Lermontov’s seventy-page short-story, “Princess Mary,” is one of the brutally honest accounts of human nature and the pursuit of love - the games and manipulations that a man will enact to make a woman love him, just for his own amusement. The story’s protagonist, Pechorin, a dashing, calculating, heartless __ of the Russian Army, knows all too well the truth behind the age-old adage that “All things that are/Are with more spirit chaséd than enjoyed.” (Shakespeare, from Merchant of Venice)
We get a sense of Pechorin’s character in this brief passage:
I love my enemies, although not in a Christian sense: they amuse me, they quicken my pulses. To be always on the lookout, to intercept every glance, to catch the meaning of every word, to guess intentions, to thwart plots, to pretend to be fooled, and suddenly with one push, to upset the entire enormous and elaborate structure of cunning and scheming - that is what I call life.
Like most good Russian lit, the story is full of dialogue that is full of such learned philosophy and sharp wit it puts modern discourse to shame. Towards the beginning we get this exchange: an officer named Grushnitski says that he “hates men in order not to despise them, since otherwise life would be too disgusting a farce,” and our protagonist Pechorin, for his part, says, “I despise women in order not to love them, since otherwise life would be too ridiculous a melodrama.”
Other great gems of dialogue - here’s Pechorin greeting his friend:
“Here we are, two intelligent people; we know beforehand that one can argue endlessly about anything, and therefore we do not argue; we know almost all the secret thoughts of each other; one word is a whole story for us; we see the kernel of our every emotion through a triple shell. Sad things seem to us funny, funny things seem to us melancholy, and generally we are, to tell the truth, rather indifferent to everything except our own selves. Thus, between us there can be no exchange of feelings and thoughts: we know everything about each other that we wish to know, and we do not wish to say anything more. There remains only one solution: telling the news. So tell me some piece of news.”
And that as soon as the poor guy had walked through the door.
Members of the fair sex will surely object to this story’s attitude towards their fair kind. But I can’t resist including these quotes, too. Here’s Pechorin on women:
It is difficult to convince women of anything; you have to bring them to a point where they will convince their own selves. The sequence of proofs by which they overcome their prejudices, is very original: to learn their dialectic one must overturn in one’s mind all the school rules of logic…Here, for instance, is the normal method:
That man loves me; but I am married: consequently I must not love him.
Now for the feminine method:
I must not love him for I am married; but he loves me - consequently…
Here come several dots, for reason does not say anything more, and what speaks mainly, is the tongue, the eyes, and in their wake, the heart, if the latter exists.