Pechorin, the hero of his autobiographical sketches collected in _A Hero of Our Time_, is the first Nietzschean in literature. His terse, unpretentious maxims and paradoxes have been re-echoed by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Przybyszewski, and other writers of the superman-literature. As always is the case with deliberate or unconscious commentators, they liquefy the original. One carelessly dropped sentence of Lermontov is elaborated in tons of Dostoevsky’s gallous psychology, in mountains of Nietzsche’s brain-splittering philosophy, in cognac-oceans of the vivisectionist-Przybyszewski. Pechorin does not talk much; he is too aristocratic for extravagance in words. Pechorin does not compromise; he is not made of that stuff. He neither repents nor seeks atonement; in his hatred for reality he does not erect a consoling phantom in the image of a Superman; he would dismiss with a contemptible shrug Falk’s matrimonial and sexual tribulations. Pechorin is eternally alone. Those who approach him are scorched with his unhuman flame. Alone, in the steppe, after a mad ride which kills his horse, Pechorin hugs the soil and weeps “like a child”. Like a child pressing to its mother’s bosom, plaintively demanding the Why and the Wherefore of existence among strangers. Shall we chuckle at the suddenly-discovered weakness of our enemy? Or shall we modestly turn away our eyes from the stolen sight of a god in his nudity? I once called Lermontov a sorrowful demon. Not a Lucifer, not a Mephistopheles, but a Russian demon, as the sculptor Antokolsky conceived him. Lermontov-Demon-Pechorin, a quaint superman, neither god nor devil, a pluralistic being, a combination of cruelty and compassion, of contempt and sympathy, of cynicism and sentimentalism, of the loftiest and the basest, of the unhuman and of the human-all-too-human. Dostoevsky? ---------- [1] A Hero of Our Time, by M. Y. Lermontov. New York, Alfred A. Knopf. The Poet Speaks MARGARET C. ANDERSON There are people in the world who like poetry if they know the poet. There are a good many people in Chicago just now who understand and enjoy Amy Lowell’s poetry because she read it to them at the Little Theatre. I know a poet who could make nothing of Vachel Lindsay’s things until Lindsay chanted them to him one day. And I know another who said to me, when I remarked that I didn’t like Alfred Kreymborg’s verse, “Oh, but you would if you knew him.” I am puzzled, because I know this man to be an intelligent being. And somehow I have always been under the naive impression that poetry was a matter of art.