Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part I – The Golden Age. Yury Tomin
with the maid of honor Lyubov Khilkova was sponsored by the imperial couple. Soon, however, it became known that the maid of honor was having an affair with the sovereign, that her husband was terribly jealous, beating her, and… a dagger flashed. The story was loud and instructive. For example, P. A. Vyazemsky wrote to their mutual friend with Pushkin: «Here we all complained about the flat prose of our everyday life, but, on the contrary: romantic poetry is made in person and such that it will shut up Hugo and Dumas. Jealousy, the dagger, criminal love, all this is now the currency of our drawing-room conversation, and all the familiar faces and circumstances of yesterday. Who could have imagined that poor Lyuba Khilkova, the cold, sensible, measured, perfect, exemplary piece of ice of the Winter Palace, would be the heroine of such a tragic tale! So much for the marriage of love! Now none of the girls would dare to marry for love.» He was exiled to the Caucasus, she went to her brother in Moscow and four months after the wedding she had a miscarriage.
In 1837 Mikhail Lermontov, who became famous for his defiant poem on Pushkin’s death, was exiled to the Nizhny Novgorod Dragoon Regiment commanded by Bezobrazov. And four years later Bezobrazov would come to Lermontov’s funeral and carry his coffin.
VI
The relay of Romanticism. Love-passion. The two ways of romantic love. Love-aspiration. The kidnappers of love. Faithful dreams. Flattery instead of love. Passing the baton
Young Lermontov delved into Pushkin’s «wonderful songs», rewrote poems, and shared with Pushkin his knowledge of people. At the same time, Lermontov was distinguished by close attention to his own mental states, the depth of which he discovered in a combination of feelings of love and awareness of his sharp mind and poetic talent. All the turbulent events of his youth turned into a struggle of internal forces in such a way that he found «the root of torment in himself.» For Lermontov, love is the strongest passion, the focus of his heartfelt impulses as an expression of the true «I»:
Many lovers do not trust the world
And so are happy; others feel desire
Engendered in their blood and outwards swirled
In brain disorder or creative fire.
Love, of all the passions, most divine;
Yet, a thing I never could define!
Seems a love can take but one sure course:
At fever pitch with all my psychic force!
And in the proud soul of the romantic hero, vain rejected love will undoubtedly «revolt, breathing revenge»:
From now on I will enjoy
And in passion I will swear as a boy;
I will laugh with everyone
And I don’t want to cry with anyone;
I shall deceive without misgivings,
To find no love as I once made, —
How can I respect other women
When I, by Angel, been betrayed?
Yu. Lotman, analyzing the work of Lermontov, points to two ways of love of the romantic hero. Firstly, the romantic scheme of love contains “the impossibility of contact: love always appears as deceit, misunderstanding, betrayal.” Secondly, “the impossibility of breaking through the line of incomprehension in love created, next to tragic real love, an ideal love-aspiration, in which the object could in no way be endowed with the features of an independent personality: it was not another ‘I’, but an addition to mine ‘I’ – ‘anti-I’… my ideal otherness… This is not a person, but the direction of my movement”.
My love for you is not an ardent thing,
And I can take or leave your beauty’s lustre:
In you I love past suffering’s memories’ muster,
The misspent youth to which I’d like to cling.
And when, betimes, I look upon your face,
On delving eyes in my preoccupation:
I’m having then a secret conversation,
For you are not my words of passion’s chase.
I’m talking to a love of younger days,
And in your face I’m other’s features seeking,
The lips of one who’s long since finished speaking,
In eyes extinguished flame of other’s gaze.
If one carefully read this poem, written in the fateful 1841 ten years after the passionate love for N. F. Ivanova, then, according to Lotman, it expresses (through love, but not real love; through love, but for another; through love not for her, but for something in the object of love; for something connected with the lover himself) the poet’s love-aspiration for his ideal “I”.
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814—1841)
After “happiness soon changed” with Ivanova, one can trace the transformation of Lermontov’s passionate love into “love-aspiration”, starting with attraction to Varvara Lopukhina, expressed in a poem written in 1832:
Not with the proud kind of beauty
She charms the animated youth,
And she doesn’t drag behind her booty —
The crowd of her slaves, confused.
Her waist isn’t one of any goddess,
Her breast does not rise like sea waves,
And nobody calls her gorgeous,
While falling on his knees on earth.
But every movement, every action,
Her features, speeches, smiles – all these
So full of life and inspiration,
So full of otherworldly ease.
Her voice pervades the whole soul,
Like memory of happy days,
And heart is sunk in love and dole,
While being shameful of its zest.
Natalya Feodorovna Ivanova (1813-1875)
Biographers know that, carried away not by the bright beauty, but by some “original charm” of the seventeen-year-old Varen’ka Lopukhina, student Mikhail Lermontov felt the sincere sharing of his love. It is also known that the relatives of Lopukhina prevented the rapprochement of the lovers, and then three years later, His Majesty the ball, which became an invisible companion of any noticeable love in high society, entered into the matter of chance. A certain Bakhmetiev, retired major, a 37-year-old landlord, who thought of marriage, saw “an undoubted indication from above” that “Varenka Lopukhina hooked her ball scarf on the button of his coat.”
This love has remained with Lermontov forever – «faithful dreams» have preserved that image, «that look full of fire,» and, regretting the bitter fate of his beloved, he prayed for the salvation of her «beautiful soul»:
…I want to hand over the innocent maiden
To the warm intercessor of the cold world.
Surround her with happiness as she worthy