This volume contains four things connected with a poem called Valerik. Lermontov's own watercolour of the battle. A second drawing by him of an episode in the fighting. A pencil portrait made from life in a tent by Count Palen immediately afterwards - perhaps his best, the caption says. And a photograph of the autograph manuscript in the poet's hand.
It does not contain the poem.
Valerik is not in the contents and not in the text. Six lines reach the reader, quoted inside a foreword which says of them that they contain more than a condemnation of war, that War and Peace stemmed from them, and that the question they ask is, alongside Pushkin's legacy, the whole of what Lermontov left to Russian literature.
What the book does carry is generous: a large selection of the lyrics, The Demon, Mtsyri, and the whole of A Hero of Our Time - with the translator named under each poem, a courtesy this series rarely extends.
Pechorin has energy, intelligence, courage and no object. He is a man of the 1830s, after the Decembrists were hanged and before anything replaced them. Put him beside Bazarov and you have the two halves of the same Russian problem thirty years apart: the first with nothing to think, the second with nothing to do.
Progress Publishers, Russian Classics Series, 1978. Verse translated chiefly by Avril Pyman and Irina Zheleznova.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
