A study of Lermontov's dramaturgy

Every touch of Lermontov's work brings us face to face with his titanic spirit, entered into a "proud enmity with heaven", rebellious and freedom-loving, with the raging and restless passions of a heart that has been swinging between love and hate all its life, yearning for freedom, but suffocating in the atmosphere of slavery and lackeys, thirsting for faith and a high purpose, but is forced to writhe in disbelief and despair, to tremble with anger and tremble with rage before the picture of the Russian autocracy. His amazing personality has the ability to draw us closest to him, to make us suffer with his sufferings, to rise with his impulses, to feel his anger towards the cold external brilliance and internal nothingness of secular society, which, like the ancient anchar tree, poisons everyone who touches it. He had the misfortune to be born in the valley of horror and despair, to breathe the decaying breath of defeat after the fateful year of 1825, to live through the years of deaf groans, of broken flights, of mercilessly trampled faith, when evil and vulgarity triumphed unhindered, when informers and renegades became the heroes of the day. Years when only blue uniforms were visible before the eye, when in the monstrous empire of Russia every police officer was a tsar, and the tsar was a crowned police officer. In this valley of slavery and torture, of silent anger and hidden unrest, Lermontov's muse was born. From her first days she experienced the freezing cold of the autocratic empire and came to the bitter, terrifying conclusions that the closest person to everyone was himself, that everyone was doomed to proud solitude. Herzen says of this era that "you had to know how to hate out of love, to despise out of humanity, you had to possess boundless pride, so that with chains on your hands and feet you could hold your head high." And although the adolescent and young man Lermontov is surrounded on all sides by evil, he does not bow his head before it, although he sees how they are destroying the wall between good and evil, how the masters trade with their people, and the people with their freedom, he does not fall into disarming reflection, into passivity and inaction, but chooses the path of manly purposeful struggle. It does not matter that this struggle leads him to death - it is as if he remains undefeated. He is not at all to blame for having fallen into "a bottomless abyss into which the best swimmers sink," where even the greatest talents disappear before they have reached what they are fighting for. The storm of his feelings, the power of his fiery word survived an entire century and reached us and his descendants, who have settled the enmity with heaven by conquering its heights, who know the price of courage and a proud mind.