Tell me that the soul and body aren’t connected after that!

Returning, I found the doctor at my quarters. He was wearing gray riding breeches, an arkhaluk, [20] arkhaluk: A Caucasian coat. and a Circassian hat. I started roaring with laughter upon seeing this small figure under an enormous shaggy hat: his face was not at all bellicose and, at that moment in time, it was even longer than usual.

“What makes you so sad, doctor?” I said to him. “Haven’t you led people a hundred times to the next world with supreme indifference? Imagine that I have a bilious fever. I may recover, I may die. Either would be according to the order of things. Try to look at me as if I were a patient, afflicted by an illness that is unknown to you—and then your curiosity will be aroused to the highest degree. You can make some important physiological observations of me… Is not the expectation of a violent death a genuine illness in fact?”

This thought struck the doctor, and he cheered up.

We mounted our horses. Werner seized the reins with both hands, and we set off. In an instant we galloped past the fortress, through the slobodka, and entered the gully; the road twisted along it, half-overgrown with high grasses, intersecting constantly with a noisy stream, across which we had to ford frequently, to the great despair of the doctor, because each time we did his horse stopped in the water.

I don’t remember a morning more blue and fresh! The sun had barely appeared from behind the green heights, and the confluence of the heat of its rays and the dying chill of night brought feelings of a sort of sweet anguish to everything. The young day had not yet sent one joyful ray into the gully. But it gilded the summits of the crags hanging over us on either side. The thick-leaved bushes, growing in their deep cracks, showered us with silver rain at the least breath of wind. I remember, at this point, I felt a love for nature greater than at any time before. How interesting to watch a single dewdrop, quivering on a wide vine-leaf and reflecting millions of rainbow rays! How greedily my gaze sought to penetrate the foggy distance! There the path became narrower all the time, the crags bluer and more fearsome, and, finally, it seemed that they converged into an impenetrable wall. We rode in silence.

“Have you written your will?” Werner suddenly asked.

“No.”

“And in the case of your death?”

“My beneficiaries will appear by themselves.”

“Surely you have friends to whom you would like to send a final farewell?”

I shook my head.

“Surely there is one woman in the world to whom you might like to leave something for memory’s sake?”

“Would you like, doctor,” I replied to him, “that I bare my soul to you?… You see, I have grown out of the times when a person dies, pronouncing the name of their beloved, and bequeathing to their friend a lock of their pomaded or unpomaded hair. Considering near and possible death, I think only about myself—some don’t even do that. The friends who will tomorrow forget me, or, worse, those who will pin God knows what cock-and-bull stories on me, and the women who, embracing another, will laugh at me, in order not to arouse jealousy toward the deceased—good luck to them! I have carried only a few ideas out of life’s storm—and not one feeling. I have long lived according to the head, not the heart. I consider and analyze my personal passions and actions with a strict curiosity, but without sympathy. There are two people within me: one who lives in the full sense of the word, and the other who reasons and judges him. The first, maybe, in an hour’s time may bid forevermore farewell to you and the world, and the second… the second? Look doctor: do you see there on that precipice, to the right, three figures blackening the landscape? They are our adversaries I suppose?”

We set off at a trot.

At the foot of the rock-face, in the bushes, three horses were tied up. We tied ours there too, and clambered up the narrow footpath to the little platform, where we were awaited by Grushnitsky, the dragoon captain, and his other second called Ivan Ignatievitch (I have never heard his last name).

“We have been expecting you for a long time,” said the dragoon captain with an ironic smile.

I pulled out my timepiece and showed it to him.

He apologized, saying that his watch was running fast.

An embarrassing silence endured for several minutes. Finally the doctor broke it, addressing himself to Grushnitsky.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that, having both demonstrated a readiness to fight and having paid these debts to the conditions of honor, you could both, gentlemen, make yourselves understood now and end this matter amicably.”

“I am willing,” I said.

The captain winked at Grushnitsky, and the latter, thinking I was being a coward, assumed a proud air, though until this minute a dull pallor had spread over his cheeks. For the first time since we arrived, he raised his eyes to me. But there was some sort of unrest in his gaze, indicating an inner struggle.

“Clarify your conditions,” he said, “and I will do everything that I can for you, you may rest assured…”

“Here are my conditions: that you now publicly retract your slander and ask my forgiveness…”

“Gracious sir, I am astonished that you deign to propose such things to me.”

“What could I propose to you otherwise?”

“We will shoot…”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“As you please, only remember that one of us will certainly be killed.”