Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part I – The Golden Age

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»:

And in the proud soul of the romantic hero, vain rejected love will undoubtedly «revolt, breathing revenge»:

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”.

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:

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»:

Varvara Alexandrovna Lopukhina-Bakhmeteva (1815—1851)

Now his own soul was not filled with vengeance, but sorrow. However, this saved love did not pacify, but rather exacerbated the peculiar struggle of the poet romantic with high society, where love is relegated to coquetry, passion for external beauty and fashionable intrigue.3 With the help of his exceptional talent, as well as his “vanity and pride,” Lermontov managed to achieve, if not a sincere love, then a flattering recognition of high society.

There was a time when I aspired to be admitted to this society as a recruit. I did not succeed; the aristocratic doors were closed to me. And now I no longer enter this same society as a petitioner, but as a man who has won his rights. I arouse curiosity, they harass me, they invite me everywhere, but I don’t even show that I want this…

Not only did he “insult all this world” in his poems before, but now he made sure from the inside that “nowhere is there so much meanness and ridiculousness.” However, the great world and, above all, the crowned one paid him in the same way. It is not known what the retired major Bakhmetyev thought of Lermontov’s death in the duel, but Nicholas First muttered in a mundane way: “Death to a dog”, but in public he said: “Gentlemen, I have received news that the one who could replace Pushkin has been killed.” Six years later, there was another duel where Sofia Bakhmetyeva’s brother was killed, trying to defend the honor of his well-educated, but untimely pregnant sister.

Mask, I love you. Achilles’ heel. The saving hope. Precious needs of the heart. We are a single link in an infinite chain. Overcoming doubt. The transformation of love. About the rebirth of Don Juan. Poets and philosophers. Illusions of the romantic ideal. The first dimension of Russian love

Ten years after Lermontov’s death, a well-read woman who knows fourteen foreign languages, femininely charming and independent in her way of life, a distant relative of the kidnapper of Lermontov’s love, enters the society of Russian literati and the final scene of romantic love for the first time. And again there was not without a ball, this time a masquerade ball. Sophia Bakhmetyeva, hiding her face with a mask, managed to enchant two outstanding people, not alien to poetic inspiration, with a conversation at once. During the following meeting and chat over tea, one of them – Ivan Turgenev – was disappointed to see “the face of a Chukhonian soldier in a skirt,” while the other – Alexey Tolstoy – was carried away and fell passionately in love.

It would be simplistic to suppose that Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy – a thirty-four-year-old handsome man, naturally strong, gifted with an exceptional memory, torn between writing and court service and a friend of the imperial family – had merely overcome the difficulty, already noted by Lermontov’s Pechorin, of “falling in love only with a quality of soul”. In the poem dedicated to this fateful encounter, other motifs covered by mystery can also be discerned: